Quando los hombres despiertan
Y el pesado sueño vencen,
Para dar á su Hacedor
El debito que le deben;—
En este tiempo la compañia
Del hijo de Abdulmunef
Se levantan y aperciben
Al casamiento solemne.
In the preface to the whole poem, the author says Allah alone knows how much labor it has cost him to collect the manuscripts necessary for his task, “scattered,” he adds, “as they were, all over Spain, and lost and hidden through fear of the Inquisition.”
The other work to which I refer is chiefly in prose, and is anonymous. Its author says he was driven from Spain in 1610, and was landed at Tunis with above three thousand of his unhappy countrymen, who, through the long abode of their race in a Christian land and under the fierce persecutions of the Inquisition, had not only so lost a knowledge of the rites and ceremonies of their religion, that it was necessary to indoctrinate them like children, but had so lost all proper knowledge of the Arabic, that it was necessary to do it through the Castilian. The Bashaw of Tunis, therefore, sent for the author, and commanded him to write a book in Castilian, for the instruction of these singular neophytes. He did so, and produced the present work, which he called “Mumin,” or the Believer in Allah; a word which he uses to signify a city populous and fortified, which is attacked by the Vices and defended by the Virtues of the Mohammedan religion, and in which one of the personages relates a history of his own life, adventures, and sufferings; all so given as to instruct, sometimes by direct precept and sometimes by example, the newly arrived Moriscos in their duties and faith. It is, of course, partly allegorical and romantic. Its air is often Arabic, and so is its style occasionally; but some of its scenes are between lovers at grated windows, as if in a Castilian city, and it is interspersed with Castilian poems by Montemayor, Góngora, and the Argensolas, with, perhaps, some by the author himself, who seems to have been a man of cultivation and of a gentle spirit. Of this manuscript I have eighty pages,—about a fifth of the whole.