He wished to unite the scattered tribes to one only purpose.  He was thus cutting away that untrammeled spirit and that free life which had been the making of Arabic poetry.  He knew this well.  He knew also the power the poets had over the people.  His own ‘Qur’an’ (Koran) was but a poor substitute for the elegant verses of his opponents.  “Imr-al-Kais,” he said, “is the finest of all poets, and their leader into everlasting fire.”  On another occasion he is reported to have called out, “Verily, a belly full of matter is better than a belly full of poetry.”  Even when citing verses, he quoted them in such a manner as to destroy the metre.  Abu Bekr very properly remarked, “Truly God said in the ‘Qur’an,’ ’We have not taught him poetry, and it suits him not.’” In thus decrying the poets of “barbarism,” and in setting up the ‘Qur’an’ as the greatest production of Arabic genius, Muhammad was turning the national poetry to its decline.  Happily his immediate successors were unable or unwilling to follow him strictly.  Ali himself, his son-in-law, is said to have been a poet; nor did the Umayyid Caliphs of Damascus, “very heathens in their carnal part,” bring the new spirit to its full bloom, as did the Abbassides of Bagdad.

And yet the old spirit was gradually losing ground.  The consolidation of the empire brought greater security; the riches of Persia and Syria produced new types of men.  The centre of Arab life was now in the city, with all its trammels, its forced politeness, its herding together.  The simplicity which characterized the early caliphs was going; in its place was come a court,—­court life, court manners, court poets.  The love of poetry was still there; but the poet of the tent had become the poet of the house and the palace.  Like those troubadours who had become jongleurs, they lived upon the crumbs which fell from the table of princes.  Such crumbs were often not to be despised.  Many a time and oft the bard tuned his lyre merely for the price of his services.  We know that he was richly rewarded.  Harun gave a dress worth four hundred thousand pieces of gold to Ja’far ibn Yahya; at his death, Ibn ’Ubeid al-Buchtari (865) left one hundred complete suits of dress, two hundred shirts, and five hundred turbans—­all of which had been given him for his poems.  The freshness of olden times was fading little by little; the earnestness of the Bedouin poet was making way for a lightness of heart.  In this intermediate period, few were born so happily, and yet so imbued with the new spirit, as was ’Umar ibn ’Rabi’a (644), “the man of pleasure as well as the man of literature.”  Of rich parentage, gifted with a love of song which moved him to speak in verses, he was able to keep himself far from both prince and palace.  He was of the family of Kureish, in whose Muhammad all the glories of Arabia had centred, with one exception,—­the gift of poetry.  And now “this Don Juan of Mecca, this Ovid of Arabia,” was to wipe away that stain.  He was the Arabian Minnesinger, whom