"Who are these Arabian vagabonds" (_ṣa‘álíku ’l-‘Arab_), he asked, "and what worth have they?"[521] [Sidenote: Critics in favour of the modern school.] While Ibn Qutayba was content to urge that the modern poets should get a fair hearing, and should be judged not chronologically or philologically, but _æsthetically_, some of the greatest literary critics who came after him do not conceal their opinion that the new poetry is superior to the old. Tha‘álibí († 1038 A.D.) asserts that in tenderness and elegance the Pre-islamic bards are surpassed by their successors, and that both alike have been eclipsed by his contemporaries. Ibn Rashíq († _circa_ 1070 A.D.), whose _‘Umda_ on the Art of Poetry is described by Ibn Khaldún as an epoch-making work, thought that the superiority of the moderns would be acknowledged if they discarded the obsolete conventions of the Ode. European readers cannot but sympathise with him when he bids the poets draw inspiration from nature and truth instead of relating imaginary journeys on a camel which they never owned, through deserts which they never saw, to a patron residing in the same city as themselves. This seems to us a very reasonable and necessary protest, but it must be remembered that the Bedouin _qaṣída_ was not easily adaptable to the conditions of urban life, and needed complete remoulding rather than modification in detail.[522] [Sidenote: Popularity of the modern poets.] "In the fifth century," says Goldziher--_i.e._, from about 1000 A.D.--"the dogma of the unattainable perfection of the heathen poets may be regarded as utterly demolished." Henceforth popular taste ran strongly in the other direction, as is shown by the immense preponderance of modern pieces in the anthologies--a favourite and characteristic branch of Arabic literature--which were compiled during the ‘Abbásid period and afterwards, and by frequent complaints of the neglect into which the ancient poetry had fallen. But although, for Moslems generally, Imru’u ’l-Qays and his fellows came to be more or less what Chaucer is to the average Englishman, the views first enunciated by Ibn Qutayba met with bitter opposition from the learned class, many of whom clung obstinately to the old philological principles of criticism, and even declined to recognise the writings of Mutanabbí and Abu ’l-‘Alá al-Ma‘arrí as poetry, on the ground that those authors did not observe the classical 'types' (_asálíb_).[523] The result of such pedantry may be seen at the present day in thousands of _qaṣídas_, abounding in archaisms and allusions to forgotten far-off things of merely antiquarian interest, but possessing no more claim to consideration here than the Greek and Latin verses of British scholars in a literary history of the Victorian Age. [Sidenote: Characteristics of the new poetry.]