halif. Al-Mansur, however, pardoned Al-Mofadhdhal, and
attached him to the household of his son, Al-Mahdi, by whose orders
Mofadhdhal made a collection of the most celebrated longer poems of
the Arabs, one hundred and twenty-eight in number, under the title of
the Mofadhdhaliat. This, the oldest anthology of Arabian poets, was
first commented upon by his disciple, Al-Aarabi; then two hundred
years later by the two great philologists and anthologists, Al-Anbari
and An-Nahas; by Merzuk; and lastly by Tibrizi, who is sufficiently
known in Europe as the editor and commentator of the Hamasa, published
by Freytag with a Latin translation. Mofadhdhal supported himself as a
copyist of the Koran, and spent the last portion of his life in
mosques doing penance for the satires which he had composed against
various individuals. His other works were a book of proverbs, a
treatise on prosody, another on the ideas usually expressed in poetry,
and a vocabulary. He was held to be of the first authority as a
philologist, a genealogist, and a relator of the poems and battle-lays
of the desert Arabs. He died A.D. 784.

Abul Faraj Ali bin Husain Al-Ispahani is the collector of the great
anthology called 'Kitab-ul-Aghani' (the Book of Songs). This work,
which surpasses all former ones of this name, he produced after a
labour of forty years, and presented it to Saif ad Dawlah, who gave
him a thousand pieces of gold for it, but excused himself at the same
time for the smallness of this honorarium. In spite of his other
works, and the long string of names given him by Ibn Khallikan, he is
best known as Al-Ispahani, and as the author of the Aghani. His family
inhabited Ispahan, but he passed his early youth in Baghdad, and
became the most distinguished scholar and most eminent author of that
city. He was born A.D. 897, and died A.D. 967, in which year also died
the great scholar Kali, and the three greatest of his patrons, namely,
Saif ad Dawlah, the sovereign of the Benou Hamdan in Syria; Moiz ud
Dawlah, the sovereign of the Benou Bujeh in Irak; and Kafur, who
governed Egypt in the name of the Akhsid dynasty. The 'Book of Songs,'
notwithstanding its title, is an important biographical dictionary,
treating of grammar, history and science, as well as of poetry.

Mention can here be made of Abu Muhammad Kassim Al-Hariri, who was one
of the ablest writers of his time, and the author of the 'Makamat
Hariri,' a work consisting of fifty oratorical, p