text:  Eighty thousand volumes were publicly burned in one fatal _auto-da-fe_ at Granada by order of Cardinal Ximenes in whom the literature of his own language yet found a munificent patron; and so meritorious did the deed appear in the eyes of his contemporaries that the number has been magnified to an incredible amount by his biographers in their zeal for the renown of their hero! So complete was the destruction or deportation[4] of the seventy public libraries which a century and a half before the subjugation of the Moors were open in different cities of Spain that the valuable collection now in the Escurial owes its origin to the accidental capture early in the seventeenth century of three ships laden with books belonging to Muley Zidan emperor of Morocco--and even of this casual prize so little was the value appreciated that it was not till more than a hundred years later and after three-fourths of the books had been consumed by fire in 1671 that the learned and diligent Casiri was commissioned to make a catalogue of the remainder