I really cannot say now whether I loved the Moors or the Spaniards more.  I fought on both sides; I would not have had the Spaniards beaten, and yet when the Moors lost I was vanquished with them; and when the poor young King Boabdil (I was his devoted partisan and at the same time a follower of his fiery old uncle and rival, Hamet el Zegri) heaved the Last Sigh of the Moor, as his eyes left the roofs of Granada forever, it was as much my grief as if it had burst from my own breast.  I put both these princes into the first and last historical romance I ever wrote.  I have now no idea what they did in it, but as the story never came to a conclusion it does not greatly matter.  I had never yet read an historical romance that I can make sure of, and probably my attempt must have been based almost solely upon the facts of Irving’s history.  I am certain I could not have thought of adding anything to them, or at all varying them.

In reading his ‘Chronicle’ I suffered for a time from its attribution to Fray Antonio Agapida, the pious monk whom he feigns to have written it, just as in reading ‘Don Quixote’ I suffered from Cervantes masquerading as the Moorish scribe, Cid Hamet Ben Engeli.  My father explained the literary caprice, but it remained a confusion and a trouble for me, and I made a practice of skipping those passages where either author insisted upon his invention.  I will own that I am rather glad that sort of thing seems to be out of fashion now, and I think the directer and franker methods of modern fiction will forbid its revival.  Thackeray was fond of such open disguises, and liked to greet his reader from the mask of Yellowplush and Michael Angelo Titmarsh, but it seems to me this was in his least modern moments.

My ‘Conquest of Granada’ was in two octavo volumes, bound in drab boards, and printed on paper very much yellowed with time at its irregular edges.  I do not know when the books happened in my hands.  I have no remembrance that they were in any wise offered or commended to me, and in a sort of way they were as authentically mine as if I had made them.  I saw them at home, not many months ago, in my father’s library (it has long outgrown the old bookcase, which has gone I know not where), and upon the whole I rather shrank from taking them down, much more from opening them, though I could not say why, unless it was from the fear of perhaps finding the ghost of my boyish self within, pressed flat like a withered leaf, somewhere between the familiar pages.

When I learned Spanish it was with the purpose, never yet fulfilled, of writing the life of Cervantes, although I have since had some forty-odd years to do it in.  I taught myself the language, or began to do so, when I knew nothing of the English grammar but the prosody at the end of the book.  My father had the contempt of familiarity with it, having himself written a very brief sketch of our accidence, and he seems to have let me plunge into the sea of Spanish verbs and adverbs,