berlain, and he displayed a collection of proverbs which Ibn
Sirri had made for the Caliph's delectation. "It is very fine,"
quoth Mansur, "but it wants a commentary." And Hasan in a week
returned with a commentary, very well written, of three hundred
couplets. One other observation: we shall not be able to present
upon these pages a connected narrative, a dark companion of the
poem, which is to the poem as a shadow to the bird. A mediaeval
Arab would have no desire to see this theory of connection put in
practice--no, not even with a poem; for the lines, to win his
admiration, would be as a company of stars much more than as a
flying bird. Suppose that he produced a poem of a hundred lines,
he would perchance make fifty leaps across the universe. But if
we frown on such discursiveness, he proudly shows us that the
hundred lines are all in rhyme. This Arab and ourselves--we
differ so profoundly. "Yet," says he, "if there existed no
diversity of sight then would inferior merchandise be left
unsold." And when we put his poem into English, we are careless
of the hundred rhymes; we paraphrase--"Behold the townsmen," so
cried one of the Bedawi, "they have for the desert but a single
word, we have a dozen!"--and we reject, as I have done, the
quantitative metre, thinking it far preferable if the metre sings
itself into an English ear, as much as possible with that effect
the poet wants to give; and we oppose ourselves, however
unsuccessfully, to his discursiveness by making alterations in
the order of the poem. But in this commentary we shall be obliged
to leap, like Arabs, from one subject to another. And so let us
begin.

With regard to prayer (_quatrain_ 1), the Moslem is indifferent
as to whether he perform this function in his chamber or the
street, considering that every spot is equally pure for the
service of God. And yet the Prophet thought that public worship
was to be encouraged; it was not a vague opinion, because he knew
it was exactly five-and-twenty times more valuable than private
prayer. It is related of al-Muzani that when he missed being
present in the mosque he repeated his prayers twenty-five times.
"He was a diver for subtle ideas," said the biographer Ibn
Khallikan. And although our poet, quoting the Carmathians, here
deprecates the common worship, he remarks in one of his letters
that he would have gone to mosque on Fridays if he had not fallen
victim to an unmentionable complaint. . . . The pre-Isla