Did I say to you that our country is destined to mourning? That will become true when an unjust sovereign rules. Tyranny is heavier than the horse's hoofs, more destructive than the unchained torrents, more deadly than the poisoned winds of Yemen, more devastating than the plague. Tyranny prevents prayers rising to heaven and prevents the blessings of heaven from falling upon the earth. Flee far from the abode of this menace, even if you are one of the highest nobles of the land, the most illustrious because of your wealth and your children. Fear lest the birds of ruin fatten on the land, and earthquakes or lightnings destroy its inhabitants. III Do not pride yourself on the nobility of your birth, for that belongs to your father; join to your hereditary virtues those which you have acquired recently. By this union you will be truly noble. Do not feel elated over the nobility of your father, if you can not draw pride from that which is in yourself; for the glory of your ancestors is vain if you have not a personal glory. There is the same difference between the fame of your ancestors and your own fame that there is between your food of yesterday and of to-day; for the feast that has passed can not calm the hunger of to-day, and still less can it provide for the days which follow. ARABIC LITERATURE THE "ASSEMBLIES" OF AL HARIRI "_The richness of the style is even more wonderful than the delicate web of the stories._" CLEMENT HUART. "_I composed fifty assemblies, comprising the serious in language and the lively, the delicate and the dignified, the brilliancies of eloquence and its pearls, the beauties of scholarship and its rarities._" AL HARIRI. THE "ASSEMBLIES" OF AL HARIRI (INTRODUCTION) The work of Al Hariri may well stand as our best example of typical Arab prose. With regard to religious writing, a few thoughtful Mohammedans, as we have seen, might travel, and seek new light, and meditate profoundly; but the great mass of the people were merely blindly fanatic. Mohammed was the prophet of God, and any one who failed to shout this with the rest of the world, was to be killed. Popular interest went but little further. But when you turned to the art of stringing words together, every true Arab was immediately attentive. There was an Arab proverb that God had given genius, or true creative ability, to three things, the brain of the Frank, the hand of the Chinaman, and the tongue of the Arab.