It is not pessimism but hope that speaks of the clearer vision to be won hereafter. One need not love this world less because one loves the future world more; belief in continuous growth of the soul is the most optimistic of thoughts. Critics who term Ibn Gebirol a pessimist make the common mistake of confounding despair with earnestness. Your truest optimist may be the most serious of men, just as sorrow may be at its purest, its strongest, in association with hope. BAR HISDAI’S “PRINCE AND DERVISH” The “moral” is a tiresome feature about certain types of allegory; we prefer that a story should tell us its own tale. Why end off with a “moral”? As Dr. Joseph Jacobs wrote in his edition of Caxton’s Aesop (p. 148): “It seems absurd to give your allegory, and then, in addition, the truth which you wish to convey. Either your fable makes its point or it does not. If it does, you need not repeat your point; if it does not, you need not give your fable. To add your point is practically to confess the fear that your fable has not put it with sufficient force.” And yet it seems probable that some of the world’s stories would never have been circulated so widely but for their morals. When, in the thirteenth century, Abraham Bar Hisdai, of Barcelona, produced his _Prince and Dervish_, his motive was not to tell a tale but to point a moral. He had a poor opinion of his age. Little wonder! Among the delectable episodes which he witnessed was the burning of some of the works of Maimonides by monks, instigated thereto by anti-Maimonist Jews. He made his protest. But it was not this experience that predisposed him to castigate his contemporaries. His language, in the preface to his _Prince and Dervish_, is vague. The most definite thing is its grim earnestness. His chance had come. An Arabic book had happened to fall under his notice, and it seemed to him the very thing! So he translated it into Hebrew. And beautiful Hebrew it is. Bar Hisdai was a master of the style known as rhymed prose. With him, however, it is hardly prose; it is poetry. It is not nearly so unmetrical in form as is usual in this genre. There is a lilt about his unrhythms, a regularity not so much of syllables as of stressed phrases; and these are marks of verse. Still it is prose, as one clearly perceives when Bar Hisdai, following the rules of the game, introduces snatches which are professedly poetical. Bar Hisdai, perhaps unfortunately, did more than translate. He considered his original badly arranged, he says; so he re-arranged the material. Possibly, then, he added to it stories taken from other sources. A rather piquant problem, for instance, is presented by the inclusion of a version of the parable of the sower, which in Bar Hisdai’s original must have been drawn from the New Testament. Assuredly Bar Hisdai did not derive it from the latter source directly; we are quite uncertain, however, as to the indirect route by which it reached him.