and-almost

Updated: June 18, 2025

The Moorish Dynasty in Spain was truly, as Irving observes, a splendid exotic, doomed never to take a lasting root in the soil It was choked to death by the native weeds; and, in place of lands richly cultivated and teeming with plenty, we now have barren and-almost depopulated wastes in place of education, industry, and the cultivation of the arts and sciences, an enslaved, ignorant and degenerate race.

Bayard Taylor - The Lands of the Saracen: Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain