Discreet and loving; not one gift on earth
Makes a man's life so highly bound to heaven;
She gives him double forces, to endure
And to enjoy; by being one with him,

Feeling his joies and griefes with equal sense;
And, like the twins Hippocrates reports,

If he fetch sighs, she drawes her breath as short:

If he lament, she melts herself in teares :

If he be glad, she triumphs; if he stirre,

She mooves his way; in all things his sweet ape:
And is in alterations passing strange :

Himselfe divinely varied without change.

Gold is right pretious; but his price infects

With pride and avarice; authority lifts

Hats from men's heads; and bows the strongest knees,

Yet cannot bend in rule the weakest hearts;

Musick delights but one sense; nor choice meats;
One quickly fades, the other stir to sinne;
But a true wife, both sense and soule delights,
And mixeth not her good with any ill;
Her virtues ruling hearts, all powers command;
All store without her, leavés a man but poore;
And with her, povertie is exceeding store;
No time is tedious with her, her true worth
Makes a true husband thinke his armes enfold
(With her alone) a compleate worlde of gold."

We shall now take leave of Chapman until our next number, when we propose to treat of the plays which he wrote in conjunction with Jonson, Shirley, and others; and we shall then have an opportunity of discussing his dramatic talents at greater length.

ART. XI.-The Moállakát, or Seven Arabian Poems, which were suspended on the Temple of Mecca; with a Translation and Arguments. By Sir William Jones. 4to. 1782.

The Arabic language was brought to its greatest perfection at the commencement of the seventh century, by the efforts of a poetical academy that used to assemble at Ocadh, where the candidates for fame produced their compositions, the best of which were transcribed in characters of gold upon

Egyptian paper and hung up in the temple at Mecca, on which account they were called Modhahebát, or Golden, and Moâllakát, or Suspended: of these poems, the seven at the head of this article, which are usually found united in the same manuscript, are considered the best that were written before the time of Mahomet they were printed, in Roman characters, by Sir William Jones, in 1782, with a prose version or rather paraphrase taken from the commentaries of the grammarians; they consist of Eclogues of a dramatic cast, in regular metres, embracing all the circumstances of an Arab's life, in which the female sex, then the companions, and not, as under the Prophet's system, the slaves of man, form the principal object. We propose in the present article to translate a few passages from each of these seven compositions, as specimens of the poetical talents of the Arabians.

Amriolkais, the first in order, was of the royal blood of one of the tribes. The opening of the poem represents him on a journey attended by a company of friends-they pass the place where his mistress formerly dwelt-he stops on the now deserted spot, and exclaims,

"Stay!-Let us weep while memory tries to trace,
The long lost fair one's sand-girt dwelling place;
Though the rude winds have swept the sandy plain,
Still some faint traces of that spot remain.
My comrades reined their coursers by my side,
And, yield not, yield not to despair, they cried,
(Tears were my sole reply; yet what avail
Tears shed on sands or sighs upon the gale?)
The same thy fortune and thy tears the same,
When bright Howaira and Rebaba came

To say farewell, on Mósel's swelling brow,

And left thee mourning, as thou mournest now!

Think ye, ah! think ye, I forget the day,

That tore those damsels from

my soul away,

Who breathed a farewell, as they left these bowers,
Sweet as an eastern gale on fields of flowers."

He relates his adventures,-his courtship of Fathima, and his more dangerous amour with a girl of a tribe at war with his own, whose beauties he very minutely and luxuriantly delineates.

"Once through the ranks, at midnight's gloomy hour,
Of hostile tribes, I sought the maiden's bower,

When shone the pleiads in the starry globe,
Like golden spangles on an azure robe.
Soon as I came, I saw her figure bent,
In eager gazing from the opening tent.
By heaven! she whispered as her hand she gave,
Secure, I'll trust me to a heart so brave;
We rose, and gliding o'er the silent plain,
She swept our footsteps with her flowing train.
A plain we reached beneath the cloud of night,
Whose sandy hillocks hid our onward flight
Safe from the foeman. By her waving hair,
To my fond heart I drew the trembling fair:
Raptured I gazed upon her polished breast,
Smooth as a mirror set within her vest,
Or like an ostrich-egg of pearly white,
Left in the sands and half exposed to sight.
The timid maiden turned away her face,
With eyes averted shunned my rude embrace,
Raised her arched neck in conscious virtue's pride,
Then like the wild fawn gazed from side to side.
Her jet black tresses down her shoulders strayed,
Like clustering dates amidst the palm-trees' shade."

