From the Daily News. MR. THACKERAY S SIXTH LECTURE. STERNE and GOLDSMITH were the subjects of the last of Mr. Thackeray's series. He began by sketching the facts of Sterne's life. He was the son of an officer in a marching regiment, who died from a wound in a duel—a rough, good fellow, who marched on till he met with the fatal goose who put a termination to his existence. Young Lawrence went to school at Halifax; to Jesus College, Cambridge; and ultimately got the living of Sutton, in Yorkshire. the peasant life in the south was excellently described by him-a man of the keenest enjoyment and sensibility. But it was a painful fact that scarcely one page of Sterne was perfectly pure; there was a latent corruption in what he did; a taint of bad. You saw the satyr eyes glaring through the leaves. How different this from the pure, sunny pages of one of his successors of to-day-a man for whose books one was grateful-the author of " David Copperfield!" With this allusion to Charles Dickens, which drew forth loud applause from the audience, the lecturer passed from Sterne to Goldsmith. What a fortune had Goldsmith had in our history! To be the most beloved of English authors, what a lot was that! The pleasant, gentle, wandering minstrel-it was delightful to see how, through all his career, he affectionately turned his eyes to home. He peopled his books with the figures of home. The charm of his works was in the fact that they contained his character, his simple, honest regrets, his love and sympathy. "Our love for him is half-pity." Whom did he ever hurt? He bears no weapon but his harp; with that he passes into every palace and cottage, delights all ranks and classes. Mr. Thackeray's first comments on his character were founded on his love affairs. He was found addressing the lady whom he married with the most sentimental passion. He spoke of her as a flower. But such a fountain as Mr. Sterne's love was not for one rose only. No. When years had passed over he wrote, in a letter to a friend, in dog-latin, and very bad dog-latin, that he wished his wife was dead. She "bored him," it would seem. And he wrote letters full of sentiment to " Eliza," his "dear child," and so on-a Mrs. Draper, the wife of an Indian official, much respected in that quarter of the globe; yet scarcely had she sailed from Goldsmith, not less than Fielding, had the merit Dover, in 1767, than the worn-out old scamp was of preserving his cheerful goodness and love of offering his heart to somebody else. Soon after-truth through distress and difficulty. He was never wards his cadaverous body was consigned to Pluto. To be sure, there were signs of grace in his last letters-those to his daughter, his letters to whom usually breathed love and kindness. so friendless but he could have a friend somewhere; if he only had his flute he could delight the poor with that; was never so poor but he could spare something to a poorer; he could pawn his trousers to save his landlord from gaol. He certainly endured great distress and pain; one could scarcely bear to read of it; you felt an anger when you heard of his being hurt, such as you felt at hearing of a cruelty exercised towards a woman or a child. 66 "Jessamy Bride." He alluded to the extravagance of his later life, but called on his hearers to remember how constantly he shared what he had with his numerous dependents, and appealed to their sympathy and pity. Think," he exclaimed, "of the pensioner weeping at his grave-think of the righteous pen that wrote his epitaph!" How well the world has paid back all the love he had for it! His figure seems to be with us still, and pleading to us in favor of the poor. It was always, the lecturer went on, a perilous case, that of a man who had to bring his inner life, his tears, his smiles, his hopes, his fears, before the public for money. Did he feign indignation? Did he assume? Did he pretend? Could he trust himself? Was he not tempted to cant? How much Mr. Thackeray then mentioned the various wellwas true sensibility-how much false? Where known anecdotes of Goldsmith, and referred with did the truth end and the lies begin? He (the lec- respect to his biographers, to the industry of Prior, turer) had some time before passed the evening the eloquence of Forster, and the love of Washingwith a French singer. This man, after singing a ton Irving. He also quoted some of the finest lines long time, to the pain of many of his hearers, in the "Deserted Village," and referred with delchansons of a questionable character, sang a senti-icate tenderness to his love for Mary Horneck, the mental one. He did it charmingly; everybody was moved, and nobody more than the singer himself. Now, Sterne had something like that about him. He blubbered over his paper; he had a lucrative art of weeping; he utilized his anguish. Sterne often, Mr. Thackeray confessed, disgusted him. "He looks his reader in the face; he watches what effect he has on him; he seems to say, 'Do cry." Great humorists laughed naturally out of their great manly hearts, but this man never let his reader alone. Sterne was a great jester, not a great humorist. You could fancy you saw him laying Having announced that this was the last of his down his carpet before beginning to perform on it. discourses, Mr. Thackeray took occasion to declare