What graceful forms those envious folds enclose! What melting glances thro’ those curtains play! Sure Weira’s antelopes, or Tudah’s roes Through yonder veils their sportive young survey. The band mov’d on--to trace their steps I strove; I saw them urge the camel’s hastening flight; Till the white [b] vapour, like a rising grove, Snatch’d them for ever from my aching sight. Nor since that morn have I Nawara seen, The hands are burst, which held us once so fast; Memory but tells me that such things have been, And sad reflection adds, that they are past. “The Arabians,” says Mr. Hole, who has written very ingeniously upon the subject of one of the tales in the Arabian Nights, and whom I shall more than once take the liberty of consulting, “are described by writers, who have personally visited them, as an acute and sensible people, and this performance, (the present work) was probably composed not many centuries after that period, when they had added to their native stores of education, those of ancient Greece. To them we are chiefly indebted for the preservation of those valuable remains of antiquity: and so fully established was their literary reputation in former days, that, when Europe was immersed in barbarism, all polite learning passed under the designation of _Studia Arabum_.” (Vide Blackwall’s Letters on Mythology.) “In the eighth, ninth, and succeeding centuries, when the European world, (says Mr. Richardson, in the preface to his Arabic Grammar) was clouded with barbarity and ignorance; when sovereign princes and great feudal lords could neither write nor read, the Arabians rivalled the Romans of the Augustan age in erudition and genius; whilst, with a more extensive empire, [c] they excelled them in magnificence, and in the more refined splendour and elegance of life. The khalifs Al Modhi, Al Rashid, Al Mamoun, and other monarchs of the illustrious house of Al Abbas, were men of learning, genius, and politeness; learning and genius were found therefore the surest avenues to royal favor; they were consequently universally cultivated; princes, generals, and viziers being not only munificent patrons of literary merit, but holding themselves a conspicuous rank among writers of the most distinguished class.