although with less brilliancy, the splendor of the times before the twelfth
century.

In the course of the long struggle the independent Christians had not been
able to avoid feeling in a certain measure something of the influence of
their neighbors, now their most civilized subjects. They translated into
prose imitations of the tales such as those of the book of Patronis,
borrowing from the general chronicles or in translations like the "Kalila
and traditions, legendary or historic, as they found them in the Dimna," or
the book of "The Ruses of Women," in verse.

In their oldest romances--for instance, that of the "Children of Sara,"[5]
and in those to which they have given the name of _romances
fronterizos_, or romances of the frontier--they give the facts of the
war between the Mussulmans and the Christians.

[5 ] T. Ramon Manendez Pidal. La legende de les Infantes de Sara. Madrid,
1896. 8vo.

But they gave the name of Mauresques to another and different class of
romances, of which the heroes are chevaliers, who have nothing of the
Mussulman but the name. The talent of certain _littérateurs_ of the
sixteenth century exercised itself in that class where the persons are all
conventional, or the descriptions are all imaginative, and made a portrait
of the Mussulman society so exact that the romances of Esplandian, Amadis
de Gaul, and others, which evoked the delicious knight-errantry of Don
Quixote, can present a picture of the veritable chivalry of the Middle
Ages. We possess but few verses of the Mussulmans of Granada. Argot de Moll
preserved them in Arabic, transcribed in Latin characters, one piece being
attributed to Mouley Abou Abdallah: