Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. II.djvu/441

415 PERSECUTIONS IN GRANADA. . 415 The mischief occasioned by this act, far from cHAPXEr. being limited to the immediate loss, continued to be felt still more severely in its consequences, efffeots^^""' Such as could, secreted the manuscripts in their possession till an opportunity occurred for convey- ing them out of the country ; and many thousands in this way were privately shipped over to Bar- bary. ^^ Thus Arabian literature became rare in the libraries of the very country to which it was in- digenous ; and Arabic scholarship, once so flourish- ing in Spain, and that too in far less polished ages, gradually fell into decay from want of aliment to sustain it. Such were the melancholy results of this literary persecution ; more mischievous, in one view, than even that directed against life ; for the loss of an individual will scarcely be felt beyond his own generation, while the annihilation of a valuable work, or in other words, of mind itself embodied in a permanent form, is a loss to all future time. The high hand with which Ximenes now carried measures, excited serious alarm in many of the more discreet and temperate Castilians in the city. They besought him to use greater forbearance, re- monstrating against his obvious violations of the treaty, as well as against the expediency of forced conversions, which could not, in the nature of things, be lasting. But the pertinacious prelate natural skepticism as to the pre- scripts belonging to an individual, tended amount and value of the which he savi^ in Algiers, whither works destroyed. they had been secretly brought by ■25 The learned Granadine, Leo the Moriscoes from Spain. — Con- Africanus, who emigrated to Fez de,Dominacion de los Arabes, pro- after the fall of the capital, notices logo. — Casiri, Bibliotheca Escu- a single collection of 3000 manu- rialensis, torn. i. p. J"^^