(_ββ_) The Arabs have always possessed a poetic nature, and from very early days we find genuine poets among them. Even their heroic songs of lyric narrative, styled the moallakat, which in part originate in the century immediately previous to Mahomet, depict either with a few bold and detached strokes and vehement ostentation, or at other times with more tranquil self-possession, or a melting softness, the original conditions of the still pagan Arabs. Here we find the honour of the clan, the passion of revenge, the rights of hospitality, love, delight in adventure, benevolence, sorrow, and yearning, in undiminished strength, and in traits which remind us of the romantic character of Spanish chivalry. Here, too, we meet with in the East for the first time a real poetry, without fantastic elements, or prose, without mythology, without gods, demons, fairies, genii, and everything else of the kind common to the East, but rather with solid and self-sufficient characters and, however unique and marvellous in the play of its images and similes, yet for all that humanly real and self-contained. We have the vision of a similar pagan world also set before us by a later age in the collected poems of Hamasa, as also in the not yet edited "Divans of the Hudsilites." After the extensive and successful conquests of the Mohammedan Arabs this primitive heroic character gradually disappears; and, in the course of the centuries, the province of Epic poetry is replaced in part by the instructive fable and the witty proverb, in part by the fairy-like narratives, of which the "Thousand and One Nights" is an example, or in those tales of adventures which Rückert, through a translation which reproduces for us the equally witty and artistically elaborate Macamen of the Hariri in their metre, rhymes, and articulate meaning, has unveiled in a manner deserving thoughtful attention.