For instance, look at his "Sentimental Journey." his opinions on a subject on which he is known to Did he not seem to go deliberately prepared to make entertain strong ones-the relation of men of letters matter of it all? He had no sooner landed than he to "society." He protested markedly against the began to make, as the actors say, "business." complaint that is sometimes made of their being Could anybody believe all the sentiment genuine? neglected. "We do," he said, "meet with kindHe whimpered over a dead donkey, over which ness." He urged that no laws or regulations could anybody (said Mr. Thackeray) may cry "who have saved the men he had been treating of from likes." That dead donkey was cooked in piquant the troubles which they brought on themselves. He sauce. In fact, the donkey had a fine funeral-an | maintained that society treated a man with due reelegant hearse, the mourner with a white pocket-gard to what he did and was; it gave him fair handkerchief, and all got up for the purposes of place and fair play. He ridiculed all absurd prescenic effect. That donkey had been used before. tensions on the part of writers in this matter, and (Here he read the well-known passage concerning inquired whether the author of the last new novel, it in "Tristram Shandy.") The critic (he re- or the last new poem, was to have a guard of honor sumed) who could not see, in this description, sen-appointed specially for him? And, speaking gratetiment, humor and wit, must be hard to please. And fully of the kindness which he himself had met with, From the Spectator. THE CONDITION-OF-AUTHOR QUESTION. MR. THACKERAY Wound up his admirable series of fashionable lectures with a moral, stern, eloquent, and incomplete. It often happens thus; the author who most beautifully illustrates a truth cannot always analyze it. Scott, who transcended rivals in invention, was poor in criticism; Johnson, whose own fiction was a didactic effort, supplied the explanation which Goldsmith could not give of the well-known line" Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow." concluded the last of a series of instructive and the tradesman secures precisely the thing for which brilliant commentaries on a class of writers with he had labored-his return is at least equal to his whom he has associated himself both as brother and outlay. The object for which the lawyer works, judge. There was a marked sympathy in the ap- quà lawyer, is successful practice; and his success plause which greeted his discourse. is exactly in proportion to his natural capacity at starting and his exertion. If all do not get the fixed prizes, all get an exact return for what they give. The author has this peculiarity in common with all artists-that, while he is at work, the thing for whose sake he works is art. He gives to society something more than can be the subject of payment-the labor of love; and the question is, whether society repays him in kind, videlicit, with love? No; the return to him as author is made to him by the bookseller; and even then it is made not according to the artistic merit of the work, but according to the law of" supply and demand"-demand, too, depending far less on the capacity of the author than on the capacity of the public. "How well," said Thackeray of Goldsmith," how well the world has paid back all the love he had for it!"-Paid, however, in a very abstract sense. The world has felt the delightful emotion to which he moved it, and has luxuriated therein; but when did that love reach Goldsmith? That is just the whole case; the love has been enormous, and all of it the gift of that great artist; but what proportion of that got back to him? Unless, indeedBut Mr. Thackeray did not mean any sacrificial allusion to the manes of the genius. The men Mr. Thackeray's peroration was an emphatic denial that the profession of authorship is looked down upon, and that authors are not received in society with enough consideration. whose characteristics he had sketched, and sketched with the suggestive hand of a master, served to illustrate this position è converso; all of them, he said, had enjoyed the consideration they deserved, where it was not abated by their own misconduct or foible; and, in our own day, he contended, the profession of authorship is held in esteem; the author is received with kindness and attention apportioned to his personal merit. Even if this assertion, taken as it stands, were strictly accurate, it would not meet the case on the other side; but it is not accurate. The consideration which the humorists of the eighteenth century enjoyed, according to the lecturer's own account, was far from being uniformly in proportion to their merits; the loose-moraled Sterne-whose picture was somewhat overdrawn-luxuriated in a social consideration wholly unknown to the innocent but eccentric Goldsmith; Dick Steele, the charming and original inventor of "light literature" in England, played fag to the cold, self-seeking, commonplace, and fuddled Mr. Addison, whose powers Mr. Thackeray preposterously overrated. The best illustration to favor the lecturer is that of Pope, whose appearance in public, like Voltaire's, was a triumph, and whose Dunciad originated "the Grub Street tradition." Mr. Thackeray glanced in a very skilful and graceful manner at the estimation