LITERATURE OF THE ARABS. 71 



position, the moral and didactic appear to have been 

 in the highest repute with the Saracens ; hence they 

 wrote in verse, with as much facihty as in prose, 

 treatises on grammar, rhetoric, theology, medicine, 

 and even on the abstruse sciences of mathematics 

 and astronomy. 



Amid this luxuriant variety, it has been remarked 

 as a curious circumstance that the Arabs have not a 

 single poem which is strictly epic. The nearest 

 approach to dramatic writing are a few dialogues 

 in rhyme ; but these belong rather to satire than 

 comedy. The classic models of the Greeks and 

 Romans, the works of Sophocles and Euripides, of 

 Terence and Seneca, were desp''=5ed by the Arabs as 

 timid, cold, and constrained ; and among all the 

 books which, with an almost superstitious venera- 

 tion, they borrowed from these nations, there is 

 scarcely a single poem. Neither Homer nor Pindar, 

 Virgil nor Horace, were allowed to enter into a com- 

 parison with their own writers ; and consequently 

 none of those relics of classical genius were judged 

 worthy of translation. A Syriac version of the bard 

 of Troy was made so early as the reign of Haroun 

 al Raschid by Theophilus, a Christian Maronite of 

 Mount Libanus ; but much as the oriental muse de- 

 lighted in the themes of love and wine, she was an 

 entire stranger to the effusions of Ovid and the lyrics 

 of Sappho and Anacreon. The heroes of Plutarch, 

 and Livy, and Tacitus, were left to slumber in 



Of their epigrammatic wit, Professor Carlyle (Specim. of Arab. 

 Poetry) has translated some examples. The following stanzas 

 are by Ibn Alrumi, who lived and clied at Emesa, in the reign of 

 Motaded, and who excelled in every species of versification : — 



TO A VALETUDINARIAN. 



" So careful is Isa, and anxious to last, 

 So afraid of himself he is grown, 

 He swears through two nostrils the breath goes too fast. 

 And he's trying to breathe through but one." 



