Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/379

345 to which they, like their compeers of the West, in all probability owed their ruin, i.e. the generous magnanimity and high-souled mansuetude, which led them to regard with heroic indifference the miserable plots of the enviers and calumniators, the assassins and intrigants, the “fishers in troubled water,” the Fezl ben Rebyas and Mohammed ibn Abi Leiths, the Cassii and Cascæ, the Gambettas and Rocheforts, the professional seditionists and Bulgarian-Atrocity-mongers of their time, and forbade them to crush, by severe but just and necessary measures of repression, which, timely employed, might probably have preserved them for the general benefit of humanity, the dastardly intrigues which resulted in their destruction.

Uniformly gifted as were the four sons of Yehya, Jaafer appears to have surpassed his brothers in mental power and accomplishments, whilst in no way yielding to them in all the virtues and nobilities for which they were