uished
themselves. Valadata, Aysha, Labana, Safia, and others, have obtained
the highest encomiums.

So great is the number of Arabian poets, that Abul Abbas, a son of
Motassem, who wrote an abridgment of their lives in the ninth century,
numbers one hundred and thirty. Other authors have occupied
twenty-four, thirty, and one no less than fifty volumes, in recording
their history.

The Arabs, however, are entirely without epic poetry, so important a
department of the art; nor have they anything that may be properly
ranked as dramatic composition. Sophocles, Euripides, Terence, and
Seneca, the classic models of Greece and Rome, they despised as timid,
constrained, and cold; and under whatever obligation to these ancient
nations the Arabs may have been in other departments of literature,
they owe them nothing, or next to nothing, in this. Their poetry was
original and local; their figures and comparisons were strictly their
own. To understand and properly appreciate them, we must have a
knowledge of the productions of their country, and of the character,
institutions, and manners of its inhabitants. The muse delights in
illustrations and figures borrowed from pastoral life; that of Judea
revels among the roses of Sharon, the verdant slopes of {253} Carmel,
and the glory of Lebanon; while the Arab muse selects for her ornaments
the pearls of Omar, the musk of Hadramaut, the groves and nightingales
of Aden, and the spicy odours of Yemen. If these appear to us
fantastic, it must be remembered they are borrowed from objects and
scenes to which we are almost utter strangers.

Who is not familiar with the Alif lita wa lilin, or the thousand and
one tales, commonly known as the Arabian Nights' Entertainment? Some
have questioned whether they are an original work, or a translation
from the Indian or Persian, made in the Augustan age of Arab
literature: a doubt certainly not warranted by any want of exactness in
their description of Arabian life and manners. They seem to have been
originally the legends of itinerant story-tellers, a class of persons
still very numerous in every part of the Mohammedan world. The scenes
they unfold, true to nature; the simplicity displayed in their
characters, their beauty and their moral instruction, appeal
irresistibly to the hearts of all; while the learned concede to them
the merit of more perfectly describing the manners of the singular
people from whom they sprung, than the works