those who are submissively resigned to the
Divine will--are wont to assert that every page of that book is indeed a
conspicuous miracle. It is not then surprising that, in the Arabian
schools, great attention was paid to the study of language, and that so
many celebrated grammarians were produced. By these scholars,
dictionaries, similar to those now in use, were composed; their
copiousness is indicated by the circumstance that one of them consisted
of sixty volumes, the definition of each word being illustrated or
sustained by quotations from Arab authors of acknowledged repute. They
had also lexicons of Greek, Latin, Hebrew; and cyclopedias such as the
Historical Dictionary of Sciences of Mohammed Ibn Abdallah, of Granada.
In their highest civilization and luxury they did not forget the
amusements of their forefathers--listening to the tale-teller, who never
failed to obtain an audience in the midst of Arab tents. Around the
evening fires in Spain the wandering literati exercised their wonderful
powers of Oriental invention, edifying the eager listeners by such
narrations as those that have descended to us in the Arabian Nights'
Entertainments. The more sober and higher efforts of the educated were,
of course, directed to pulpit eloquence, in conformity with the example
of all the great Oriental khalifs, and sanctified by the practice of the
Prophet himself. [Sidenote: Defects of their literature.] Their poetical
productions embraced all the modern minor forms--satires, odes, elegies,
etc.; but they never produced any work in the higher walks of poesy, no
epic, no tragedy. Perhaps this was due to their false fashion of valuing
the mechanical execution of a work. They were the authors and
introducers of rhyme; and such was the luxuriance and abundance of their
language, that, in some of their longest poems, the same rhyme is said
to have been used alternately from the beginning to the end. Where such
mechanical triumphs were popularly prized, it may be supposed that the
conception and spirit would be indifferent. Even among the Spanish women
there were not a few who, like Velada, Ayesha, Labana, Algasania,
achieved reputation in these compositions; and some of them were
daughters of khalifs. And this is the more interesting to us, since it
was from the Provencal poetry, the direct descendant of these efforts,
that European literature arose. Sonnets and romances at last displaced
the grimly-orthodox productions of the we