gone to bathe in the Guadalquiver, leaving Muhamad alone, in the lower chambers of the tower. No sooner were they out of sight and hearing, than he hastened to a window of the stair-case, leading down to the cistern, lowered himself as far as his arms would reach, and dropped without injury to the ground. Plunging into the Guadalquiver, he swam across to a thick grove on the opposite side, where his friends were waiting to receive him. Here, mounting a horse which they had provided for an event of the kind, he fled across the country, by solitary roads, and made good his escape to the mountains of Jaen.

The guardians of the tower dreaded for some time to make known his flight to Abderahman. When at length it was told to him, he exclaimed: All is the work of eternal wisdom; it is intended to teach us that we cannot benefit the wicked, without injuring the good. The flight of that blind man will cause much trouble and bloodshed.' His predictions were verified. Muhamad reared the standard of rebellion on the mountains; the seditious and discontented of all kinds hastened to join it, together with soldiers of fortune, or rather wandering banditti, and he had soon six thousand men, well armed, hardy in habits, and desperate in character. His brother Casim, also, réappeared about the same time, in the mountains of Ronda, at the head of a daring band, that laid all the neighboring valleys under contribution.

Abderahman summoned his alcaydes from their various military posts, to assist in driving the rebels from their mountain fastnesses into the plains. It was a dangerous and protracted toil, for the mountains were frightfully wild and rugged. He entered them with a powerful host, driving the rebels from height to height, and valley to valley, and harassing them by a galling fire from thousands of crossbows. At length, a decisive battle took place near the river Guadalemar. The rebels were signally defeated; four thousand fell in action, many were drowned in the river, and Muhamad, with a few horsemen, escaped to the mountains of the Algarves. Here he was hunted by the alcaydes from one desolate retreat to another; his few followers grew tired of sharing the disastrous fortunes of a fated man; one by one deserted him, and he himself deserted the remainder, fearing they might give him up, to purchase their own pardon.

Lonely and disguised, he plunged into the depths of the forests, or lurked in dens and caverns, like a famished wolf, often casting back his thoughts with regret to the time of his captivity in the gloomy tower of Cordova. Hunger at length drove him to Alarcon, at the risk of being discovered. Famine and misery, however, had so wasted and changed him, that he was not recognized. He remained nearly a year in Alarcon, unnoticed and unknown, yet constantly tormenting himself with the dread of discovery, and with groundless fears of the vengeance of Abderahman. Death at length put an end to his wretchedness.

A milder fate attended his brother Casim. Being defeated in the mountains of Murcia, he was conducted in chains to Cordova. On coming into the presence of Abderahman, his once fierce and haughty spirit, broken by distress, gave way; he threw himself on the earth, kissed the dust beneath the feet of the king, and implored his cle

mency. The benignant heart of Abderahman was filled with melancholy, rather than exultation, at beholding this wreck of the once haughty family of Yusuf a suppliant at his feet, and suing for mere existence. He thought upon the mutability of fortune, and felt how insecure are all her favors. He raised the unhappy Casim from the earth, ordered his irons to be taken off, and, not content with mere forgiveness, treated him with honor, and gave him possessions in Seville, where he might live in state conformable to the ancient dignity of his family. Won by this great and persevering magnanimity, Casim ever after remained one of the most devoted of his subjects.

All the enemies of Abderahman were at length subdued; he reigned undisputed sovereign of the Moslems of Spain; and so benign was his government, that every one blessed the revival of the illustrious line of Omeya. He was at all times accessible to the humblest of his subjects; the poor man ever found in him a friend, and the oppressed a protector. He improved the administration of justice; established schools for public instruction; encouraged poets and men of letters, and cultivated the sciences. He built mosques in every city that he visited; inculcated religion by example as well as by precept; and celebrated all the festivals prescribed by the Koran, with the utmost magnificence.

As a monument of gratitude to God for the prosperity with which he had been favored, he undertook to erect a mosque in his favorite city of Cordova, that should rival in splendor the great mosque of Damascus, and excel the one recently erected in Bagdad by the Abassides, the supplanters of his family.

It is said that he himself furnished the plan for this famous edifice, and even worked on it, with his own hands, one hour in each day, to testify his zeal and humility in the service of God, and to animate his workmen. He did not live to see it completed, but it was finished according to his plans by his son Hixem. When finished, it surpassed the most splendid mosques of the east. It was six hundred feet in length, and two hundred and fifty in breadth. Within were twenty

eight aisles, crossed by nineteen, supported by a thousand and ninetythree columns of marble. There were nineteen portals, covered with plates of bronze, of rare workmanship. The principal portal was covered with plates of gold. On the summit of the grand cupola, were three gilt balls, surmounted by a golden pomegranate. At night, the mosque was illuminated with four thousand seven hundred lamps, and great sums were expended in amber and aloes, which were burnt as perfumes. The mosque remains to this day, shorn of its ancient splendor, yet still one of the grandest Moslem monuments in Spain.

