Few of the children of the Arabs receive much instruction in literature, and still fewer are taught even the rudiments of any of the higher sciences; but there are numerous schools in their towns, and one at least in almost every moderately large village. The former are mostly attached to mosques and other public buildings, and, together with those buildings, are endowed by princes or other men of rank, or wealthy tradesmen. In these the children are instructed either gratis or for a very trifling weekly payment, which all parents save those in indigent circumstances can easily afford. The schoolmaster generally teaches nothing more than to read, and to recite by heart the whole of the Ḳur-án. After committing to memory the first chapter of the sacred volume, the boy learns the rest in the inverse order of their arrangement, as they generally decrease in length (the longest coming first, and the shortest at the end). Writing and arithmetic are usually taught by another master; and grammar, rhetoric, versification, logic, the interpretation of the Ḳur-án, and the whole system of religion and law, with all other knowledge deemed useful, which seldom includes the mere elements of mathematics, are attained by studying at a collegiate mosque, and at no expense; for the professors receive no pay either from the students, who are mostly of the poorer classes, or from the funds of the mosque. The wealthy often employ for their sons a private tutor; and when he has taught them to read, and to recite the Ḳur-án, engage for them a writing-master, and then send them to the college. But among this class, polite literature is more considered than any other branch of knowledge, after religion. Such an acquaintance with the works of some of their favourite poets as enables a man to quote them occasionally in company, is regarded by the Arabs as essential to a son who is to mix in good society; and to this acquirement is often added some skill in the art of versification, which is rendered peculiarly easy by the copiousness of the Arabic language and by its system of inflexion. These characteristics of their noble tongue (which are remarkably exhibited by the custom, common among the Arabs, of preserving the same rhyme throughout a whole poem), while on the one hand they have given an admirable freedom to the compositions of men of true poetic genius, have on the other hand mainly contributed to the degradation of Arabic poetry. To an Arab of some little learning it is almost as easy to speak in verse as in prose; and hence he often intersperses his prose writings, and not unfrequently his conversation, with indifferent verses, of which the chief merit generally consists in puns or in an ingenious use of several words nearly the same in sound but differing in sense. This custom is frequently exemplified in the "Thousand and One Nights," where a person suddenly changes the style of his speech from prose to verse, and then reverts to the former.