ibn Hájar, and as-Shánfarah, whose poem has been called "the most magnificent of old Arabic poems." In addition to the single poems found in the 'Mu 'allakât' and elsewhere, nearly all of these composed whole series of poems, which were at a later time put in the form of collections and called 'Diwans.' Some of these poets have left us as many as four hundred verses. Such collections were made by grammarians and antiquarians of a later age. In addition to the collections made around the name of a single poet, others were made, fashioned upon a different principle: The 'Mufáddaliyát' (the most excellent poems), put together by al-Mufáddal (761); the 'Diwan' of the poets of the tribe of Hudhéil; the 'Hamásah' (Bravery; so called from the subject of the first of the ten books into which the collection is divided) of Abu Tammám. The best anthology of these poems is The Great Book of Songs,' put together by Abu al-Fáraj al-Ispaháni (died 967).

With these poets Arabic literature reached its highest development. They are the true expression of the free Arabic spirit. Most of them lived before or during the time of the appearance of Muhammad. His coming produced a great change in the life of the simple Bedouins. Though they could not be called heathen, their religion expressed itself in the simple feeling of dependence upon higher powers, without attempting to bring this faith into a close connection with their daily life. Muhammad introduced a system into which he tried to mold all things. He wished to unite the scattered tribes to one only purpose. He was thus cutting away that untrammeled spirit and that free life which had been the making of Arabic poetry. He knew this well. He knew also the power the poets had over the people. His own 'Qur'an' (Koran) was but a poor substitute for the elegant verses of his opponents. "Imr-al-Kais," he said, "is the finest of all poets, and their leader into everlasting fire." On another occasion he is reported to have called out, "Verily, a belly full of matter is better than a belly full of poetry." Even when citing verses, he quoted them in such a manner as to destroy the metre. Abu Bekr very properly remarked, "Truly God said in the Qur'an,' We have not taught him poetry, and it suits him not." In thus decrying the poets of "barbarism," and in setting up the 'Qur'an' as the greatest production of Arabic genius, Muhammad was turning the national poetry to its decline. Happily his immediate successors were unable or unwilling to follow him strictly. Ali himself, his son-in-law, is said to have been a poet; nor did the Umáyyid Caliphs of Damascus, "very heathens in their carnal part," bring the new spirit to its full bloom, as did the Abbassides of Bagdad.

And yet the old spirit was gradually losing ground. The consolidation of the empire brought greater security; the riches of Persia

and Syria produced new types of men. The centre of Arab life was now in the city, with all its trammels, its forced politeness, its herding together. The simplicity which characterized the early caliphs was going; in its place was come a court, court life, court manners, court poets. The love of poetry was still there; but the poet of the tent had become the poet of the house and the palace. Like those troubadours who had become jongleurs, they lived upon the crumbs which fell from the table of princes. Such crumbs were often not to be despised. Many a time and oft the bard tuned his lyre merely for the price of his services. We know that he was richly rewarded. Harún gave a dress worth four hundred thousand pieces of gold to Ja'far ibn Yahya; at his death, Ibn 'Ubeid al-Buchtarí (865) left one hundred complete suits of dress, two hundred shirts, and five hundred turbans - all of which had been given him for his poems. The freshness of olden times was fading little by little; the earnestness of the Bedouin poet was making way for a lightness of heart. In this intermediate period, few were born so happily, and yet so imbued with the new spirit, as was 'Umar ibn 'Rabí'a (644), "the man of pleasure as well as the man of literature.» Of rich parentage, gifted with a love of song which moved him to speak in verses, he was able to keep himself far from both prince and palace. He was of the family of Kureish, in whose Muhammad all the glories of Arabia had centred, with one exception, -the gift of poetry. And now "this Don Juan of Mecca, this Ovid of Arabia," was to wipe away that stain. He was the Arabian Minnesinger, whom Friedrich Rückert called "the greatest love-poet the Arabs have produced." A man of the city, the desert had no attractions for him. But he sang of love as he made love, with utter disregard of holy place or high station, in an erotic strain strange to the stern Umáyyids. No wonder they warned their children against reading his compositions. "The greatest sin committed against Allah are the poems of 'Umar ibn Rabí'a,» they said.

