th all their images. Medschun and Leila, rose and
nightingale, parrots and tulips; mosques and dervishes; desert, caravan,
and robbers; peeps at the harem; bags of gold dinars; slaves, horses,
camels, sabres, shawls, pearls, amber, cohol, and henna; insane
compliments to the Sultan, borrowed from the language of prayer; Hebrew
and Gueber legends molten into Arabesque;--'tis a short inventory of
topics and tropes, which incessantly return in Persian poetry. I do not
know but at the first encounter many readers take also an impression of
tawdry rhetoric, an exaggeration, and a taste for scarlet, running to
the borders of the negro-fine,--or if not, yet a pushing of the luxury
of ear and eye where it does not belong, as the Chinese in their
mathematics employ the colors blue and red for algebraic signs, instead
of our pitiless _x_ and _y_. These blemishes disappear, or diminish, on
better acquaintance. Where there is real merit, we are soon reconciled
to differences of taste. The charge of monotony lies more against the
numerous Western imitations than against the Persians themselves, and
though the torrid, like the arctic zone, puts some limit to variety, it
is least felt in the masters. It is the privilege of genius to play its
game indifferently with few or with many pieces, as Nature draws all her
opulence out of a few elements. Saadi exhibits perpetual variety of
situation and incident, and an equal depth of experience with Cardinal
de Retz in Paris or Doctor Johnson in London. He finds room on his
narrow canvas for the extremes of lot, the play of motives, the rule of
destiny, the lessons of morals, and the portraits of great men. He has
furnished the originals of a multitude of tales and proverbs which are
current in our mouths, and attributed by us to recent writers; as, for
example, the story of "Abraham and the Fire-Worshipper," once claimed
for Doctor Franklin, and afterwards traced to Jeremy Taylor, who
probably found it in Gentius.

The superlative, so distasteful in the temperate region, has vivacity in
the Eastern speech. In his compliments to the Shah, Saadi says,--"The
incurvated back of the sky became straight with joy at thy birth." "A
tax-gatherer," he says, "fell into a place so dangerous, that, from
fear, a male lion would become a female." Of dunces he says, with a
double superlative,--"If the ass of Christ should go to Mecca, it would
come back an ass still." It is a saying from I know not what poet,