He too frequently displayed a fighting spirit, where tolerance and a willingness to admit of another point of view would have shown to greater advantage. Jámí commenced his education at Herát. He strongly objected to the disciplinary methods of instruction, was not studious as a boy, and preferred games rather than the study of books. But he was naturally clever, naturally quick at absorbing knowledge with a minimum of labour. It is said of him that he used to snatch a book from one of his fellow students while on his way to school and excel them all when they were examined in class. Jámí soon left his instructor Mullá Junaid and became a pupil of Khwájah 'Alí al-Samarqandi. Jámí was so brilliant a scholar that after forty lessons further instruction from his master was quite unnecessary. After attending a series of lectures by Qazí Rúm, at Samarqand, he succeeded in getting the best of an argument with the learned professor who had given the lectures. It might have been expected that the defeat of an older man of letters than Jámí would have produced ill-feeling; but quite the contrary was the case. Qazí Rúm, before a large assembly, described Jámí thus: "Since the building of this city, no one equal, in sharpness of intellects and power of using them, to young Jámí, has ever crossed the Oxus and entered Samarqand." This was high praise indeed; but though it awakens our admiration, the fact that he dispensed with "home-work" while at school, scanned his lessons while walking past the rose-gardens, bettered his instructor in an argument, and in every way shone as a most clever young man, because he simply could not help being anything else, makes him not one whit dearer to our hearts if we expect from him something more than cleverness. Jámí had not that greatness of soul whereby to counteract the deterrent effect his conspicuous success might have upon him. In these early days of too youthful recognition we find Jámí infected with that disease commonly known as "swelled head," from which the poet never recovered. We see him too often as a little tin-god denying, with the exception of his father, all indebtedness to others for his noteworthy erudition--an absurd attitude for any one to take. He remarks: "I have found no master with whom I have read, superior to myself. On the contrary I have invariably found that, in argument, I could defeat them all. I acknowledge, therefore, the obligations of a pupil to his master to none of them; for if I am the pupil of any one, it is of my father who taught me the language." This blatantly conceited attitude is both disappointing and surprising when we remember first, that Jámí was a professed Súfí, the follower of a teaching the tenets of which are the abandonment of self and the knowledge of God only. Second, that Jámí had a very decided sense of humour, strongly in evidence in the "Sixth Garden" of his _Baháristán_, so delightfully entitled: "Blowing of the zephyrs of wit and the