Finding himself advancing in years, Abderahman assembled in his capital of Cordova the principal governors and commanders of his kingdom, and in presence of them all, with great solemnity, nominated his son Hixem as the successor to the throne. All present made an oath of fealty to Abderahman during his life, and to Hixem after his death. The prince was younger than his brothers, Soleiman and Abdallah; but he was the son of Howara, the tenderly

beloved sultana of Abderahman, and her influence, it is said, gained him this preference.

Within a few months afterward, Abderahman fell grievously sick at Merida. Finding his end approaching, he summoned Hixem to his bed-side: My son,' said he, 'the angel of death is hovering over me; treasure up, therefore, in thy heart this dying counsel, which I give through the great love I bear thee. Remember that all empire is from God, who gives and takes it away, according to his pleasure. Since God, through his divine goodness, has given us regal power and authority, let us do his holy will, which is nothing else than to do good to all men, and especially to those committed to our protection. Render equal justice, my son, to the rich and the poor, and never suffer injustice to be done within thy dominion, for it is the road to perdition. Be merciful and benignant to those dependent upon thee. Confide the government of thy cities and provinces to men of worth and experience; punish without compassion those ministers who oppress thy people with exorbitant exactions. Pay thy troops punctually; teach them to feel a certainty in thy promises; command them with gentleness but firmness, and make them in truth the defenders of the state, not its destroyers. Cultivate unceasingly the affections of thy people, for in their good will consists the security of the state, in their distrust its peril, in their hatred its certain ruin. Protect the husbandmen who cultivate the earth, and yield us necessary sustenance; never permit their fields, and groves, and gardens to be disturbed. In a word, act in such wise that thy people may bless thee, and may enjoy, under the shadow of thy wing, a secure and tranquil life. In this consists good government; if thou dost practice it, thou wilt be happy among thy people, and renowned throughout the world.'

Having given this excellent counsel, the good king Abderahman blessed his son Hixem, and shortly after died; being but in the sixtieth year of his age. He was interred with great pomp; but the highest honors that distinguished his funeral, were the tears of real sorrow shed upon his He left behind him a name for valor, grave. justice, and magnanimity, and forever famous as being the founder of the glorious line of the Ommiades in Spain.

LITERARY NOTICES.

A TRIBUTE TO THE MEMORY OF FITZHUGH SMITH. By the Author of 'Thoughts on a New Order of Missionaries,' etc. In one volume. pp. 290. New-York: Published for the Author: WILEY AND PUTNAM.

FITZHUGH SMITH, the implied subject of the above-named volume, was a son of GERRIT SMITH, Esq., of Madison county, in this state; a gentleman distinguished for his liberality, and for the conspicuous interest he has taken in certain public movements of the day. The deceased, who departed this life at the early age of eleven years, was evidently a boy of clever parts, remarkable for his agreeable person, and sweetness of disposition, as well as for great moral and religious propriety of deportment; a propriety which appears to have been the result of careful paternal training. Leaving the home of his childhood desolate, he was early translated to a better habitation; to the arms of a heavenly parent, in whose house are many mansions:

'There, mid day-beams round him playing,

He his FATHER's face shall see, And shall bear him gently saying, 'Little children, come to me!""

With this brief allusion to the ostensible subject of the volume before us, we pass to a consideration of the work itself. We had scarcely perused a score of its pages, before we were enabled to form a correct conjecture as to its character; for it is as easy to see one's way through a flat book, as it is in travelling to discern a flat country in the onward distance. The volume, instead of being a tribute to the memory of FITZHUGH SMITH, is for the most part a heterogenous compound of inflated small-talk, upon something more than three hundred irrelevant topics, or ramifications of themes, which are partly designated by a syllabus at the head of each chapter, something after the manner of CRABBE, in the 'Rejected Addresses;' as, 'Hobbs binds his son John a'prentice in London and why; interior of a theatre-pit described; check-takers insolent - and why,' etc. The writer proceeds with an uninterrupted series of aimless digressions, until he arrives at the two hundred and fiftieth page, where we find him felicitating himself upon 'having now obtained the ear of the reader,' (apparently unmindful that he had already exchanged two ears, of unusual length, for the one he had gained,) for which reason he takes occasion to 'dwell still farther' upon his stores of diminutive and desultory scraps.

