fessorship in Cairo, learned by heart further enormous quantities of
poetry, and engaged in literary discussions which, judging by a specimen
given in one of his Lives, were even more futile than discussions
usually are.

The vicissitudes of fortune, always noticeably extreme in the East,
brought him again to be kadi at Damascus in 1278, when his reappointment
was signalized by public ceremonies, including the composition by
numberless poets of congratulatory and adulatory verses, which must have
been very dear to his simple old heart, and not the less so because he
may have discovered from his astonishing repertory that not all were
strictly original: such discoveries and the tracing back of the loans to
their fount being the greatest of his pleasures.

Thereafter, until the year 1281, the Kadi lived with much honour, famed
as the most learned and widely-read personage in Damascus, filling his
house with scholars and discursive amateurs of verse, and engaging in
conversations that are described by a friend as "most instructive,
being entirely devoted to learned investigations and the elucidation of
obscure points."

But Ibn Khallikan, who was now nearing three-score years and ten, was
destined still to misfortune, for suddenly, in 1281, he was deposed from
his kadi-ship and, more than that, thrown into prison on the charge of
having made a remark detrimental to the sultan, Kalavun. A pardon soon
after arriving, he was liberated and again reinstated; but after ten
more months as a kadi he was, in 1282, dismissed finally, and this time
he refused ever more to leave his house, and died there in the same
year.

Not a word (you will say) so far as to Baghdad. But although Ibn
Khallikan spent most of his life in Egypt or Syria, the greater number
of his heroes were, as I have said, citizens all of the city of the
romance which recently has fallen to Sir Stanley Maude's gallant forces.
Yet of the romance which we shall always associate with Baghdad he knew
nothing. To him it was delectable (and perhaps even romantic too--each
of us having his own conception of what romance is) because grave
bearded men there taught religion, explained the _Koran_, disputed as
to points of grammar, exchanged sarcasms and swapped verses. Not,
however, as I hope to show, unamusingly.

What indeed I particularly like about the book is the picture that it
gives of sardonic pleasantry and intellectual and sophisticated
virtuosity going quietl