and Law forbids were permitted me; and if I had only two years to live, that God would change me into a dog at the Temple in Mecca, so that I might bite every pilgrim in the leg,” he is reported to have said.  When he himself did once make the required pilgrimage, he did so in order to carry his loves up to the very walls of the sacred house.  “Jovial, adventure-loving, devil-may-care,” irreligious in all he did, yet neither the Khalif nor the whole Muhammadan world were incensed.  In spite of all, they petted him and pronounced his wine-songs the finest ever written; full of thought and replete with pictures, rich in language and true to every touch of nature.  “There are no poems on wine equal to my own, and to my amatory compositions all others must yield,” he himself has said.  He was poor and had to live by his talents.  But wherever he went he was richly rewarded.  He was content only to be able to live in shameless revelry and to sing.  As he lived, so he died,—­in a half-drunken group, cut to pieces by those who thought themselves offended by his lampoons.

At the other end of the Muslim world, the star of the Umayyids, which had set at Damascus, rose again at Cordova.  The union of two civilizations—­Indo-Germanic and Semitic—­was as advantageous in the West as in the East.  The influence of the spirit of learning which reigned at Bagdad reached over to Spain, and the two dynasties vied with each other in the patronage of all that was beautiful in literature and learned in science.  Poetry was cultivated and poets cherished with a like regard:  the Spanish innate love of the Muse joined hands with that of the Arabic.  It was the same kind of poetry in Umayyid Spain as in Abbasside Bagdad:  poetry of the city and of the palace.  But another element was added here,—­the Western love for the softer beauties of nature, and for their expression in finely worked out mosaics and in graceful descriptions.  It is this that brings the Spanish-Arabic poetry nearer to us than the more splendid and glittering verses of the Abbassides, or the cruder and less polished lines of the first Muhammadans.  The amount of poetry thus composed in Arab Spain may be gauged by the fact that an anthology made during the first half of the tenth century, by Ibn Faraj, contained twenty thousand verses.  Cordova under ’Abd-al-Rahman III. and Hakim II. was the counterpart of Bagdad under Harun.  “The most learned prince that ever lived,” Hakim was so renowned a patron of literature that learned men wandered to him from all over the Arab Empire.  He collected a library of four hundred thousand volumes, which had been gathered together by his agents in Egypt, Syria, and Persia:  the catalogue of which filled forty-four volumes.  In Cordova he founded a university and twenty-seven free schools.  What wonder that all the sciences—­Tradition, Theology, Jurisprudence, and especially History and Geography—­flourished during his reign.  Of the poets of this period there may be mentioned: