“She partly is to blame who has been tried; He comes too near who comes to be denied.” [p.95]The evil of this system is that they, like certain Southerns—pensano sempre al male—always suspect, which may be worldly-wise, and also always show their suspicions, which is assuredly foolish. For thus they demoralise their women, who might be kept in the way of right by self-respect and by a sense of duty. From ancient periods of the Arab’s history we find him practising knight-errantry, the wildest form of chivalry.[FN#27] “The Songs of Antar,” says the author of the “Crescent and the Cross,” “show little of the true chivalric spirit.” What thinks the reader of sentiments like these[FN#28]? “This valiant man,” remarks Antar (who was “ever interested for the weaker sex,”) “hath defended the honour of women.” We read in another place, “Mercy, my lord, is the noblest quality of the noble.” Again, “it is the most ignominious of deeds to take free-born women prisoners.” “Bear not malice, O Shibub,” quoth the hero, “for of malice good never came.” Is there no true greatness in this sentiment?—“Birth is the boast of the faineant; noble is the youth who beareth every ill, who clotheth himself in mail during the noontide heat, and who wandereth through the outer darkness of night.” And why does the “knight of knights” love Ibla? Because “she is blooming as the sun at dawn, with hair black as the midnight shades, with Paradise in her eye, her bosom an enchantment, and a form waving like the tamarisk when the soft wind blows from the hills of Nijd”? Yes! but his chest expands also with the thoughts of her “faith, purity, and affection,”—it is her moral as well as her material excellence that makes her [p.96] the hero’s “hope, and hearing, and sight.” Briefly, in Antar I discern “a love exalted high, By all the glow of chivalry;” and I lament to see so many intelligent travellers misjudging the Arab after a superficial experience of a few debased Syrians or Sinaites. The true children of Antar, my Lord Lindsay, have not “ceased to be gentlemen.” In the days of ignorance, it was the custom for Badawin, when tormented by the tender passion, which seems to have attacked them in the form of “possession,” for long years to sigh and wail and wander, doing the most truculent deeds to melt the obdurate fair. When Arabia Islamized, the practice changed its element for proselytism.