The unbridled license of the Arabian poet offers a curious commentary on national manners. The most exalted dignity, the sacred attributes of the gods, the pride of opulence, the delicacy of the sex, were not exempt from the attacks of his venom and sarcasm. He exposed with relentless severity the frailties of the wife and daughters of the sheik. He boasted of his own intrigues with a shameless audacity which, under more refined social conditions, could only be atoned for with blood. The immunity he enjoyed was one of the prerogatives of his calling. A certain sacredness of character was believed to attach to the latter by reason of the demoniac possession to which was popularly attributed the inspiration of the poetic faculty. His verses abounded in chivalrous sentiments, but uniformly ignored the claims of religion to the veneration of mankind. No beautiful mythology, like that of ancient Greece, was at hand to prompt the efforts of his muse. The maxims of the luxurious Epicurean were those that exerted the greatest power over his imagination and his life. An idea may be formed of the influence of poetry. on the public mind when we remember that the Koreish in vain attempted to bribe the pagan bard Ascha to deliver a panegyric on Mohammed at the commencement of the latter’s career, and, unable to secure his compliance, succeeded with much difficulty in purchasing his neutrality and silence at the expense of a hundred camels. The Prophet was so sensitive to the keen thrusts of the satirist, that when Mecca was captured and a general amnesty proclaimed, one of the four unfortunates whom he expressly excluded from this act of clemency was an obscure poet, Habbar-Ibn-Aswad by name, who had published a lampoon against him. The Arabian bard, like his literary descendant the troubadour, was attended by minstrels who chanted his verses, often to the accompaniment of musical instruments. The latter vocation, regarded as degrading by the Bedouin, was always exercised by a slave. Islamism, while in other directions it zealously promoted the intellectual development of its adherents, fell like a blight upon the poetic taste and genius of Arabia. The dreams of the poet disappeared before the stern fanaticism of the soldier, who had no time for rhapsodies, and cared for nothing save indulgence in rapine, the acquisition of empire, and the extension of the Faith.