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task of conquest left them leisure to turn their attention to the arts of peace.

The same energy with which this young but powerful faith animated its followers to wield the sword and grasp the sceptre led them with equal daring to aspire at once to gigantic creations in architecture.

The mosques and tombs of Ispahan and Cairo are amongst the largest, the earliest, and the most lovely of all Mahometan remains of structural beauty. While they retain the general methods of brick building and of stone cutting, of vault construction and decoration, popular with the Greeks of Byzantium, they speedily exhibit a richness of geometrical combination and a peculiar conventional style of sculptured and inlaid and Ceramic ornament, which rapidly altered the aspect of such monuments. In Ispahan, Damascus, Tabreez, Sultanieh, Bagdad, and other great cities of the Caliphate, mosques and palaces were erected upon the vastest scale.

So soon as the arms of Mahmoud (a.d. 977–1030) carried him to Ghazni, and those of Kootub to Delhi, the art of the Moslem to a great extent superseded the traditions of the followers of Buddha and Brama in India.

In the far south, in Sicily, the north of Africa, and Spain, the horse-shoe arch, and indeed every leading characteristic of Arabian design, found a new field of developement, and probably a more refined type of expansion, than it obtained in any other portion of the world. At Cordova the monuments of the greatness of Abder Ahman, and, at Grenada, those of the sovereigns immediately preceding the unhappy Boabdil el Chico, still remain to delight us with their freshness, their intricacy, and their beauty.

While those by whom these exquisite creations of architectural art were given to the world sank into nonentity under the dominion of the Spaniards—, who as a nation may be truly said to have cared for none of these things—, the traditions of Mahometan excellence, which had been so nobly