have been lost.  And we—­this nobody will contradict—­have lost the old facility.  For instance, Hasan ibn Malik ibn Abi Obaidah was one day attending on Mansur the Chamberlain, and he displayed a collection of proverbs which Ibn Sirri had made for the Caliph’s delectation.  “It is very fine,” quoth Mansur, “but it wants a commentary.”  And Hasan in a week returned with a commentary, very well written, of three hundred couplets.  One other observation:  we shall not be able to present upon these pages a connected narrative, a dark companion of the poem, which is to the poem as a shadow to the bird.  A mediaeval Arab would have no desire to see this theory of connection put in practice—­no, not even with a poem; for the lines, to win his admiration, would be as a company of stars much more than as a flying bird.  Suppose that he produced a poem of a hundred lines, he would perchance make fifty leaps across the universe.  But if we frown on such discursiveness, he proudly shows us that the hundred lines are all in rhyme.  This Arab and ourselves—­we differ so profoundly.  “Yet,” says he, “if there existed no diversity of sight then would inferior merchandise be left unsold.”  And when we put his poem into English, we are careless of the hundred rhymes; we paraphrase—­“Behold the townsmen,” so cried one of the Bedawi, “they have for the desert but a single word, we have a dozen!”—­and we reject, as I have done, the quantitative metre, thinking it far preferable if the metre sings itself into an English ear, as much as possible with that effect the poet wants to give; and we oppose ourselves, however unsuccessfully, to his discursiveness by making alterations in the order of the poem.  But in this commentary we shall be obliged to leap, like Arabs, from one subject to another.  And so let us begin.

With regard to prayer (quatrain 1), the Moslem is indifferent as to whether he perform this function in his chamber or the street, considering that every spot is equally pure for the service of God.  And yet the Prophet thought that public worship was to be encouraged; it was not a vague opinion, because he knew it was exactly five-and-twenty times more valuable than private prayer.  It is related of al-Muzani that when he missed being present in the mosque he repeated his prayers twenty-five times.  “He was a diver for subtle ideas,” said the biographer Ibn Khallikan.  And although our poet, quoting the Carmathians, here deprecates the common worship, he remarks in one of his letters that he would have gone to mosque on Fridays if he had not fallen victim to an unmentionable complaint. . . .  The pre-Islamic Arabs were accustomed to sacrifice sheep (quatrain 1) and other animals in Mecca and elsewhere, at various stones which were regarded as idols or as altars of the gods.[1] Sometimes they killed a human being, such as the four hundred captive nuns of whom we read that they were sacrificed by al-Mundhir to the goddess Aphrodite.  Sheep are