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It is true that the wave of Saracenic invasion had been arrested by Charles Martel four or five hundred years before; but in the mean time a new Mohammedan power sprang up, of greater vigor, of equal ferocity, and of a more stubborn fanaticism. This was that of the Turks, who had their eye on Constantinople and all Eastern Europe.

X. for an illustration of a Christian Basilica. See chapter on Saracenic Architecture. Paper communicated to the Royal Institute of Architects. Buildings of the Doric Order. The architecture of Greece has a value far higher than that attaching to any of the styles which preceded it, on account of the beauty of the buildings and the astonishing refinement which the best of them display.

For how many philosophical histories has Greece afforded opportunity! while the constitutional history of England, as far as it has hitherto gone, is a recognized subject-matter of scientific and professional teaching. The case is the same with the history of the medieval Italian cities, of the medieval Church, and of the Saracenic empire.

He has his promenades, his drives, his club visits, is seen everywhere a brilliant convolvulus now, twining the espaliers of that Saracenic fabric of society; to speak architecturally, its very summer-house. He visits the opera and gives it his frank approval, but confesses a preference for the old plantation-melodies.

He was also influenced to make this exposition by the "Sic et Non" of Abélard, which tended to unsettle belief. It was the great text-book of the theological schools. About the time this book appeared the works of Aristotle were introduced to the attention of students, translated into Latin from the Saracenic language.

Behind the window was a deep and narrow room, lined on both sides with cabinets of great age and curious workmanship, oaken furniture belonging to various periods, pictures restored and pictures cracked and faded, cases filled with dainty objects of gold and silver, brass work from Moorish and Saracenic craftsmen, tall suits of armor, helmets and weapons that had clashed in battle hundreds of years before, and other things too numerous to mention, all of a genuine value that put them beyond the reach of a slim purse.

Studded with splendid cities, gracious mosques, and quiet universities where the wisdom of the ancient world was preserved and appreciated, the Moslem East offered a striking contrast to the Christian West, then sunk in the night of the Dark Ages. However, by the tenth century the Saracenic civilization began to display unmistakable symptoms of decline. This decline was at first gradual.

The merit of the church was incalculable, for it was meant to be the sepulcher of the Catholic Kings, who were eventually more fitly buried in the cathedral at Granada, in the heart of their great conquest; and it is a most beautiful church, of a mingled Saracenic plateresque Gothic, as the guide-books remind me, and extravagantly baroque as I myself found it.

The two doors, also from Cairo, the oldest parts of which are just two hundred years earlier than the pulpit, are exactly of the same style, and, so far as appearances go, might be just as well taken for two hundred years later, so conservative was the Saracenic treatment of decorative woodwork for some four or five centuries.

It is as if all the buildings of the University of Chicago were scattered along the lake front in Chicago from the river to Twelfth street. The Bombay buildings are a mixture of Hindu, Gothic and Saracenic architecture, blended with taste and success, and in the center, to crown the group, rises a stately clock tower of beautiful proportions.