in which popular authors of our own day are held; and if there are disappointments, he argued, is not neglect equally the fate of the soldier, the sailor, the lawyer, the tradesman-of all But the two points here raised are not the points in question. The question is, not whether an individual, being an author, may not attain much social consideration by means not literary, but whether he attains that consideration as an author, and in proportion to his merits; and, secondly, not whether all men are not liable to disappointment in the struggles of life, but whether that which is peculiar to authorship is not peculiarly subject to neglect? Mr. Thackeray spoke as if the author, the lawyer, and the tradesman, stood on the same ground, and must be content to share the same chances; a position, indeed, in which he goes far beyond "society." The tradesman devotes himself to the acquisition of certain profits; intelligence and prudence are tolerably certain of reward; and lawyer in the land takes precedence next after the The practical truth goes further yet; the first royal family; the tradesman who has received the exact quid pro quo for his exertions shall, when he has accumulated good store of that same quid, transmitter of a foolish face," though he shall be revel in boundless consideration; and "the tenth as improvident as Dick Steele, as fuddled as Mr. Addison, as foul-tongued as Swift, as loose as Sterne, shall be more considered than an angel. Survey the table of social precedency, and say where the author stands, as author. Some are received, half on sufferance, at great houses; but if you find one really high on the social scale, it is for some condition extraneous to his art-he sits there, not as author of the Cosmos, but as chamberlain to his majesty; not as the poet of Italy, but as banker. The hardship to the author does not constitute the gravamen of this truth-art is its own solace; the worst mischief befalls society, whose treatment of the artist on extraneous grounds not only tends to encourage inferior art of a trading tuft-hunting quality, and so even to debauch students who might do higher things; but it is a confession that society has not altogether risen since the day when Petrarch was recognized as noble by his works, or Raphael walked as a prince for the palette in his hand. THE WISE MAN AND THE SERPENT.-A wise man one day asked the serpent, "Of what advantage is it to thee to deprive men of life? The lion kills and devours his prey; the tiger, the wolf, and other fierce but thou bitest thine innocent victims, and sheddest beasts do the same, in order to satisfy their hunger, benefit from their death, save the cruel satisfaction of mortal poison into their veins, without reaping any destroying." “Why askest thou me this question ?” rejoined the reptile. "Ask rather the slanderer amongst thy own race, what pleasure he finds in poisoning unto death those who have never injured him.”—Eliza Cook, from the Chaldee. From the Westminster Review. Makamat; or, Rhetorical Anecdotes of Al Hariri, of "IN Arabia as in Greece," says Gibbon, "the perfection of language outstripped the refinement of manners, and her speech could diversify the fourscore names of honey, the two hundred of a serpent, the five hundred of a lion, the thousand of a sword, at a time when this copious dictionary was intrusted to the memory of an illiterate people. We have no remains extant of the poems of the ages preceding the century immediately previous to Mohammed; but tradition tells of the annual fair that was held for thirty days, and the prize poems recited there, which were written in letters of gold, and suspended in the temple of the Caaba. The Arabic of Mohammed's age appears in its perfect form, with its structure of grammar fully developed; and though letters seem to have been then a recent invention, all that letters could perpetuate had been long current in the hearts and memories of successive generations of Arabs. Soon after the rapid conquests of Mohammed's successors, when, to use Ockley's phrase," the crescent shed its malignant influence over half the world where once the Roman eagle soared," the Arabs began to fear lest the purity of their speech should suffer from the increased intercourse with foreigners; and a race of grammarians sprang up, who sought to fix the fluctuating features of the language. Abu'l Aswad al Duli is the first grammarian whom we know of, and he flourished under the Caliph Ali, A. D. 655. He was succeeded by a host of followers, and, through their labors, Arabic grammar and prosody were reduced to a system. The Koran itself stimulated their industry, for its dialect and style, though eminently classical, demanded much explanation and critical investigation; and, consequently, the sciences which embraced these as their object, and the persons who addicted themselves thereto, became more and more esteemed, until at last they well-nigh absorbed the whole attention of the Mohammedan mind. Grammar was held to be the highest effort of the human intellect; words, instead of being regarded as only the symbols of ideas, stood for ideas themselves; and men seemed to think that the grammarian who dealt with these, must thereby be the world's most cunning magician. Even the Muse caught the general infection, and became