With the rise of the Abbassides (750), that "God-favored dynasty," Arabic literature entered upon its second great development; a development which may be distinguished from that of the Umayyids (which was Arabian) as, in very truth, Muhammadan. With Bagdad as the capital, it was rather the non-Arabic Persians who held aloft the torch than the Arabs descended from Kuréish. It was a bold move, this attempt to weld the old Persian civilization with the new Muhammadan. Yet so great was the power of the new faith that it succeeded. The Barmecide major-domo ably seconded his Abbasside master; the glory of both rests upon the interest they took in art, literature, and science. The Arab came in contact with a new world. Under Mansúr (754), Harun al-Rashid (786), and Ma'mún

(813), the wisdom of the Greeks in philosophy and science, the charms of Persia and India in wit and satire, were opened up to enlightened eyes. Upon all of these, whatever their nationality, Islam had imposed the Arab tongue, pride in the faith and in its early history. 'Qur'an' exegesis, philosophy, law, history, and science were cultivated under the very eyes and at the bidding of the Palace. And, at least for several centuries, Europe was indebted to the culture of Bagdad for what it knew of mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy.

The Arab muse profited with the rest of this revival. History and philosophy, as a study, demanded a close acquaintance with the products of early Arab genius. The great philologian al-Asmái (740-831) collected the songs and tales of the heroic age; and a little later, with other than philological ends in view, Abu Tammán and al-Búchturí (816-913) made the first anthologies of the old Arabic literatures (Hamásah '). Poetry was already cultivated: and amid the hundreds of wits, poets, and singers who thronged the entrance to the court, there are many who claim real poetic genius. Among them are al-Ahtal (died 713), a Christian; 'Umar ibn Rabí'a (died 728), Jarír al-Farázdak (died 728), and Muslim ibn al-Walid (died 828). But it is rather the Persian spirit which rules, - the spirit of the Shahnámeh and Firdaúsi,—“charming elegance, servile court flattery, and graceful wit." In none are the characteristics so manifest as in Abu Núwas (762-819), the Poet Laureate of Harun, the Imr-al-Kais of his time. His themes are wine and love. Everything else he casts to the wind; and like his modern counterpart, Heine, he drives the wit of his satire deep into the holiest feelings of his people. "I would that all which Religion and Law forbids were permitted me; and if I had only two years to live, that God would change me into a dog at the Temple in Mecca, so that I might bite every pilgrim in the leg," he is reported to have said. When he himself did oncemake the required pilgrimage, he did so in order to carry his loves up to the very walls of the sacred house. "Jovial, adventure-loving, devil-may-care,» irreligious in all he did, yet neither the Khalif nor the whole Muhammadan world were incensed. In spite of all, they petted him and pronounced his wine-songs the finest ever written; full of thought and replete with pictures, rich in language and true to every touch of nature. "There are no poems on wine equal to my own, and to my amatory compositions all others must yield," he himself has said. He was poor and had to live by his talents. But wherever he went he was richly rewarded. He was content only to be able to live in shameless revelry and to sing. As he lived, so he died, in a half-drunken group, cut to pieces by those who thought themselves offended by his lampoons.

