[8] Zum Arabischen Dialekt.  Von Markko.  Leipzig, 1893.  Vers. 8.

We must not forget that these last-named have borrowed much from the first ones, and it is by them that they have known the celebrated Khalif of Bagdad, one of the principal heroes of the “Thousand and One Nights,” Haroun al Raschid, whose presence surprises us not a little when figuring in adventures incompatible with the dignity of a successor of the Prophet.

As in the Berber tales, one finds parallels to the Arab stories among the folk-lore of Europe, whether they were borrowed directly or whether they came from India.  One will notice, however, in the Arab tales a superior editing.  The style is more ornate, the incidents better arranged.  One feels that, although it deals with a language disdaining the usage of letters, it is expressed almost as well as though in a cultivated literary language.  The gathering of the populations must also be taken into consideration; the citizens of Tunis, of Algiers, and even in the cities of Morocco, have a more exact idea of civilized life than the Berber of the mountains or the desert.  As to the comic stories, it is still the Si Djeha who is the hero, and his adventures differ little with those preserved in Berber, and which are common to several literatures, even when the principal person bears another name.

The popular poetry consists of two great divisions, quite different as to subject.  The first and best esteemed bears the name of Klam el Djedd, and treats of that which concerns the Prophet, the saints, and miracles.  A specimen of this class is the complaint relative to the rupture of the Dam of St. Denis of Sig, of which the following is the commencement: 

  “A great disaster was fated:[9]
  The cavalier gave the alarm, at the moment of the break;
  The menace was realized by the Supreme Will,
  My God!  Thou alone art good. 
  The dam, perfidious thing,
  Precipitated his muddy Legions,
  With loud growlings. 
  No bank so strong as to hold him in check.

  “He spurred to the right,
  The bridges which could not sustain his shock fell
  Under his added weight;
  His fury filled the country with fear, and he
  Crushed the barrier that would retain him.”

[9] Delphin et Genis.  Notes sur la Poesie et la musique Arabes dans le Maghreb Algerien, pp. 14-16.  Paris, 1886.

As to the class of declamatory poems, one in particular is popular in Algiers, for it celebrates the conquest of the Maghreb in the eleventh century by the divers branches of the Beni-Hilal, from whom descend almost the whole of the Arabs who now are living in the northwest of Africa.  This veritable poem is old enough, perhaps under its present form, for the historian, Ten Khaldoun, who wrote at the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth, has preserved the resume of the episode of Djazza, the heroine who abandoned her children and husband to follow her brothers