Page:The Celebrated Romance of the Stealing of the Mare.djvu/11

 code of honour in war; even the coats of mail-armour, and the heraldic bearings, which last may perhaps be traced to the *^wusms" or family brands used in Arab tribes for the marking of their camels. Again, the feudalism of the middle ages was Arabian; the union of the temporal with the spiritual authority in politics; and in literature, the purely Semitic form of rhymed verse, as distinguished from the classic scansion and the unrhymed sagas of Europe. The romantic cycle of Abu Zeyd may very well have been known to the first singers of the cycle of Charlemagne and King Arthur, and have suggested to them their method.

Hardly less interesting is the picture given in the poem in question of Arab life and ideas, a picture naive in its fidelity to the African form of Arabian" thought. The hero, Salame Abu Zeyd, is the exact type of the North African Bedouin even of our own day, with his strange mixture of scepticism and superstition, of courage and cowardice, of truth and deceit, of romance and calculation. The particular episode of the "Stealing of the Mare" gives these last characteristics with peculiar vividness, and for that reason and for the liveliness of the plot and the individuality of the characters was chosen by the translators in preference to any other for a first attempt to introduce the poem to English notice.

It is strange that no translation of so remarkable an epic should have been hitherto made (so the present translators believe) into any European language. But the truth probably is that European scholars have been