“Sí sál shud ki banda bi-ṣaff-i-ni'ál dar
Búdast madḥ-khwán, u tu bar takht madḥ-khwáh.
Dánad Khudáy-i-'arsh ki hargiz na ístád
Chun banda madḥ-khwání dar hích bárgáh.
Aknún dil-at zi banda-i-sí-sála shud malúl;
Dar dil bi-túl-i-muddat yábad malál ráh.
Líkin mathal zanand ki ‘makhdúm shud malúl,
Júyad gunáh, u banda-i-bí-chára bí-gunáh’.”

“For thirty years thy servant, standing meek
In shoe-rank, * sang the praises thou didst seek:
Such praise, God wotteth well, as none before
Hath ever laid before a patron's door.

Thou'rt tired of him who served thee thirty years: *
Such lengthy service bores thee, it appears.
‘The master seeks some fault’ (the saw runs so),
‘And the poor servant hath no fault to show.’”

Dawlatsháh says that Waṭwáṭ's Díwán comprises nearly fifteen thousand verses, remarkable for their ornate and rhetorical style and elaborate tropes. He was particularly fond of the artifice called tarṣí' (see pp. 47-48 supra), and boasted that before him no one had ever composed an entire qaṣìda in which this figure had been observed in every single line. His qaṣìdas are of the boastful and exaggerated type usually affected by Persian panegyrists at this period, and he owes his immor­tality less to them than to his treatise on the Poetic Art (the Ḥadá'iqu's-Siḥr), and a few occasional verses, such as those above cited, which are connected with historical events.

Amongst the rivals of Rashíd-i-Waṭwáṭ was the unfortunate Adíb-i-Ṣábir, whose tragic fate has been already mentioned.*

Adíb-i-Ṣábir b. Isma'íl. According to Dawlatsháh (p. 92 of my edition) these two poets attacked one another in satires of such coarseness that he did not feel justified in quoting them in his Memoirs. Each had his admirers, Anwarí and Kháqání being the most eminent of Adíb-i-Ṣábir's partisans; while Anwarí even sets him above the far more celebrated Saná'í, for he says:—*