From these love-tales he proceeds to the commendation of bis own fortitude in the frequent and perilous expeditions, which his enterprise prompted him to make across the desert. His constant liability in these solitudes to be overtaken by darkness, gives occasion to a description of night.

"Oft did the night her misty horrors roll,
Like ocean's billows, o'er my anxious soul,
And as her form, without or pause or haste,
In sullen grandeur stalked the sandy waste,
I cried, To morning yield thy hated sway,
Yet safety comes not with the coming day;
Then, night, rule on, while hid the stars remain,

Chain'd to the rocks that bound thy vast domain.”

The narrative of his adventures is interrupted by a storm of lightning; his companions retire, and the drama concludes.

The poem of Amriolkais is easy, sprightly and elegant; that of Tarafa, the next in order, is in a more bold and youthful strain. This young poet, who, at the early age of twentysix, fell the victim of his love of satire, which he had indulged

at the expense of the king of his tribe, appears, from the poem before us, to have been remarkable for the ardour and unguardedness of his character. He and his brother jointly possessed a herd of camels, which they watched alternately, lest they should be carried off by a tribe at war with their own. The poet's negligence, however, enabled the enemy to seize the herd, while he was immersed in poetic meditation; and on being sarcastically asked by his brother, whether the camels could be restored by his poetry, he departed to solicit the aid of a kinsman. Instead of granting it, his kinsman rebuked him with acrimony for his remissness in this instance, and for his general prodigality, libertinism, and spirit of contention. Tarafa produced this poem in vindication of his character and conduct, which he boldly justifies in every respect, and even claims praise for the very course of life which had exposed him to censure.

He begins, according to custom, with descriptions of his absent mistress and of his camel, the latter of which is long and tiresome; but introduces the following passage, which aptly exhibits his passion for enterprise and voluptuousness.

"Oft has my faithful camel borne me far
Through the wild desert to the scenes of war;
My coward comrade, trembling with dismay,
Wept o'er the terrors of the doubtful way.

"Tis mine, whene'er the tribes to glory call,

In deeds of daring to outstrip them all.
High waves the lash above my camel's head;
Though sultry vapours o'er the mountains spread,
Onward she rushes, and her flowing tail
Floats, like the dancer's garment, on the gale.

Me you will find, or at the council board,
Or where the taverns maddening draughts afford;
Come in the morning, and I'll give a bowl
Shall warm the prudence of thy chilly soul.
Come to the council of our tribe, and see

Its brightest honours showered down on me ;
But above all, come, join the merry ring

Where gay youths laugh and blooming maidens sing."

Tarafa seems to have been one of those joyous spirits whose love of wine was soon to be checked by the stern prohibition of the coming prophet. "If," says he,

"If death be near me, let me quaff the bowl,

That none to-morrow mourn a thirsty soul.

The same dark mansions, by an equal fate,
The noble spirit and the mean await;

Their mother earth, impartial, seals their doom,
And one broad stone protects their common tomb.
Death, the all-conquering, seizes on the bold,
His proudest prey-then claims the miser's gold.
Though short my life, I've seen the age of man
Dwindling, still dwindling, in its narrow span;
The camel-riders when they lose the rein,
With firmer grasp the loosened cord retain ;
So, though he spare them for a little space,
Death holds dominion over all our race.
Let me then quaff the goblets while I live,
Nor die unconscious of the joys they give."

The rest of the poem contains an eulogy on his own fortitude, liberality, and valour, mixed with keen expostulations against the unkindness and ingratitude of his kinsman. There is a tradition, that one of the chiefs, whom Tarafa took occasion to compliment, made him a present of a hundred camels, and thus enabled him to convince his brother that poetry could repair his loss.

Zohair composed his poem, as a panegyric on Hareth and Harem, two chiefs of Arabia, who by a singular act of generosity had succeeded in healing a deadly feud that existed between theirs and a rival clan. Though the bard was, as he himself informs us, more than fourscore years of age when he wrote, yet, like his brethren, he opens his piece quite in an amatory strain, as he recognises the place where the tent of his mistress had been pitched, twenty years before. He passes on to the praises of the peace-makers, and then personifies war, describing its miseries, which the two chiefs had averted from their country, in a strain highly figurative.

"War is a monster of the foulest mien,

All know her hideous form, for all have seen.
Though for a while you drive her from the plain,
Still will you rouse her, and she'll rage again.
War, at one birth, who ne'er had borne before,
Famine and twin-born desolation bore;

Their cruel mother wean'd them from their birth,
And sent to feed upon the ravaged earth."

A bitter invective against the chief who had caused the