The grammatical questions are of hardly less import­ance in the author’s eyes. His other works show the subtlety of his intellect and the fastidiousness of his taste, and many of the precepts which he utters in them he enforces by examples in the Assemblies. Yet there is a peculiarity in his art which is worth noticing. Where a question is doubtful, and two men of eminence whose opinions are probable, have differed, Ḥarîri will make use of a form which there is reason to believe he disapproves, as if his object were rather to continue the controversy than decide it. A conspicuous instance of this occurs in the thirty-fifth Assembly, in the phrase , of which the nearest rendering in English is “Behold he was him!” that is, the person I looked at was Abû Zayd. Now a controversy had been carried on between the schools of Basra and Kufa on this matter; the Basrians held the phrase to be incorrect, and that one ought to say , “Behold he was he.” The grammatical question is discussed in the notes to the twenty-fourth Assembly, and need not be dwelt upon here; but a commentator expresses his wonder that Ḥarîri, who was a Basrian, should use a phrase con­demned by the grammarians of his city, and one which most people looked upon as faulty. This controversy, how­ever, was classic, inasmuch as it had been originated by one of the greatest of the grammarians, Sîbawayh, and was said to have been the cause of his death. The story is as follows:—Sîbawayh was one day in the presence of Harûn ar Reshîd, or as others say of Yaḥya ibn Khâlid the Bermeki, when they were discussing grammatical questions, and he asked Al Kisâ’î, which is right, “I thought that the scorpion was different from the zenbûr, and behold ,” or “behold .” “The latter,” said Al Kisâ’î. Sîbawayh contradicted him, and the Khalif resolved to refer to some native Arabs. Al Kisâ’î then contrived that he should refer to a tribe who were not of pure speech, and these said that Sîbawayh was in the wrong. The great grammarian angrily departed from court, and retired to Khorasan, where he soon died. Ḥarîri seeks to awaken in his hearers the memory of this anecdote by using the condemned form, which would bring to their minds the celebrated controversy. So in the thirty-seventh Assembly the expression , imitated from Koran vii. 148, gives to the imper­sonal verb of the original a faulty construction, though Ḥarîri has himself noticed this very error in his book called the “Pearl.” But a controversy had taken place on this subject involving even the proper reading of the verb in the Koran; and Ḥarîri, by making use of what he does not approve, shows that he is not ignorant of the discussion. Several instances of a similar kind will be found in the notes, and I will notice but one more. In the thirty-sixth Assembly is used where, from Ḥarîri’s own explanation in the “Pearl,” it is plain that accuracy requires . The author’s design may have been to claim for this particular word a licence derived from popular use.

From these examples the reader will be able to judge how intimate a knowledge of the niceties of the tongue may be obtained from the study of Ḥarîri and his com­mentators. An acquaintance with the pagan antiquity also necessarily follows an examination of his incessant allusions. These, for the most part, occur in the form of proverbs, and of such popular sayings as have been already mentioned. The Arabic word does indeed comprise any phrase current among the people, or any sententious utterance of the past time, and is not con­fined to moral apophthegms. The Arabs, in imitation of the Greeks, began at an early time to make collections of the multudinous proverbs of their language. The collec­tion of Maydâni is invaluable, as preserving for us some of the oldest forms of Arab speech,—perhaps the most primi­tive utterances of the race. There is hardly a celebrated occurrence in early Arab story that is not illustrated by one or more of these phrases, which were attributed to the heroes and heroines of the old time; and whether authentic or not have, undoubtedly, for the most part, come down from the times of purely oral tradition. A whole series of proverbs connects itself with the history of Jathîmet al Abrash, Queen Zebbâ, and Ḳoṣayr. Another belongs to the story of Kolayb Wâ’il and the war of Basûs. When the poet ‘Obayd ibn al Abraṣ was sacrificed by the king of Hira at the tomb of his boon companions, ‘Obayd uttered sentences which be­came proverbial. Many of these proverbs indicate an archaic state of the language, and the combinations of letters are less euphonious than in the dialect of Ḳoraysh. Every page of Ḥarîri’s work contains some of these relics of a past time, and they are imbedded in the Assemblies like the stones of a Roman ruin in the walls of a modern Italian villa. Whole passages are but a cento of primeval phrases, mingled with sentences of the Koran or the Traditions, and remarkable idioms from poets of repute. The proverb served to call the hearer’s attention to the incident from which it was said to have arisen; and if he were a pupil, he that recited the composition to him would take care to examine him respecting the origin of the saying, and the precise form in which it had been most authoritatively handed down. An instance of the exactitude with which the purists required these proverbs to be used is given in the work of Maydâni, where it is said that the proverb : “Thou (a woman) didst lose the milk in the summer,” should be used in the feminine singular, even though it be addressed to a male or to more than one person, since it was first uttered by ‘Amr ibn ‘Odas to his wife Dakhtenûs.”*

The Koran is exemplified by continual quotations, and these are full of instruction for the foreign scholar. But the sacred book was so well known to those for whom the Assemblies were composed, that I cannot think the author had in view the inculcation of any special knowledge. Moreover he does not appear to quote difficult passages, or those which require special interpretation; he rather endeavours to show his wit by the use of it in a strange and unexpected manner, as, for instance, at the end of the third Assembly.