and here, at last, largest and most important,
is the beautiful palace of the Alhambra, the
nucleus and queen of the whole. You see in it
what I suppose you might see in Ispahan or
Damascus or Cairo, only that you are not per-
mitted to do so. But as you are not permitted
to do so there, it is a very good thing for pure
Westerners like us, as it were so many Visi-
goths at the court of one of Cleopatra's de-
scendants, to see how comfortably these people
lived.
Perhaps it adds to the interest to see the
blood-stain where thirty-six Abencerrages chiefs
were killed by one of these Moorish kings not
long before Granada fell. To say truly, though
we have a natural sympathy for these poor
Moors, who builded so much better than their
successors knew, that as to desert, they can be
said to have deserved but little. Good archi-
tecture is hardly a moral merit. If it were, I
think it is a merit which belonged more to the
ancestors of Boabdil and those who were turned
out, than to themselves. And for themselves,
after dipping a little into their history, I am dis-
posed to say that if any persons ever deserved
the vengeance of the Almighty it was these
same Moorish chiefs. As for their people, I
know nothing, and say nothing.
