of the author's former productions. If it pleases us less than these, we must attribute it in part perhaps to the want of contrivance, and in a still greater degree to the nature of the subject itself, which is deprived of all the interest derived from suspense or sympathy, and, as far as it is connected with modern politics, represents a scene too near our immediate inspection to admit the interposition of the magic glass of fiction and poetry."— Quarterly Review, October, 1811.] APPENDIX. NOTE A. And guide me, Priest, to that mysterious room, His nation's future fates a Spanish Kingshall see.—P. 381 THE transition of an incident from history to tradition, and from tradition to fable and romance, becoming more marvellous at each step from its original simplicity, is not ill exemplified in the account of the "Fated Chamber" of Don Roderick, as given by his namesake, the historian of Toledo, contrasted with subsequent and more romantic accounts of the same subterranean discovery. I give the Archbishop of Toledo's tale in the words of Nonius, who seems to intimate, (though very modestly,) that the fatale palatium, of which so much had been said, was only the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre. "Extra muros, septentrionem versus, vestigia magni olim theatri sparsa visuntur. Auctor est Rodericus, Toletanus Archiepiscopus ante Arabum in Hispanias irruptionem, hic fatale palatium fuisse; quod invicti vectes æterna ferri robora claudebant, ne reseratum Hispaniæ excidium adferret; quod in fatis non vulgus solum, sed et prudentissimi quique credebant. Sed Roderici ultimi Gothorum Regis animum infelix curiositas subiit, sciendi quid sub tot vetitis claustris observaretur; ingentes ibi superiorum regum opes et arcanos thesauros servari ratus. Seras et pessulos perfringi curat, invitis omnibus; nihil præter arculam repertum, et in ea linteum, quo explicato novæ et insolentes hominum facies habitusque apparuere, cum inscriptione Latina, Hispanic excidium ab illa gente imminere; Vultus habitusque Maurorum erant.— Quamobrem ex Africa tantam cladem instare regi cæterisque persuasum; nec falso ut Hispaniæ annales etiamnum queruntur."-Hispania Ludovic. Nonij. lix. cap. But, about the term of the expulsion of the Moors from Grenada, we find, in the "Historia Verdadeyra del Rey Don Rodrigo," a (pretended) translation from the Arabic of the sage Alcayde Abulcacim Tarif Abentarique, a legend which puts to shame the modesty of the historian Roderick, with his chest and prophetic picture. The custom of ascribing a pretended Moorish original to these legendary histories, is ridiculed by Cervantes, who affects to translate the History of the Knight of the Woful Figure, from the Arabic of the sage Cid Hamet Benengeli. As I have been indebted to the Historia Verdadeyra for some of the imagery employed in the text, the following literal translation from the work itself may gratify the inquisitive reader : "One mile on the east side of the city of Toledo, among some rocks, was situated an ancient tower, of a magnificent structure, though much dilapidated by time which consumes all; four estadoes (i. e. four times a man's height) below it, there was a cave with a very nar |