m
afar, I wish to be its inhabitant. May the Being who granteth
tranquillity have compassion on the soul of the generous man who will
bestow death, as a charity, upon one of his brethren!_ These verses
being heard by a person who was travelling in the same caravan with him,
and whose name was Abd Allah As-Sufi (or, by another account, Abu
'l-Hasan Al-Askalani), he bought for Al-Muhallabi a dirhem's worth of
meat, cooked it, and gave it to him to eat.

"They then," says Ibn, "separated, and Al-Muhallabi having experienced a
change of fortune, became vizier to Moizz Ad-Dawlat at Baghdad, while
the person who had travelled with him and purchased the meat for him was
reduced to poverty. Having then learned that Al-Muhallabi was a vizier,
he set out to find him and wrote to him these lines: _Repeat to the
vizier, for whose life I would sacrifice my own--repeat to him the words
of one who reminds him of what he has forgotten. Do you remember when,
in a life of misery, you said: 'Where is death sold, that I may buy
it?'_ The vizier on reading the note recollected the circumstance, and,
moved with the joy of doing a generous action, he ordered seven hundred
dirhems to be given to the writer, and inscribed these words on the
paper: _The similitude of those who lay out their substance in the
service of God is as a grain of corn which has produced seven ears and
in every ear a hundred grains; for God giveth many-fold to whom He
pleaseth._ He then prayed God's blessing on him, and clothed him in a
robe of honour, and appointed him to a place under government, so
that"--the corollary seems hardly worth adding--"he might live in easy
circumstances."

Poetry was, you see, worth practising in Baghdad in those days; nor had
the poets any shame in accepting presents. What princes liked to give it
was not for poets to analyse or refuse. Al-Moizz Ibn Badis, sovereign of
Ifrikya and the son of Badis, was a patron indeed. "Poets," says Ibn
Khallikan, "were loud in his praise, literary men courted his patronage,
and all who hoped for gain made his court their halting-place."

To the modern mind he was too easily pleased, if the following story is
typical. He was sitting, one day, in his saloon with a number of
literary men about him, when, noticing a lemon shaped like a hand and
fingers, he asked them to extemporize some verses on that subject. Abd
Abu Ali Al-Hasan Ibn Rashik Al-Kairawani at once recited the following
lines: _A lemon, with