Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 8.djvu/173

 12 s. vm. FEB. 12, i92i.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 139 LEIGH HUNT (12 S. viii. 91 ). The ' Dirge does not appear in the later (3 vol.) edition (1901-3) of 'Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English Literature.' H. M. CHARTERS MACPHERSON. Oxford and Cambridge Club, Pall Mall, S.W.I AUTHOR OF QUOTATION WANTED. (12 S. viii. 91.) In reply to L.H.P., the first quotation " My hold of the colonies," &c. is from Burke's famous speech on the American question. It is wel worth study to-day G. A. H. SAMUEL, Cadet Major (ret.). 0n Studies in Islamic Poetry. By Reynold Alleyne Nicholson. (Cambridge University Press, 1 6s. net.) DR. NICHOLSON, in his Preface, tells us that these Studies, written during the war, grew out of a wish to impart some things he had enjoyed in Arabic and Persian not only to fellow-students but also to others who, without being specialists, are interested in the literature and philosophy of the East. We should like to extend the range of his appeal. His work, we hope, will serve to arouse interest in readers to whom Arabic and Persian literature have so far been a closed book. When one considers how old, and widely ramified, and deep-penetrating, is the connection between England and the East it is curious how tittle present to the ordinary cultivated Englishman are Eastern letters and Eastern thought. Their existence, just beyond his visible horizon, is known : but they cannot be said in more than a few cases even to form an indistinct background uiioii any quarter of it. This is doubly to be regretted first, because whatever is not thus within the horizon of the average educated person, will fail to be really operative in national opinion .end action; and secondly, because Oriental litera- ture illustrates the human spirit in a manner that we cannot properly afford to ignore, whether we seek letters for enjoyment or for instruction. To those who either know nothing of the subject, or whose ideas upon it have been merely filtered t' them through Western romantic versions of Eastern story in verse or prose, this book may be emphatically recommended. The first chapter is a study of the most ancient ! literary compilation in Persian, the ' Lubab ' i'rof. Browne, was pxiblished in 1903-1906. The '"mpiler flourished in the latter half of the twelfth century appearing to us but a vague re, yet of true Oriental lineaments. He came in>m Bukhara, lived as a wandering scholar, and travelling into India played his part at the courts of Xasiru'ddin Qubacha of Sind, and then of lUtatmish. The ' Lubab ' is valuable almost solely as an inthology though it cor tains also notices and lyrics of poets, and what the writer intended hould count as history and biography. As an inthology it is a perfect treasure-house wherein ,are to be found, ranged in chronological order,- specimens of the work of poets belonging to five dynasties and covering a period of about four hundred years (A.D. 820-c. 1220). The poems fall into four main types of which the ghozal and the quatrain will probably awake old echoes in most readers' minds. A* certain number of the latter love poems and mystical 1 pieces are not merely interesting, but beautiful* and worth making a permanent possession. Dr.- Nicholson's renderings are deft and happy best perhaps, in epigram, but meritorious also hi' longer pieces by a certain slight but well-calculated 1 ' aloofness from the tone of ordinary English verse ,- echoing, thus, as nearly as is possible, the original untranslatable tone. In general, the level of the work as poetry is not actually of the highest, and Dr. Nicholson, to make the account true and complete, has included some examples of worth- less and fulsome panegyric. The qasido the form of verse largely employed for panegyric is, in its rhyming system, of a hopeless difficulty in English. The opening couplet rhymes and this rhyme has to be repeated at the end of the second hemistich of each succeeding couplet throughout the poem. Dr. Nicholson has con- trived to give a short English illustration. A work of greater interest both as to matter and as to form is dealt with in the second chapter- on the ' Meditations ' of Ma'arri. Ma'arri him- self, whether he kindle indignation or sympathy,- arrests the imagination. Blind from his child- hood, as a consequence of small-pox, he spent the first years of his youth in strenuous study iri the chief towns of Syria, and the next fifteen years in work and poverty at Ma'arra, his native^' town. Then, having made such a reputation for learning as would ensure his honourable reception in the great city, he journeyed to Baghdad to try his fortune there. He met with praise, indeed, but with so little support that after a sojourn of but eighteen months, he returned to Syria bitter at heart, and having his bent towards pessimism confirmed by the rankling of injured pride. For about fifty years he lived in retirement, but a retirement in which he not only worked out his great poem the ' Luziuniyyat,' but likewise dictated many works on learned ubjects and taught a throng of scholars. Dr. Nicholson gives a detailed and lucid account of the metres used in the ' Luzi'imiyyat.' Illus- tration of these in English cannot be attempted so far as rhyme is concerned, but, rhyme being aban- doned, we are supplied with examples of the schemes of the four principal metres hi English, and also what is still better for the purpose, since the metres are quantitative in Latin. He gives 332 excerpts from the work, some in unrhymed verse of the form of the original, others n ordinary English metres rhymed or unrhymed. EEere, again, he is to be congratulated on having achieved considerable success. Ma'arri, in these versions, we speak of the cumulative impression made by a careful reading of all that is given lere appears in a sufficiently true reflection of limself, as a poet, but a poet whose depth of hough t and amazing skill lack the last touch >f genius which fuses and irradiates ; as a thinker,- mt one whose pre-occupation with poetry of peat technical difficulty, has deflected his mind rom the highest or central way of pure philo- sophy.
 * of Muhammad 'Awfi, of which the text, edited by