CAUCASIA AND ITS PEOPLES 49 



and just why I was surprised I cannot tell you — how 

 wide a knowledge of the great poets the average 

 cultivated Georgian possesses. Prose has nothing like 

 the same attraction. In the National Theatre Shake- 

 speare is sometimes played, the work of the Master 

 having been translated by Prince Machabeli. 



One very intellectual man I met, a prince, cela va 

 sans dire, who had been educated in France, had an 

 extensive acquaintance with the word songs of the 

 whole world. I don't know that his choice and judg- 

 ment would have been approved by our critical critics, 

 but they were very interesting to me. His favourites 

 were all of the heroic mould. For instance, he placed 

 Joaquin Miller above all America's poets, and maint 

 tained stoutly that " Columbus " ranks as the fines- 

 poem ever written by an American. 



The national epic of the Georgians was composed 

 by their poet Rustaveli in the twelfth century. 

 It is called Vepkhvis Tkaosani, The Man in the 

 Panther's Skin, and is to-day as familiar to the 

 whole Georgian nation as the words of God Save the 

 King are with us, and that is very familiar indeed. 

 This impassioned poem sets forth the history of 

 one Avtandil, a hero who stands, like Tennyson's 

 King Arthur, as representative of the poet's ideal 

 national type. Some of the lines of the famous epic 

 have passed into proverbial sayings, which are quoted 

 as we quote our own Immortal One. I like best the 

 last stanza, in which it would seem that the poet 

 foresaw, as in a glass, darkly, the fate in store for his 

 beloved land : — 