the handmaid of Grammar; and the effects of this are branded into Arabic poetry. Its notes had begun with the true trumpet-sound in the Moallakat and the finer parts of the Koran; a new era had sprung up in the history of the Arabian soul, and its sphere had suddenly widened from the sterile peninsula into the ample crescent from Persia to Spain; and we might well have expected that poetry would have burst like lava from that wild temperament. But fate had bestowed a fatal gift-a language already perfect; and the poet, instead of uttering his thoughts in their own burning words, forgot his mission, and dallied with the instrument he found in his hands. Hence it is that the poetry of the most ardent people in the world has so little of that ardor; and history records with a sigh, that (fine as much of the Arabian song undoubtedly is) one half of that poetry which boiled in the Arabian heart never found a voice at all; it spoke only in the enthusiasm which kindled at Mohammed's voice, and overran the fairest realms of Asia and CCCLXXX. LIVING AGE. VOL. XXX. 26 Africa as a torrent, and in the countless deeds of heroism which it prompted; but the voice of song, which should have risen therefrom as its true exponent and expression, died away unheard as the wind In the waste land where no man comes, Or has come since the making of the world. portance than the spirit; and hence it came to pass that poetry, to be popular, must come in some quaint attire; labor of composition was more highly turns of expression were set before those simple esteemed than the matter composed, and far-fetched touches, which, put in the plainest language, go at this was, that there arose a class of men whom Mr. once to the quivering heart. The consequence of Preston calls "the knight-errants of literature," who, to use his own words, "eloquent and erratic, like the hero of the 'Odyssey,' roamed from place to place with no means of support, except their marvellous powers of language, nor any object except the display of them-restless if without any opportunity of exerting them, but careless from the very confidence of success about employing them in a settled direction, devoting themselves sometimes to the noblest, and sometimes to the meanest Purposes, yet never losing sight of the dignity of their possession." These men, as they wandered from place to place, everywhere found a welcome, because the love of rhetoric was everywhere prevalent, and in every assembly of literate men the favorite topics were grammar and criticism. Those who improvisatori-like could dictate (like Lucilius stans pede in uno) a string of verses on a given subject in some unusual metre, and with some difficult rhyme, obtained a welcome in every society; and, as Mr. Preston observes, "it was not uncommon for a destitute stranger to enter the learned circle where the choicest wits of a province were assembled, and, as soon as an opportunity was offered, compel them all to acknowledge his superiority to themselves, and win their bounty by some feat of marvellous improvisation, or a lucid decision of some perplexing difficulty in grammar or rhetoric." An incident in point occurs to us in the biography of the Persian poet Firdusi, when he arrived at Ghazni, whither he had come to seek his fortune, after having been for years a poor gardener at Tus; he happened to pass a garden, where were seated the three best poets of the day, who, observing a stranger coming, agreed that each should address him in a line with the same difficult rhyme, to see if he could improvise a similar line in his turn. Firdusi immediately accomplished the task, and this incident was the commencement of a friendship which at last introduced him to Mahmoud's notice, and thus led to his immortal Shah nameh. We have been led to these preliminary observations by the work which stands at the head of our paper. It is only by a knowledge of the state of things which we have described, that its aim or object can be at all rightly understood; for to them it owes its entire existence. Hariri, as he is commonly called, was born at Basra, a city on the Tigris, A. H. 446 (a. D. 1054, not A. D. 1030, as Mr. Preston gives it), and died there A. H. 516(A. D. 1122). Nothing is known of his life except that he traded in silk (whence his name Hariri, * His real name, with true Arabian sesquipedalism, is Abu-Mohammed al Kasim Ibn Ali Al Hariri Al Basri Al Haraami gone; from harir, silk); he is said to have undertaken | And calling to mind those of his family who were the work at the request of a vizier. His personal appearance, we are told, was not prepossessing, and a stranger who once visited him with the intention to engage him as his instructor, conceived an instantaneous contempt for him on that account. 