Throughout the whole book, incontrovertible facts, not above the clear comprehension of a boy of twelve years, are 'fortified' by nebulous disquisitions - crude, diluted, and incoherent pleasantly denominated 'arguments,' or, to use a favorite term of the writer, 'positions under notice;' and in this way the author goes on, chapter after chapter, bristling with stale truisms, and prurient with elaborately-defended but trite ideas. He does not seem to affix any very precise meaning to much of the language he employs; yet in the 'weak, washy, everlasting flood' of words which he pours out, there will be found some one or two pets, that are constantly recurring, until other windy favorites take their places, which are only relinquished when, even in the writer's estimation, 58

VOL. XV.

they must be deemed thread-bare. The forcibly-critical remark of Hood's boatswain, that 'where there is a heavy ground-swell of words, there can be no great depth of ideas,' is fully verified in this ambitious volume. The simplest thought is mounted high upon stilts. Even if pilfered, as is frequently the case, from other writers, our author dresses up the borrowed idea in characteristic language, and having made it ridicalous, it readily passes as original. An example or two may serve to 'sustain the position under notice.' 'No parent has a right to send out into the world a spider, whose filthy work it shall be to suck poison from what it sees around!' 'There is a mawkish pitying of the poor, which passes current on the Bourse of a spurious philanthrophy! 'Earth teemed with a perennial and golden spontaneity!- and so thornless were the flowers, and so tareless the grain, that even the Almighty affirmed that it was very good.' 'The twig must be swayed aright, if we would hope for a comely and fruit-producing tree!' This intense embellishment of the commonest thought, always a mark of invincible mediocrity, is a distinctive characteristic of our author's style, if that can be called style, which is no style at all. Had he found occasion to use the time-worn term, 'looking two ways for Sunday,' he would doubtless have written, 'vigilantly scrutinizing, in duple directions, for the holy Christian Sabbath.' A fault not less apparent, is a certain weakness and mawkishness of sentiment, whenever it is deemed appropriate to affect it. An author who makes an attempt at a display of fine feelings, always betrays himself. Numerous examples, passim, from the volume before us, might be cited, 'in illustration of the correctness of our position.' The affectation alluded to is not suppressed even at the bed-side of the dying boy; for here, we are told, 'there was, to his view, a tangibility, a substantiality, a spiritual corporcity, so to speak, in those things to which he was going! Where the writer under notice' gives us real sentiment, there is such a desire to parade it so much of what the French call gauche that it entirely loses its effect. 'It is a sort of sulphate of meanness,' says he, in one of his tumid sentences, to coin or give currency to any thing prejudicial to another, unless some public good may be derived from it.' This precise 'good' must constitute our apology for cutting down a gnat with a broad-sword. The book we have discussed is bad, beyond all kindred specimens of mental debility on stilts we remember ever to have encountered. Moreover, it is not, it should seem, the first publication from the same source, (a source, let us add, entirely unknown to us,) and the writer even threatens to inflict yet another volume upon an unoffending public. Oral examples, in this kind, it is true, are often heard at conventicle,' from some prosy divine, who makes no assertion that he is not prepared to prove on the spot; who compares till he perplexes, and illustrates till he confounds; and in such case, the courteous hearer has no alternative but to possess his soul in patience, until the speaker preaches the last dog out of the aisles. But a reader is differently situated; and we esteem it the duty of an honest critic to guard the public against flights of immortal dulness, when appearing in a book the subject and pretension of which may give it temporary currency; and to caution young writers against a style of literary composition, which, while it has no one attribute to recommend it, is at war alike with simplicity, clearness, beauty, and common sense.

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THE GREEK READER. BY FREDERICK JACOBS. A new Edition, with English Notes. By CHARLES ANTHON, LL. D. pp. 179. New-York: HARPER AND BROTHERS.

THIS is an excellent elementary Greek work, as much superior to the 'Collectanea Minora,' for the learner, as that was, when first introduced, to the old elementary Greek treatises. Indeed, this little volume seems to make the road to Greek literature so smooth and easy, that the 'rusty' scholar is almost tempted to revive his knowledge, through these new paths, of the delightful treasures of that elegant language. Classical literature of all kinds is greatly indebted to Professor ANTHON for his numerous and valuable treatises; and we say most heartily, to both author and publishers of this noble series of classical works, macte virtute.