and mature, she has lost all her first youth, her beaute du diable, and she is assuming the characteristics of an age beyond “middle age.”  No one can study the earliest poetry without perceiving that it results from the cultivation of centuries and that it has already assumed that artificial type and conventional process of treatment which presages inevitable decay.  Its noblest period is included in the century preceding the Apostolate of Mohammed, and the oldest of that epoch is the prince of Arab songsters, Imr al-Kays, “The Wandering King.”  The Christian Fathers characteristically termed poetry Vinum Daemonorum.  The stricter Moslems called their bards “enemies of Allah”; and when the Prophet, who hated verse and could not even quote it correctly, was asked who was the best poet of the Peninsula he answered that the “Man of Al-Kays,” i.e. the worshipper of the Priapus-idol, would usher them all into Hell.  Here he only echoed the general verdict of his countrymen who loved poetry and, as a rule, despised poets.  The earliest complete pieces of any volume and substance saved from the wreck of old Arabic literature and familiar in our day are the seven Kasidahs (purpose-odes or tendence-elegies) which are popularly known as the Gilded or the Suspended Poems; and in all of these we find, with an elaboration of material and formal art which can go no further, a subject-matter of trite imagery and stock ideas which suggest a long ascending line of model ancestors and predecessors.

Scholars are agreed upon the fact that many of the earliest and best Arab poets were, as Mohammed boasted himself, unalphabetic[FN#434] or rather could neither read nor write.  They addressed the ear and the mind, not the eye.  They “spoke verse,” learning it by rote and dictating it to the Rawi, and this reciter again transmitted it to the musician whose pipe or zither accompanied the minstrel’s song.  In fact the general practice of writing began only at the end of the first century after The Flight.

The rude and primitive measure of Arab song, upon which the most complicated system of metres subsequently arose, was called Al-Rajaz, literally “the trembling,” because it reminded the highly imaginative hearer of a pregnant she-camel’s weak and tottering steps.  This was the carol of the camel-driver, the lover’s lay and the warrior’s chaunt of the heroic ages; and its simple, unconstrained flow adapted it well for extempore effusions.  Its merits and demerits have been extensively discussed amongst Arab grammarians, and many, noticing that it was not originally divided into hemistichs, make an essential difference between the Sha’ir who speaks poetry and the Rajiz who speaks Rajaz.  It consisted, to describe it technically, of iambic dipodia (U-U-), the first three syllables being optionally long or short It can generally be read like our iambs and, being familiar, is pleasant to the English ear.  The dipodia are repeated either twice or thrice; in