66 a Mr. Preston has had no easy task to accomplish, in putting these Makamat into a readable English dress; but zuɛna ta zaka, and we congratulate him on the complete success which has crowned his efforts. The original is written in a peculiar kind of Arabic prose, which consists of sentences of unequal length, whose last syllables rhyme in pairs or triplets; † this is interspersed with numerous metrical passages; and Mr. Preston has most skilfully adapted his translation at once to the original, and the obstinate genius of the English language. For the rhyming prose he has substituted species of composition which occupies a middle place between prose and verse; the clauses of which, though not rhyming together, are arranged, as far as possible, in evenly balanced periods, and never exceed a certain length;" the metrical passages are translated into the common English measures. We can speak in the highest terms of the exceeding accuracy of the translation; it is nearly line for line, we had almost said, word for word; and wherever the text is not exactly literal, a foot-note is always at hand to give the precise meaning of the passage. The German translator, Rückert, produced an admirable work, but failed in being literal; Mr. Preston has triumphed in both respects, and his book is as admirably adapted to the general reader as to the student. The Muse Orientales may well rejoice at the appearance of this, which he calls "suorum in hoc genere studiorum primitias," and at the hope of future triumphs which it inspires. and even in the wilds of the desert it is his wellknown form that he sees in "the pilgrim's garb, carrying the wallet fastened about his waist." The In Hariri's work, however, we have abundant book thus becomes, in addition to its value as a reproofs of his peculiar genius to compensate for the pository of philological lore, an interesting picture little we know of his life. Its original object was of men and manners to the general reader; and, to to display the full riches of the Arabic language, use Mr. Lumsden's words in his preface to the and thus nearly every sentence exhibits some pe-Calcutta edition, in 1809, "it may be read with culiar idiom or construction. In this the author considerable interest on the score of amusement, as has indeed succeeded à merveille, and his work has well as with great advantage to the progress of ever since furnished the text-book for numberless those who are desirous to master the Arabic lancommentators, and the treasury of Arabic lore for guage." the learned. But Hariri knew that something was needed to lure even an Arabian public to the results of his unwearied labors in philology; and he has, therefore, skilfully interwoven a secondary object with his first, by making the subject matter of the book a series of the adventures of "Abou Zaid," an ideal personification of the spirit of literary knight-errantry which we have described. This fictitious hero in some respects reminds us of Rabelais' Panurge, or the heroes of the better class of Spanish picaresco novels, or "Gil Blas; he is endowed with marvellous gifts as a rhetorician and improvisatore, and wherever he goes he finds ready listeners and admirers, who repay him with abundant liberality. These narratives, therefore, form a series of satires on the state of manners in the time of the author; and many and interesting glimpses do they give us into the world of Oriental life at that period. Europe was in darkness; the crusades had just begun; but the golden age of Arabian literature which had commenced under Haroun-al-Raschid and Almamon was not yet over, though many were the symptoms of its decline. Hariri leads us with his hero into the mosques, the courts of the kadis and governors, the caravanserais, and the public libraries; we wander with him to Alexandria, Koufa, Damietta, Sasaan, Damascus, and the Desert; and in every place the wily Abou Zaid finds willing listeners, and not unfrequently willing dupes. We can easily believe that Hariri had many an actual professor in his mind's eye, when he sketched his hero's character, for its features are full of vigor and life; and we fancy the quiet smile with which he sometimes turns away, had played, in Hariri's sight, round real lips of flesh and blood. The narratives themselves are thrown into the mouth of a fictitious personage, named Hareth Ibn-Hamman, who is represented as trading from one city to another; and it is in these journeys that he continually falls upon Abou Zaid, in various characters and disguises, much in the same way as Borrow, in his "Bible in Spain,' everywhere meets with the unaccountable Benedict Moll. The continual rencontre is very amusing, and the two characters stand out with an individuality which is not usual in Eastern works. In the crowded caravan, Hareth hears the well-known voice in the silence of the night, "when the groaning of camels and snoring of sleepers ceased," or in the society of his friends at Koufa recognizes it in "the low call of a benighted traveller at the door;" he finds him the preacher at the Mosque of Tenise or the cemetery of Sowa, when he― Observed a group of mourners assembled there, Over a newly made grave, where they were burying a corpse ; We have spoken of the Makamat as a narrative; we will now say a few words on its style, and then proceed to give our readers some extracts from the translation, to support our criticisms and rouse their curiosity. The Arabic language is remarkable for strength and copiousness; its verbal forms are peculiarly full, and the variations of purpose, position, &c., are expressed by slight changes in the root, which "thus blend together various significations in the mind's eye, to a degree which a student of occidental tongues can hardly conceive. Moreover, no language has so many of those strong metaphorical words which