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To many people it will seem surprising to learn that the next evidence of deep broad interest in knowledge is to be found in the next century in the distant west of Europe, in the Spanish Peninsula. It is a long step from the semi-barbaric splendor of the Gothic court at Verona, to the bishop's palace in Seville in Andalusia.

Basil, which is top-heavy with spires, domes, and minarets, ornamented in the most irregular and unprecedented manner. Yet, as a whole, the structure is not inharmonious with its unique surroundings, the semi-Oriental, semi-barbaric atmosphere in which it stands.

The nobles, however, a semi-barbaric set of men, surrounded him upon his arrival, refused to allow him any interview with Hedwige, threatened him with personal violence, and drove him out of the kingdom. Poor Hedwige was in anguish.

Would it not be better for him to die at once, and go to wait for her in the blessed regions of semi-barbaric futurity? And yet, that awful tiger, those shrieks, that blood! Her decision had been indicated in an instant, but it had been made after days and nights of anguished deliberation.

When De Soto and his band, led by native guides whom they had picked up by the way, had arrived within two miles of the village of the chief, they discovered him approaching them with a retinue of five hundred plumed warriors, adorned with glittering robes and weapons in the highest style of semi-barbaric display. The chief was unembarrassed, dignified, and courtly in his address.

She was very lovely, more lovely than in the mirror; for now he was getting the full effect of her splendid coloring, set off by the gown she wore, a thing of rich but somber shades, lit up by a semi-barbaric necklace of amber and gold, that hung almost to her knees. Yes, the girl was a picture against the unforgetable background of that tragic situation.

No mother to see her own youth over again in those fresh features and rising reliefs of half-sculptured womanhood, and, seeing its loveliness, forget her lessons of neutral-tinted propriety, and open the cases that hold her own ornaments to find her a necklace or a bracelet or a pair of earrings, those golden lamps that light up the deep, shadowy dimples on the cheeks of young beauties, swinging in a semi-barbaric splendor that carries the wild fancy to Abyssinian queens and musky Odalisques!

While thus employed, the stern, indefatigable tzar was pressing forward the building of his fleet on the Don for the conquest of the Black Sea, and was unwearied in his endeavors to promote the elevation of his still semi-barbaric realms, by the introduction of the sciences, the arts, the manufactures and the social refinements of southern Europe. From 1702 TO 1718.

Soon both Poland and Saxony lay crushed at the feet of the "Lion of the North," as they called him then "Madman of the North," after his great designs had failed. Only Russia remained to oppose him Russia, as yet almost unknown to Europe, a semi-barbaric frontier land, supposedly helpless against the strength and resources of civilization. Russia was in the pangs of a most sudden revolution.

In the very olden time there lived a semi-barbaric king, whose ideas, though somewhat polished and sharpened by the progressiveness of distant Latin neighbors, were still large, florid, and untrammelled, as became the half of him which was barbaric. He was a man of exuberant fancy, and, withal, of an authority so irresistible that, at his will, he turned his varied fancies into facts.