If any thing can give me pleasure, it is the information which you give me, that my employers are contented with me, and I beg you to assure them, that as long as I shall have the honour to be in their service, no efforts shall be left untried by me to deserve their approbation. I fully appreciate the permission they have given me, to pass so long a time out of the intended direction of my labours. If some credit be due to me for the manner in which I have spent this time, no less is due to their liberality, in affording me the means of applying my exertions to countries and subjects, that fell not within the immediate scope of my mission; although I flatter myself, that the purposes of the latter were at the same time considerably advanced. It affords me much satisfaction to understand that what I have written on the Bedouins has been found of interest. My last additions to those papers, which complete all the information I possess on that nation, have perhaps not reached you. I have illustrated their manners, laws, and character, with much pleasure, because I hold them to be infinitely superior to their neighbours the Turks. They have happily escaped the corruption of Levantine manners and morals, and this alone entitles them to the attention of the European public, although few travellers have thought them worth noticing, otherwise than as a nation of bloody, savage, and faithless robbers. When you ask me whether I know Antar, you probably forget that the first knowledge I gained of that author, was from an odd volume in your own library.[14] I fully agree with you in your sentiments concerning it; it has certainly every characteristic of an epic poem; it is throughout of high interest, and often sublime. I have attentively read little more than one twelfth part of it; the copy I bought at Aleppo is among the MSS. which I sent to England from Syria. Its style is very remarkable; without descending to the tone of common conversation, as the One Thousand and one Nights often do, it is simple, and natural, and clear of that bombast, and those forced expressions, and far-fetched metaphors, which the Orientals admire even in their prosaists, but which can never be to the taste of an European critic. The poetry appears almost every where to be the effusion of real sentiment, and the heroic strain of Antar’s war and love songs, his satires and bursts of self-praise, are as exalted as they are natural. You are no doubt informed that this same Antar was one of the poets of the Moallakat, and that Osmay, who relates his life in this work, occupied a high rank among the poets at the court of Haroun er-Rashid, and his son Mamoun. I believe Sir William Jones was the first to call the attention of the public to this romantic poem, in his Comment. Poes. Asiat. He possessed only one or two volumes of it, yet enough to convince him of the excellence of the whole performance, of which he speaks in terms of the highest praise.