The greatest literary treasure of the Arabs next to the Koran is the _Makāmat_ of Al Hariri. No one of polite scholarship would dare profess ignorance of this great classic, and the reader of these “Assemblies” is introduced to every branch of Mohammedan learning—poetry, history, antiquities, theology and law. Recently Hariri has been translated into English by Chenery and an earlier translation by Preston has also been printed. Stanley Lane-Poole reviewing these translations thus characterizes this Shakespeare of the Arabic world: “It is difficult, no doubt, for most Westerns to appreciate the beauties of this celebrated classic. There is no cohesion, no connecting idea, between the fifty separate ‘Assemblies,’ beyond the regular reappearance of an egregious Tartufe, called Abu-Zeyd, a Bohemian of brilliant parts and absolutely no conscience, who consistently extracts alms from assemblies of people in various cities, by preaching eloquent discourses of the highest piety and morality, and then goes off with his spoils to indulge secretly in triumphant and unhallowed revels. Even in this framework there is no attempt at originality; it is borrowed from Hamadâni, the ‘Wonder of the Age.’ The excellence lies in the perfect finish: the matter is nothing; the charm consists in the form alone. Yet this form is, to English readers, exotic and artificial. Among its special merits, in the eyes of Easterns, is the perpetual employment of rimed prose. To us this is apt to seem at once monotonous and strained, with its antithetic balance in sense, and jingle of sound; but to the Arabs, as to many primitive peoples, either riming or assonant prose was from early times a natural mode of impassioned and impressive speech. It is the mode adopted constantly and without strain in the Koran, and it is the mode into which an historian, such as Ibn-el-Athîr, falls naturally when he waxes eloquent over a great victory or a famous deed.... “But if we do not care for rimed prose, there is plenty besides in Hariri to minister to varied tastes. In these wonderful ‘Assemblies,’ we shall find every kind of literary form, except the shambling and the vulgar. Pagan rhetoric, Moslem exhortation, simple verse, elaborate ode, everything that the immeasurable flexibility of the Arabic tongue and the curious art of a fastidious scholar could achieve—all is here, and we may take our choice.”