ace with all his _bonhommie_, his common sense, and his acuteness, is
but the representative of a narrow Roman coterie of the Augustan age.
How thin, flimsy, and unspiritual does he appear in comparison with the
marvellous depth, the spiritual insight, the tenderness and power of
expression which characterized Sa'di.

Sa'di had begun his life as a student of the Koran and became early
imbued with the quietism of Islam. The cheerfulness and exuberant joy
which characterize the poems he wrote before he reached his fortieth
year, had bubbled up under the repressions of severe discipline and
austerity. But the religion of Mohammed was soon exchanged by him, under
the guidance of a famous teacher, for the wider and more transcendental
system of Sufism. Within the area of this magnificent scheme, the
boldest ever formulated under the name of religion, he found the liberty
which his soul desired. Early discipline had made him a morally sound
man, and it is the goodness of Sa'di that lends such a warm and
endearing charm to his works. The last finish was given to his
intellectual training by the travels which he took after the Tartar
invasion desolated Persia, in the thirteenth century. India, Arabia,
Syria, were in turn visited. He found Damascus a congenial
halting-place, and lived there for some time, with an increasing
reputation as a sage and poet. He preached at Baalbec on the
fugitiveness of human life, on faith, love, and rest in God. He
wandered, like Jerome, in the wilderness about Jerusalem, and worked as
a slave in Africa in the trenches of Tripoli: he travelled the length
and breadth of Asia Minor. When he arrived back at Shiraz, he had passed
the limit of three-score years and ten, and there he remained in his
hermitage and his garden, to arrange the result of all his studies, his
experiences, and his sufferings, in that consummate work which he has
named the "Rose Garden," after the little cultivated plot in which he
spent his declining days and drew his last breath.

The "Gulistan" is divided into eight chapters, each dealing with a
specific subject and partaking of the nature of an essay: although these
chapters are composed of disjointed paragraphs, generally beginning with
an aphorism or an anecdote and closing with an original poem of a few
lines. Sometimes these paragraphs are altogether lyrical. We are struck,
first of all, by the personal character of these paragraphs; many of
them relate the experience