At the other end of the Muslim world, the star of the Umáyyids, which had set at Damascus, rose again at Cordova. The union of two civilizations - Indo-Germanic and Semitic-was as advantageous in the West as in the East. The influence of the spirit of learning. which reigned at Bagdad reached over to Spain, and the two dynasties vied with each other in the patronage of all that was beautiful in literature and learned in science. Poetry was cultivated and poets cherished with a like regard: the Spanish innate love of the Muse joined hands with that of the Arabic. It was the same kind of poetry in Umáyyid Spain as in Abbasside Bagdad: poetry of the city. and of the palace. But another element was added here, the Western love for the softer beauties of nature, and for their expression in finely worked out mosaics and in graceful descriptions. It is this that brings the Spanish-Arabic poetry nearer to us than the more splendid and glittering verses of the Abbassides, or the cruder and less polished lines of the first Muhammadans. The amount of poetry thus composed in Arab Spain may be gauged by the fact that an anthology made during the first half of the tenth century, by Ibn Fáraj, contained twenty thousand verses. Cordova under 'Abd-alRahmán III. and Hákim II. was the counterpart of Bagdad under Harun. "The most learned prince that ever lived," Hákim was so renowned a patron of literature that learned men wandered to him from all over the Arab Empire. He collected a library of four hundred thousand volumes, which had been gathered together by his agents in Egypt, Syria, and Persia: the catalogue of which filled forty-four volumes. In Cordova he founded a university and twentyseven free schools. What wonder that all the sciences - Tradition, Theology, Jurisprudence, and especially History and Geographyflourished during his reign. Of the poets of this period there may be mentioned: Sa'íd ibn Júdi—the pattern of the Knight of those days, the poet loved of women; Yáhyah ibn Hakam, "the gazelle "; Ahmad ibn 'Abd Rabbíh, the author of a commonplace book; Ibn Abdún of Badjiz, Ibn Hafájah of Xucar, Ibn Sa'id of Granada. Kings added a new jewel to their crown, and took an honored place among the bards; as 'Abd al-Rahmán I., and Mu'tamid (died 1095), the last King of Seville, whose unfortunate life he himself has pictured in most beautiful elegies. Although the short revival under the Almohades (1184-1198) produced such men as Ibn Roshd, the commentator on Aristotle, and Ibn Toféil, who wrote the first 'Robinson Crusoe' story, the sun was already setting. When Ferdinand burned the books which had been so laboriously collected, the dying flame of Arab culture in Spain went out.

During the third period-from Ma'mún (813), under whom the Turkish body-guards began to wield their baneful influence, until the break-up of the Abbasside Empire in 1258-there are many

names, but few real poets, to be mentioned. The Arab spirit had spent itself, and the Mogul cloud was on the horizon. There were 'Abd-allah ibn al-Mu'tazz, died 908; Abu Firás, died 967; al-Tughrai. died 1120; al-Busíri, died 1279,-author of the 'Búrda,' poem in praise of Muhammad: but al-Mutanábbi, died 965, alone deserves special mention. The "Prophet-pretender»-for such his name signifieshas been called by Von Hammer "the greatest Arabian poet"; and there is no doubt that his 'Diwán,' with its two hundred and eightynine poems, was and is widely read in the East. But it is only a depraved taste that can prefer such an epigene to the fresh desertmusic of Imr-al-Kais. Panegyrics, songs of war and of bloodshed, are mostly the themes that he dilates upon. He was in the service of Saif al-Daulah of Syria, and sang his victories over the Byzantine Kaiser. He is the true type of the prince's poet. Withal, the taste for poetic composition grew, though it produced a smaller number of great poets. But it also usurped for itself fields which belong to entirely different literary forms. Grammar, lexicography, philosophy, and theology were expounded in verse; but the verse was formal, stiff, and unnatural. Poetic composition became a tour de force.

This is nowhere better seen than in that species of composition which appeared for the first time in the eleventh century, and which so pleased and charmed a degenerate age as to make of the 'Makamat' the most favorite reading. Ahmad Abu Fadl al-Hamadhání, "the wonder of all time» (died 1007), composed the first of such "sessions." Of his four hundred only a few have come down to our time. Abu Muhammad al-Hariri (1030-1121), of Bâsra, is certainly the one who made this species of literature popular; he has been closely imitated in Hebrew by Charízi (1218), and in Syriac by Ebed Yéshu (1290). "Makámah" means the place where one stands, where assemblies are held; then, the discourses delivered, or conver

sations held in such an assembly. The word is used here especially to denote a series of "discourses and conversations composed in a highly finished and ornamental style, and solely for the purpose of exhibiting various kinds of eloquence, and exemplifying the rules of grammar, rhetoric, and poetry." Hariri himself speaks of

"These 'Makamat,' which contain serious language and lightsome,
And combine refinement with dignity of style,

And brilliancies with jewels of eloquence,
And beauties of literature with its rarities,

Besides quotations from the Qur'an,' wherewith I adorned them,
And choice metaphors, and Arab proverbs that I interspersed,
And literary elegancies, and grammatical riddles,
And decisions upon ambiguous legal questions,

And original improvisations, and highly wrought orations,
And plaintive discourses, as well as jocose witticisms.»