“How wonderfully hath He whose Name is to be exalted and extolled combined with the glory of his noble extraction* the graces of his generous character, with his valiant soul all laudable qualities, such as piety and righteousness, carefulness in defending and observing the rites of religion, justice and equity, humility and beneficence, firmness and determination, liberality and gentleness, the talent for ruling and governing, for managing and deciding, and other qualities which no fancy could comprehend and no mortal enumerate!”

Ath-Tha'álibí, in the tenth and last chapter of the third volume of his Yatíma, is equally enthusiastic in “crowning his book with some of the shining fruits of his eloquence, which is the least of his many virtues and characteristics.”* The great Avicenna (Abú 'Alí ibn Síná) was another of the eminent men of learning whom Qábús protected and aided, as is fully narrated in the Chahár Maqála, or “Four Discourses” (pp. 121-4 of my translation), by Nidhámí of Samarqand, who calls Qábús “a great and accomplished man, and a friend to men of learning.” His unhappy and violent end is well known,* and ampler details of his life are to be found in Ibn Isfandiyár's History of Ṭabaristán, of which I am now pre­paring an abridged translation. He composed verses both in Arabic and Persian. Amongst the former is the following:—

“Say to him who fain would taunt us with vicissitudes of Fate,
‘Warreth Fate or fighteth Fortune save against the high and great?
Seest thou not the putrid corpse which Ocean to its surface flings,
While within its deep abysses lie the pearls desired of Kings?’
Though the hands of Fate attack us, though her buffets us disarm,
Though her long-continued malice bring upon us hurt and harm,
In the sky are constellations none can count, yet of them all
On the Sun and Moon alone the dark Eclipse's shadows fall!”

And again:—

“My love is enkindled in thinking of thee,
And passionate thrills through my being do dart:
No limb of my body but speaks of thy love,
Each limb, thou would'st think, was created a heart!”

Amongst his Persian verses 'Awfí records the following:—

“The things of this world from end to end are the goal of desire
and greed,
And I set before this heart of mine the things which I most do
need,
But a score of things I have chosen out of the world's unnumbered
throng,
That in quest of these I my soul may please and speed my life
along.
Verse, and song, and minstrelsy, and wine full-flavoured and
sweet,
Backgammon, and chess, and the hunting-ground, and the falcon
and cheetah fleet;
Field, and ball, and audience-hall, and battle, and banquet rare,
Horse, and arms, and a generous hand, and praise of my Lord
and prayer.”

And again:—

“Six things there be which have their home in the midst of thy
raven hair;
Twist and tangle, curl and knot, ringlet and love-lock fair;
Six things there be, as you may see which in my heart do reign;
Grief and desire and sorrow dire: longing and passion and
pain!”

The following quatrain is also his:—

“Mirth's King the Rose is, Wine Joy's Herald eke;
Hence from these two do I my pleasure seek:
Would'st thou, O Moon, inquire the cause of this?
Wine's taste thy lips recalls, the Rose thy cheek!”

Amongst other royal and noble poets of this early period 'Awfí mentions Sulṭán Maḥmúd of Ghazna (whose Court will Other royal and noble poets. be described at the beginning of the next volume), and his son Amír Abú Muḥammad b. Yamínu'd-Dawla; Abu'l-Mudhaffar Ṭáhir b. al-Faḍl b. Muḥammad Muḥtáj aṣ-Ṣaghání (i.e., of Chaghán); Amír General charac­teristics of the poetry of this period. Kayká'ús the Ziyárid, son of the talented and un­fortunate Qábús whom we have just been discussing, and others who need not detain us, since we have examined a sufficient amount of the poetry of this period to be able to characterise it in general terms. The metrical system which underlies it is, as we have already observed, identical with that of the Arabs; though certain Arabic and Per­sian metrical systems. metres (e.g., Kámil, Basít, and Ṭawíl) which are common in Arabic are but rarely used in Persian, while some new metres were introduced in the latter language which were not used in the former. Dr. Forbes at pp. 132-3 of his Persian Grammar (4th ed. London, 1869), cites the opinion of Herr Geitlin, a German writer on the Persian language, who remarks that “the Persians and Arabs, like the Greeks and Romans, rejoice in a great variety of metres, but the Asiatic metres differ mainly in this, that the long syllables far exceed the short, which is quite in conformity with the character of the Oriental people, who are distinguished by a certain degree of gravity and sobriety in their conversation and gestures, com­bined with dignity and stateliness in all their movements;” and, á propos of this, remarks, in speaking of the five purely Arabian metres comprised in the “First Circle,” that in them “the short syllables are more nearly on a par with the long; whereby we are to infer, according to Herr Geitlin's theory, that the roving Arabs are less grave and sober in their con­versation and gestures than their neighbours of Persia.”

As regards verse-forms, it is the qaṣída, or elegy, alone which occupies a prominent place in both languages, and Verse-forms most favoured by the Persians in early times. which (chiefly, as it would appear, from the influence of the great Arab poet al-Mutanabbí, A.D. 905-965) attained so great a development in Persia under the Ghaznawí and succeeding dynasties, as will appear in a subsequent chapter. But at the period of which we are now speaking such long and elaborate monorhymes appear to have enjoyed little favour in Persia; and even the ghazal, or ode, seems to have been less popular The quatrain. in these early days than the qiṭ'a, or fragment, and the rubá'í, dú-baytí, or quatrain. This last, indeed, was almost certainly the earliest product of the Persian poetical genius. Allusion has already been made to one of the stock anecdotes given by the biographers as to the first occasion on which Persian verse was composed in Muhammadan times; the anecdote, namely, which ascribes a single miṣrá' to the chance utterance of a gleeful child. In Dawlatsháh's Memoirs (pp. 30-31 of my edition) this child is said to have been the son of Amír Ya'qúb b. Layth the Ṣaffárid; but lately I have come across a much older version of the story in the British Museum manuscript Or. 2814 of a very rare work on Persian Prosody and Rhetoric entitled al-Mu'jam fí ma'ábíri ash'ári'l-'Ajam, composed about A.H. 617 (= A.D. 1220-1221) by Shams-i-Qays. In this version (ff. 49^b-50^b of the above-mentioned manuscript) the verse (“ghalatán ghalatán hamí rawad tá bun-i-kú”) and the anecdote are nearly the same, but the child is unnamed and not represented as of royal patronage, while it is not the Amír Ya'qúb but the poet Rúdagí “or some other of the ancient poets of Persia” who is the auditor and admirer. He, according to the author, after an examination of the hemistich in question, “evolved out of the akhrab and akhram varieties of the hazaj metre a measure which they call the ‘Quatrain measure,’* and which is indeed a graceful measure and a pleasant and agreeable form of verse; in consequence of which most persons of taste and most cultivated natures have a strong inclination and leaning towards it.” The quatrain, then, may safely be regarded as the most ancient essentially The Mathnawí. Persian verse-form, while next to this comes the mathnawí, or poem in “doublets,” which is gene­rally narrative, and where the rhyme changes in each couplet. The portion of the Sháhnáma composed by Daqíqí is probably the oldest Persian mathnawí poem of which any considerable portion has been preserved to us, though fragments of Rúdagí's Kalíla and Dimna and other old mathnawís have been discovered by Dr. Paul Horn of Strassburg amongst the citations adduced by Asadí in his lexicon in proof of the meanings of rare and archaic words.