appointment must have been his
lot, for a lampoon which he wrote a short time afterwards is filled with
the bitterest satire upon the prince whose praises he had sung so
beautifully. Happily, the satire does not seem to have gotten under the
eyes of Mahmud; it was bought off by a friend, for one thousand dirhems
a verse. But Firdusi was a wanderer; we find him in Herat, in
Taberistan, and then at the Buyide Court of Bagdad, where he composed
his "Yusuf and Salikha," a poem as Mohammedan in spirit as the "Shah
Nameh" was Persian. In 1021, or 1025, he returned to Tus to die, and to
be buried in his own garden--because his mind had not been orthodox
enough that his body should rest in sacred ground. At the last
moment--the story takes up again--Mahmud repented and sent the poet the
coveted gold. The gold arrived at one gate while Firdusi's body was
being carried by at another; and it was spent by his daughter in the
building of a hospice near the city. For the sake of Mahmud let us try
to believe the tale.

We know much about the genesis of this great epic, the "Shah Nameh"; far
more than we know about the make-up of the other great epics in the
world's literature. Firdusi worked from written materials; but he
produced no mere labored mosaic. Into it all he has breathed a spirit of
freshness and vividness: whether it be the romance of Alexander the
Great and the exploits of Rustem, or the love scenes of Zal and Rodhale,
of Bezhan and Manezhe, of Gushtasp and Kitayim. That he was also an
excellent lyric poet, Firdusi shows in the beautiful elegy upon the
death of his only son; a curious intermingling of his personal woes with
the history of his heroes. A cheerful vigor runs through it all. He
praises the delights of wine-drinking, and does not despise the comforts
which money can procure. In his descriptive parts, in his scenes of
battle and encounters, he is not often led into the delirium of
extravagance. Sober-minded and free from all fanaticism, he leans not
too much to Zoroaster or to Mohammed, though his desire to idealize his
Iranian heroes leads him to excuse their faith to his readers. And so
these fifty or more thousand verses, written in the Arabic heroic
Mutakarib metre, have remained the delight of the Persians down to this
very day--when the glories of the land have almost altogether departed
and Mahmud himself is all forgotten of his descendants.

Firdusi introduces us to the greatness of Mahmud of Ghazna's