spoils of the East soon changed them to splendid cities where luxury and learning fluorished side by side.  Sprenger (Al-Mas’udi pp. 19, 177) compares them ecclesiastically with the primitive Christian Churches such as Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch.  But the Moslems were animated with an ardent love of liberty and Kufah under Al-Hajjaj the masterful, lost 100,000 of her turbulent sons without the thirst for independence being quenched.  This can hardly be said of the Early Christians who, with the exception of a few staunch-hearted martyrs, appear in history as pauvres diables and poules mouillees, ever oppressed by their own most ignorant and harmful fancy that the world was about to end.

[FN#458] i.e.  Waiting to be sold and wasting away in single cursedness.

[FN#459] Arab.  “Ya dadati”:  dadat is an old servant-woman or slave, often applied to a nurse, like its congener the Pers.  Dada, the latter often pronounced Daddeh, as Daddeh Bazm-ara in the Kuisum-nameh (Atkinson’s “Customs of the Women of Persia,” London, 8vo, 1832).

[FN#460] Marjanah has been already explained.  D’Herbelot derives from it the Romance name Morgante la Deconvenue, here confounding Morgana with Urganda; and Keltic scholars make Morgain = Mor Gwynn-the white maid (p. 10, Keightley’s Fairy Mythology, London, Whittaker, 1833).