originate in early times, and too generally lose their original meaning, as refinement advances, until at last they are merely expressionless names; we mean such words as opelo, detiro, And he turned towards them, meditating on the end of life, *The best edition of Makamet is De Sacy's, (a monument of the skill of the greatest Arabic scholar Europe ever saw,) but is now very difficult to procure Mr. Lumsden's is a good edition, and contains a useful Arabic and Persian lexicon in the third volume. + The following may serve as a specimen; it is the passage translated in p. 374: "Fa-'anna laná i'málo 'Irikábi-fi lailatin fatiyati 'lshababi-ghodáfiyati 'lihábi-fa-asrainá ilá an nadha 'llailo shababaho-wasalata 'lsobho khidhábaho," &c. him, Like the halo about the moon, or the shell about fruit. desidero, &c.; in Arabic these retain their original | And the crowdings of the throng had gathered round force, (or at any rate, retained it in Hariri's time,) and they give a solidity and energy to his lines, which often remind us of Eschylus. Hariri displays these two excellences of the language in their perfection; and Mr. Preston has endeavored in his translation, (or by foot notes, where it was otherwise impracticable,) to bring this home to the mere English reader.* Hariri abounds with fine lines and original similes, but these latter are never very long; they are more usually condensed in some grand old word, which he had perhaps found in an obsolete song or heard in a Bedouin encampment, and rescued from oblivion by preserving it in his pages. The following are a few that occur to us: we can assure our readers there are many such which we find continually. We were left, by the loss of his agreeable company, I withheld myself in speaking, like one in uncer- And suppressed all observations respecting him, ellers, The sorrowful maiden, lovely though distrest, Several of the songs, which frequently occur in the course of the narrative, are very well translated: one or two of these will be quoted hereafter. We now turn to the Makamat themselves, merely premising that the term signifies, like the Latin concio, first, "an assembly," and then " any discourse delivered to an assembly ;" and thus in the present instance it may be translated "dissertations." The adventures of which they consist, as we have said, are very various, but they are all true pictures of Mohammedan life. Hareth first met Abou Zaid in Sanaa of Yemen, when he was haranguing a crowd in a square of the city. I beheld, in the midst of a throng, In the garb of pilgrimage, and with a plaintive voice, tion; * Of the fifty Makámat he has translated twenty of the best; the remainder, which consist chiefly of inexplicable riddles or bewildering juggleries with words, alias post se memoranda relinquit; and we were amused by the Latin lines, p. 24, where he makes that liberal offer to the successful translator, "sit meus edendi sumptas, tua fama laboris." There is a beautiful couplet by a Persian poet, which resembles this: "Thou hast gone, but regret for thee is left in our hearts, as the ashes of the fire of a departed caravan in the desert." The mendicant retires with his scrip filled by the bounty of the bystanders; Hareth follows him to a cave, and there Found him sitting, with a young attendant opposite Over some fine bread, and a roast kid, and a flask of to him, wine beside. After a little conversation he retires bewildered by the way he had come in ;" and it is very singular to observe here and elsewhere, what was doubtless a remarkable trait of the times, that in spite of the moral culpability of many of these rhetorical professors, (like the sophists of ancient Athens,) their fine-sounding phrases and elaborated rhymes won a welcome for them wherever they turned, and thus Hareth seems always pleased to meet his mellifluous friend, although his purse was generally lightened by gifts to pay for the enjoyment. In the very pleasant Makamah of Damietta, when he had introduced his old friend to the caravan and filled his purse for him by contributions, Abou Zaid suddenly decamps, under pretence of going to a bath in a neighboring village, whence he would The caravan waits for him the whole soon return. day, and at last, when they had fairly given him up, Hareth says— I arose to saddle and lade my camel for departure, "O thou! who of kindness alone giving proof, No, indeed! But 't is always the plan I admire, And they expressed admiration for the elegance of him. In the Makamah of the Denar, we have a pleasant incident of Hareth's meeting his old acquaintance, while discoursing with some friends. Hareth offers him first a denar, if he will improvise an eulogy on it, and then a second for an improvisazione of the opposite kind; the shaikh fulfils each request in two very curious addresses. The Makamah of Holouan is a rencontre with Abou Zaid in a library, where he astonishes some of the grave critics by extemporaneous effusions, which surpassed the most elaborate compositions of their favorite poets. But the most pleasant Makamah of this kind is that of Meragra, where Hareth represents himself as present in the court of administration there, while a discussion on eloquence was going on; all maintained the degeneracy of the age, and that modern authors were only the old diluted. |