of the “writer.”  He is an elegant narrator.  Not only does he intersperse verses and lines more frequently than our own taste would license:  by nature, he easily falls into the half-hearted poetry of rhymed prose, for which the rich assonances of his language predispose.  His own learning was further cultivated by his early contact with Persian literature; through which the fable and the wisdom of India spoken from the mouths of dumb animals reached him.  In this more frivolous form of inculcating wisdom, the Prophet scented danger to his strait-laced demands:  “men who bring sportive legends, to lead astray from God’s path without knowledge and to make a jest of it; for such is shameful woe,” is written in the thirty-first Surah.  In vain; for in hours of relaxation, such works as the ‘Fables of Bidpai’ (translated from the Persian in 750 by ’Abd Allah ibn Mukaffah), the ‘Ten Viziers,’ the ‘Seven Wise Masters,’ etc., proved to be food too palatable.  Nor were the Arabs wanting in their own peculiar ‘Romances,’ influenced only in some portions of the setting by Persian ideas.  Such were the ‘Story of Saif ibn dhi Yazan,’ the ’Tale of al-Zir,’ the ‘Romance of Dalhmah,’ and especially the ‘Romance of Antar’ and the ‘Thousand Nights and A Night.’  The last two romances are excellent commentaries on Arab life, at its dawn and at its fullness, among the roving chiefs of the desert and the homes of revelry in Bagdad.  As the rough-hewn poetry of Imr-al-Kais and Zuheir is a clearer exponent of the real Arab mind, roving at its own suggestion, than the more perfect and softer lines of a Mutanabbi, so is the ’Romance of Antar’ the full expression of real Arab hero-worship.  And even in the cities of the Orient to-day, the loungers in their cups can never weary of following the exploits of this black son of the desert, who in his person unites the great virtues of his people, magnanimity and bravery, with the gift of poetic speech.  Its tone is elevated; its coarseness has as its origin the outspokenness of unvarnished man; it does not peep through the thin veneer of licentious suggestiveness.  It is never trivial, even in its long and wearisome descriptions, in its ever-recurring outbursts of love.  Its language suits its thought:  choice and educated, and not descending—­as in the ’Nights’—­to the common expressions of ordinary speech.  In this it resembles the ‘Makamat’ of Hariri, though much less artificial and more enjoyable.  It is the Arabic romance of chivalry, and may not have been without influence on the spread of the romance of mediaeval Europe.  For though its central figure is a hero of pre-Islamic times, it was put together by the learned philologian, al-’Asmai, in the days of Harun the Just, at the time when Charlemagne was ruling in Europe.