They have gotten of me a roasting--I tire not Of desiring them till me they desire not. First, of foemen's blood my spear deeply drinketh, Then a second time, deep in, it sinketh. Lawful now to me is wine, long forbidden: Sore my struggle ere the ban was o'erridden.[199] Pour me wine, O son of ‘Amr! I would taste it, Since with grief for mine uncle I am wasted. O'er the fallen of Hudhayl stands screaming The hyena; see the wolf's teeth gleaming! Dawn will hear the flap of wings, will discover Vultures treading corpses, too gorged to hover." [Sidenote: Honour conferred by noble ancestry.] All the virtues which enter into the Arabian conception of Honour were regarded not as personal qualities inherent or acquired, but as hereditary possessions which a man derived from his ancestors, and held in trust that he might transmit them untarnished to his descendants. It is the desire to uphold and emulate the fame of his forbears, rather than the hope of winning immortality for himself, that causes the Arab "to say the say and do the deeds of the noble." Far from sharing the sentiment of the Scots peasant--"a man's a man for a' that"--he looks askance at merit and renown unconsecrated by tradition. "The glories that have grown up with the grass Can match not those inherited of old."[200] Ancestral renown (_ḥasab_) is sometimes likened to a strong castle built by sires for their sons, or to a lofty mountain which defies attack.[201] The poets are full of boastings (_mafákhir_) and revilings (_mathálib_) in which they loudly proclaim the nobility of their own ancestors, and try to blacken those of their enemy without any regard to decorum. It was my intention to add here some general remarks on Arabian poetry as compared with that of the Hebrews, the Persians, and our own, but since example is better than precept I will now turn directly to those celebrated odes which are well known by the title of _Mu‘-allaqát_, or 'Suspended Poems,' to all who take the slightest interest in Arabic literature.[202] [Sidenote: The Mu‘allaqát, or 'Suspended Poems.']