Note 5 — Chapter I

“And in that time,” we are told in the old “Crónica General de España,” (Zamora, 1541, fol., f. 275,) “was the war of the Moors very grievous; so that the kings, and counts, and nobles, and all the knights that took pride in arms, stabled their horses in the rooms where they slept with their wives; to the end that, when they heard the war-cry, they might find their horses and arms at hand, and mount instantly at its summons.” “A hard and rude training,” says Martinez de la Rosa, in his graceful romance of “Isabel de Solís,” recollecting, I suspect, this very passage,—“a hard and rude training, the prelude to so many glories and to the conquest of the world, when our forefathers, weighed down with harness, and their swords always in hand, slept at ease no single night for eight centuries.” Doña Isabel de Solís, Reyna de Granada, Novela Histórica, Madrid, 1839, 8vo, Parte II. c. 15.