80 LITERATURE OP THE ARABS. 



siduity by all who aspired to literary honours and 

 distinctions. As always happens, the precepts of 

 elegant composition have succeeded the models ; 

 the inimitable Koran, and the pure dialect of the 

 Koreish, had refined the Arabian tongue long before 

 its rules were fixed and its beauties analyzed in 

 the rival schools of Cufa and Bussora. The literati 

 of Spain were not inferior to those of the East in 

 the prosecution of their philological investigations. 

 We learn from Casiri that Abdallah ibn Hescham, 

 in his " Introduction to a Chastised Mode of Speak- 

 ing," reviews and corrects the errors of hundreds 

 of former grammarians. 



Eloquence, one of the three national distinctions 

 of the ancient Arabs, had ceased to be cultivated 

 after the time of Mohammed and his immediate 

 successors, when Oriental despotism had banished 

 the freedom of the desert. But this art was revived 

 by the Saracens, who exercised themselves alter- 

 nately in the compositions of the academy and the 

 pulpit. Among these distinguished orators Malek 

 was considered the most pathetic; while Sharaif 

 possessed beyond all others the art of blending the 

 brilliancy of poetry with the vigour of prose. Ho- 

 rairi was placed in the same rank with Cicero and 

 Demosthenes ; and his academical orations, we are 

 assured, deserved to be written, not on paper or 

 vellum, but on silk and gold. In the sixth cen- 

 tury, Granada could boast of Bedreddin, surnamed 

 the Torch of Eloquence ; while Sekaki, the most ce- 

 lebrated writer on the belles lettres, produced a work 

 on rhetoric called the Key of the Sciences, which ob- 

 tained him the title of the Arabian Quinctilian. 



Poetry, anciently a favourite occupation of the 



