extracts from the long Legend of Noble Women. I have illustrated their keen sense of honour and loyalty, but I might equally well have chosen examples of gracious dignity and quick intelligence and passionate affection. Many among them had the gift of poetry, which they bestowed especially on the dead; it is a final proof of the high character and position of women in Pre-islamic Arabia that the hero's mother and sisters were deemed most worthy to mourn and praise him. The praise of living women by their lovers necessarily takes a different tone; the physical charms of the heroine are fully described, but we seldom find any appreciation of moral beauty. One notable exception to this rule occurs at the beginning of an ode by Shanfará. The passage defies translation. It is, to quote Sir Charles Lyall, with whose faithful and sympathetic rendering of the ancient poetry every student of Arabic literature should be acquainted, "the most lovely picture of womanhood which heathen Arabia has left us, drawn by the same hand that has given us, in the unrivalled _Lâmîyah_, its highest ideal of heroic hardness and virile strength."[177] UMAYMA. "She charmed me, veiling bashfully her face, Keeping with quiet looks an even pace; Some lost thing seem to seek her downcast eyes: Aside she bends not--softly she replies. Ere dawn she carries forth her meal--a gift To hungry wives in days of dearth and thrift. No breath of blame up to her tent is borne, While many a neighbour's is the house of scorn. Her husband fears no gossip fraught with shame, For pure and holy is Umayma's name. Joy of his heart, to her he need not say When evening brings him home--'Where passed the day?' Slender and full in turn, of perfect height, A very fay were she, if beauty might Transform a child of earth into a fairy sprite!"[178] Only in the freedom of the desert could the character thus exquisitely delineated bloom and ripen. These verses, taken by themselves, are a sufficient answer to any one who would maintain that Islam has increased the social influence of Arabian women, although in some respects it may have raised them to a higher level of civilisation.[179] [Sidenote: Infanticide.] There is, of course, another side to all this. In a land where might was generally right, and where "the simple plan That he should take who has the power And he should keep who can,"