Much of Persian poetry is conventional, and the demarcation in style, due to the various phases of Persian history, is not as pronounced as might be expected. The Persian poets not only conservatively followed old metres, but old similes, old subjects as well. It was with words they were most concerned, and not with ideas. The _Lover's Companion_ of Sharafu'd-Dín Rámí is sufficient to prove this. The book contains a very large number of similes on the various parts of the body. This was intended to be a _vade mecum_ to the writer of erotic poetry. Professor Brown defends this conservatism and remarks that it has "guarded the Persian language from the vulgarisation which the triumph of an untrained, untrammelled, and unconventional genius of the barbaric-degenerate type tends to produce in our own and other European tongues." [Footnote 1: See _The Prosody of the Persians_. By H. Blockmann, Calcutta, 1872.] End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Jalálu'd-dín Rúmí, by Frederick Hadland Davis and Jalálu'd-dín Rúmí