Excerpt from The Works of Washington Irving, Vol. 5 of 12: Conquest of Granada, And, Oliver Goldsmith The time of the contest, also, contributed to heighten the interest. It was not long after the invention of gunpowder; when firearms and artillery mingled the flash, and smoke, and thunder of modern warfare, with the steely splendor of ancient chivalry, and gave an awful magnifi cence and terrible sublimity to battle; and when the old Moorish towers and castles, that for ages had frowned defiance to the battering-rams and catapults of classic tactics, were toppled down by the lombards of the Spanish engineers. It was one of the cases in which history rises supe rior to fiction. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.