And yet the old spirit was gradually losing ground. The consolidation of the empire brought greater security; the riches of Persia and Syria produced new types of men. The centre of Arab life was now in the city, with all its trammels, its forced politeness, its herding together. The simplicity which characterized the early caliphs was going; in its place was come a court,--court life, court manners, court poets. The love of poetry was still there; but the poet of the tent had become the poet of the house and the palace. Like those troubadours who had become jongleurs, they lived upon the crumbs which fell from the table of princes. Such crumbs were often not to be despised. Many a time and oft the bard tuned his lyre merely for the price of his services. We know that he was richly rewarded. Harún gave a dress worth four hundred thousand pieces of gold to Já'far ibn Yahya; at his death, Ibn 'Ubeid al-Buchtarí (865) left one hundred complete suits of dress, two hundred shirts, and five hundred turbans--all of which had been given him for his poems. The freshness of olden times was fading little by little; the earnestness of the Bedouin poet was making way for a lightness of heart. In this intermediate period, few were born so happily, and yet so imbued with the new spirit, as was 'Umar ibn 'Rabí'a (644), "the man of pleasure as well as the man of literature." Of rich parentage, gifted with a love of song which moved him to speak in verses, he was able to keep himself far from both prince and palace. He was of the family of Kureísh, in whose Muhammad all the glories of Arabia had centred, with one exception,--the gift of poetry. And now "this Don Juan of Mecca, this Ovid of Arabia," was to wipe away that stain. He was the Arabian Minnesinger, whom Friedrich Rückert called "the greatest love-poet the Arabs have produced." A man of the city, the desert had no attractions for him. But he sang of love as he made love,--with utter disregard of holy place or high station, in an erotic strain strange to the stern Umáyyids. No wonder they warned their children against reading his compositions. "The greatest sin committed against Allah are the poems of 'Umar ibn Rabí'a," they said.