the worship of Venus and other heavenly bodies. We are told by
ash-Shahrastani, in his _Book of Religious and Philosophical
Sects_, that the Indians hold Saturn for the greatest luck, on
account of his height and the size of his body. But such was not
Abu'l-Ala's opinion. "As numb as Saturn," he writes in one of his
letters,[3] "and as dumb as a crab has every one been struck by
you." Elsewhere he says in verse:

If dark the night, old Saturn is a flash
Of eyes which threaten from a face of ash.

And the worship of Saturn, with other deities, is about a hundred
years later resented by Clotilda, says Gregory of Tours, when she
is moving Chlodovich her husband to have their son baptized. When
the little boy dies soon after baptism, the husband does not fail
to draw a moral. But misfortunes, in the language of an Arab
poet, cling about the wretched even as a coat of mail (_quatrain_
6) is on the warrior. This image was a favourite among the Arabs,
and when Ibn Khallikan wants to praise the verses of one As Suli,
he informs us that they have the reputation of delivering from
sudden evil any person who recites them frequently. When this
evil is complete, with rings strongly riven, it passes away while
he thinks that nothing can dispel it. . . . We have mention in
this quatrain of a winding-sheet, and that could be of linen or
of damask. The Caliph Solaiman was so fond of damask that every
one, even the cook, was forced to wear it in his presence, and it
clothed him in the grave. Yet he, like other Moslems (_quatrain_
10), would believe that he must undergo the fate recorded in a
book. The expression that a man's destiny is written on his
forehead, had its origin without a doubt, says Goldziher, in
India. We have remarked upon the Indian ideas which had been
gathered by Abu'l-Ala at Baghdad. There it was that he enjoyed
the opportunity of seeing ships (_quatrain_ 11). He spent a
portion of his youth beside the sea, at Tripoli. But in the
capital were many boats whose fascination he would not resist,--
the Chinese junks laboriously dragged up from Bassora, and dainty
gondolas of basket-work covered with asphalt.[4] However, though
in this place and in others, very frequently, in fact, Abu'l-Ala
makes mention of the sea, his fondness of it was, one thinks, for
literary purposes. He writes a letter to explain how grieved he
is to hear about a friend who purposes to risk himself upon the
sea, and he recalls a certain vers