Guard thy tongue, O Man, lest it kill thee, for it is a serpent.

How many an one is there in the grave, slain by his tongue, whom his rivals had shunned to meet in the fight! See Arabum Proverbia, ii. 671, Freytag’s edition.

Who musters footmen and horsemen together.—These words are addressed to Iblîs by God, Koran xvii. 66, with the mean­ing, “Collect against mankind thy forces, or threaten them with thy forces, riding and on foot;” and thus may be used to signify an impious or abortive effort. Or they may be ex­plained as applying to a confused and unsuccessful production, since a band of mixed horse and foot is but a disorganised crowd.

Fifty Assemblies, etc.—Ḥarîri here describes the nature of his compositions. Not only are verses of the Koran freely introduced, but the whole language is tinged with allusions to it which are almost imperceptible to the European, but which are readily caught by a Moslem, who knows the sacred work by heart. Metonymy () is the use of indirect expressions, as though you should say, Such an one is great in the ashes of his pot, meaning that he is given to hospitality,—Ta‘rîfât, p. 197.) Of the Arab proverbs a great number are to be found in Maydâni, and the source and original application of others are given by various commentators. To follow Ḥarîri in this department of his boundless learning has always been one of the hardest tasks of those who have devoted themselves to his work. References to the most important of them will be found in these notes. The scholarly elegancies or subtleties are to be found in the Sixth, Twenty-sixth, Twenty-eighth, and Twenty-ninth Assemblies, where the merit of the composition consists in the use of words with or without pointed letters; in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth, where phrases or a whole composition may be read either back­wards or forwards; in the Twenty-Third, where a part of each verse may be removed, without spoiling sense or metre; in the Forty-sixth, where several of these ingenious displays are united. The Grammatical riddles are represented in the Twenty-Fourth, where Abû Zayd puzzles his companions by twelve subtle ques­tions. The decisions dependent on the use of a word in two different senses are instanced in the Thirty-second, and akin to this are the enigmas or conundrums which appear in some of the other Assemblies. The addresses, orations, exhortations, and jests are too numerous to be specified.

I change the pasture.—i.e., I turn from grave to gay, from dignified to lightsome style. The Arabs divide the herbage on which the camel feeds into , which means the sweet kind, and , that in which there is saltness; on the latter the camels feed in the hot season, and it makes them drink. If they have it not they become lean. The former is called the bread of the camel, and the latter the fruit; and the word is used meta­phorically, to express the refreshing of the reader by a change of incident and discourse.

And of the poetry of others.—The Assembly of Ḥolwân is the Second, and that of Kerej the Twenty-fifth.

The father of its virginity.—Father is here used as we should use Lord: the father of a poem’s virginity is he who first broaches or originates it. Compare Sixth Assembly, “Who can deflower a virgin composition;” also Sixteenth, “And deflower virgins of it.”

Of its sweet and its bitter,—i.e., of all of it. Compare a verse quoted at page 678, De Sacy’s Ḥarîri.

Ḳodâmeh.—Abû ’l Faraj Ibn Ja‘far Ibn Ḳodâmet Ibn Ziyâd, a scribe of Bagdad, eminent for purity of composition. He is said to have lived in the time of Muḳtadir b’illah.

And excellently said one.—The author of these lines was the amatory poet ‘Adî Ibn ar Ruḳâ‘. They relate to a lover, who hears a turtledove lamenting the loss of its mate, upon which he also laments the absence of his mistress. He then addresses himself with the words quoted, the meaning of which is that the merit of his verses is lessened by the dove having set him the example.

Although a translator does not necessarily concern himself with the technicalities of the original work, yet as this volume is intended rather for the student in Arabic than the general reader, I shall make no apology for dwelling occasionally in these notes on a subject respecting which there is little informa­tion to be found in commentators; I mean the prosody of the verses introduced throughout the Assemblies. Of this branch of learning, which has been especially elaborated by the Arab grammarians, I have made mention in the Introduction. An acquaintance with the metres, and the habit of reading the lines in accordance with them, are not only necessary for the enjoy­ment of Ḥarîri’s melodious and plaintive verse, but enable the student the more readily to seize the meaning of the numberless parallel passages and shawâhid which are introduced into the commentary, and which are often ill-written and insufficiently vowelled. Less attention has been paid to the subject by Euro­pean scholars than might have been expected; and the Arabs, who detect the metre at once and do not need artificial help, generally pass it by without notice.

The verses beginning are in the , the most common of the old metres. In the Ḥamâseh the greater part of the pieces belong to this metre or to the and ; the others, though known, not having been in very common use till a later period. The belongs to the first circle (), so called from being composed of five-lettered and seven-lettered feet ( and ). To this circle belong the three metres , and , and two others only used by later authors; the , which is the reversed, and the , which is the reversed. The first circle consists of the first two primitive feet (that is a a ), and (that is a ) twice re­peated, and the original is of the measure,

This (last foot of first hemistich) is, however, I believe, not found; the being invariably , that is losing its quiescent fifth letter, and becoming . To this there are four or closes of the second hemistich. The first is retaining the normal . The second suffers like the , and this is the metre quoted by Ḥarîri. The other two to this consist of one to and one to . There is also an in some use. (It must be mentioned that is the dropping of the at the end of a foot, and the dropping of the last letter of a at the end of a foot, and the making quiescent the moved letter before it).

The metre of the lines quoted is, accordingly—

But it will be remarked that , in these lines, is of the measure ; that is, as we should say, the last syllable is short instead of long, and the same licence takes place twice in the next line. This brings us to the consideration of the licences allowable in , among which are, according to the prosodists, two of the kind called , namely, of the kind which affects the second letter of the . The first of these licences is , which we have seen affects the closing foot of each hemi­stich; it may also affect both and , whenever they occur, striking out the quiescent fifth letter of each; and making the former , as in the verses before us. Of its effect on , there will be many instances as we proceed. The other licence is , which is the dropping of the quiescent seventh letter of a foot; by which, in this metre, becomes , a licence very common among the old writers. It must be borne in mind, however, that the same foot cannot suffer both and ; thus, there can be no such foot as . This exclusion of one licence by the other is called . Other peculiarities in this metre may be noticed, but the foregoing are the most important.

Scratched up its death with its hoof.—An Arab found a ram in the desert, but had no knife to kill it with. The ram, in scratching the ground, uncovered one. Hence the proverb applied to a man who furnishes the means of his own destruction. Freytag’s Arabum Proverbia, ii. 359.