1877.] life of the poet as given in the Kitab-el-Aghani. 79 
XVI generally it may be said that appears to make nonsense, and that while 
is a word meaning “light and active” applied to a camel, it does not seem 
appropriate here). 
17 These verses have not been rendered by De Sacy, and we should be glad to 
know that they were really spurious and not by Lebid. Verses 4 and 5 accuse er-Rabi‘ 
of cowardice, and say that in the press of battle he is like a thing held there by force, 
and would be glad to escape if he could. In verse 6 he is charged with merely sipping 
a sip and tasting of the fight I n verses 7 and 8 the meaning is 
that if the man who stands next to er-Rabi ‘ in the press and takes him for a bulwark 
(who to do so must needs be a coward himself) feels him, as one feels a sheep to see 
if it is fat (y+c -^ } he will find that he is lighter and leaner, i. e. more cowardly and chick¬ 
en-hearted than himself. In the last line is a word, which is explained in the 
commentary on the authority of el-Asma‘i as meaning the action of a beast whose legs 
are hobbled or shackled, or one walking among thorns : he sets down his forelegs, then 
he raises them and in the place where they had been puts his hind legs. So here the 
sense is that er-Rabi‘ having committed a villainy, returns to the same again. 
18 El-\Velid son of ‘Oqbeh. His grandfather was Abu Mo‘eyt son of Abu ‘Amr 
son of Umayyeh son of ‘Abd Shems; he became a Muslim at the conquest of Mekkeh 
(A. H. 8), and was sent by the Prophet to collect the Sadaqah or poor-rate from the 
Benu-l-Mustalaq ; having returned with a false report that they had refused to pay it 
to him, the Prophet ordered arms to be taken up against them : whereupon there was 
sent down from God this warning verse (Q,ur. xlix. 6) “ O ye that have believed! 
verily there has come to you a wicked man with news : act therefore with deliberation.” 
‘Omar appointed el-Welid to be collector of the Sadaqah from the tribe of Teghlib, 
and ‘Othman made him governor of el-Kufeh in succession to Sa‘d son of Abu Waq- 
qas. One day he was leading the prayers in the great mosque of el-Kufeh, and being- 
drunk, after he had finished turned to the people and said “ Shall I give you any 
more ?” This greatly scandalized them, and they reported to ‘Othman his drunken 
habits. The Khalifeh thereupon removed him from his post and inflicted upon him 
the legal punishment ( hadd ) for drunkenness, viz., eighty stripes. After this he re¬ 
mained in el-Medineh until ‘All was proclaimed Khalifeh, when he withdrew to er- 
Raqqah, a town on the upper Euphrates, where he lived till his death, taking 1 part with 
neither side in the contest between ‘All and Mo‘awiyeh. El-Welid was the uterine 
brother of the Khalifeh ‘Othman. (Ibn Quteybeh, Ma‘arif, pp. 162-3). 
19 Ghani : the tribe of ‘Amir ibn Sa‘sa‘ah to which Lebid belonged descended (as 
will be seen from the genealogy with which the notice begins) from Qeys son of 
‘Eylan through his son Khasafeh. Ghani was the offspring of another son of Qeys (or, 
as others say, his grandson), A‘sur. The tribe of Ghani was bound by the ties of 
mutual protection fjiwdrj to ‘Amir, and a man of Ghani having slain Sha’s son of 
Zuheyr the king of Hawazin, Khalid, Lebid’s great uncle (see above, note 2 ) offered to 
bear the blood wit: on Zuheyr refusing to accept anything but the destruction of the 
offending tribe, Khalid slew him ; and this produced an enmity between ‘Amir and 
<Abs which was not appeased till many years after on the outbreak of the war of Dahis. 
20 In rendering this poem I have ventured, with great diffidence, to take it in a 
sense exactly opposite to that adopted by De Sacy. He imagines that the words of 
Tufeyl are directed against Ja‘far: and he renders the word in line 3 which I trans¬ 
late “ to be weary of us,” “venir a notre secours,” observing however in a 
note that he would have preferred to read This other reading would, however, 
