The poetry of love comprises, alas! also the poetry of despair. Here is an example by Ibn As-Sarraj, the grammarian: _I compared her beauty with her conduct, and found that her charms did not counterbalance her perfidy. She swore to me never to be false, but 'twas as if she had sworn never to be true. By Allah! I shall never speak to her again, even though she resembled in beauty the full moon, or the sun, or Al-Muktafi!_ The inclusion of the khalif Al-Muktafi seems to have been an afterthought, added when the poet first saw him. Struck by his comeliness, he recited the poem to some companions and inserted his name at the end. The sequel is amusing and very characteristic. "Some time after, the katib Abu Abd Allah Muhammad Ibn Ismail Ibn Zenji repeated the verses to Abu 'l-Abbas Ibn Al-Furat, saying that they were composed by Ibn Al-Motazz, and Abu 'l-Abbas communicated them to the vizier Al-Kasim Ibn Obaid Allah. The latter then went to the khalif and recited the verses to him, adding that they were by Obaid Allah Ibn Abd Allah Ibn Tahir, to whom Al-Muktafi immediately ordered a present of one thousand dinars. "'How very strange,' said Ibi Zenji, 'that Ibn As-Sarraj should compose verses which were to procure a donation to Obaid Allah Ibn Abd Allah Ibn Tahir!'" Abu Bakr Ibn Aiyash, the Traditionist and scholar, discovered a remedy for lovers which is too simple, I fear, to commend itself to less philosophic Occidentals affected by the pains of longing. "I was suffering," he says, "from an anxious desire of meeting one whom I loved, when I called to mind the verse of Zu 'r-Rumma's: _Perhaps a flow of tears will give me ease from pain; perhaps it may cure a heart whose sole companion is sad thoughts._ On this I withdrew to a private place and wept, by which means my sufferings were calmed." XIX.--TO DISARM CRITICS And so we come to an end. And how can an author do better than to quote Ibn Khallikan's own concluding words, which, though written so long ago about a biographical dictionary, may be borrowed by all literary hands as palliation for whatever shortcomings their work may have?--"If any well-informed person remark, in examining this book, that it contains faults, he should not hasten to blame me, for I always aimed at being exact, as far as I could judge; and, besides, God has allowed no book to be faultless except His noble _Koran_." =DIVERSIONS= DIVERSIONS Nurses