and his habits of idealizing every thing, and of magnifying the smallest into the same proportions with the grandest. His torch-light is ever in danger of extinguishing his starlight. He seems wholly ignorant of the art of producing effect in a picture by a few vigorous touches. His landscapes are overladen with coloring and laborious ornament. Nature is not good enough for him. His earth is not the same earth we inhabit. His suns shine with a purer and more golden light. So his men are moral monsters, colossal in good or evil. He has not the despairing, philosophical misanthropy of Lord Byron; his views do not shut out the better things of humanity; his heart apprehends them; but his fancy colors them. with strange hues. He will not paint nature as she is, in the mind of man, any more than in the external world. In short, he lacks simplicity, which he sacrifices in his morbid desire to elevate the ideal. This is the reason why his creations fail to command universal interest, to touch the soul. They are not beings of our own brotherhood; they are creatures elaborated and refined in the furnace of M. de Lamartine's imagination, and then dressed for exhibition in his stiff vesture of embellishment.

The next épisode, M. de Lamartine informs us, will be entitled Les Pêcheurs. It will have more of local interest than the present one. It is more like that of "Jocelyn," for which the public has shown such flattering partiality. May we hope, that in it our author will endeavour to preserve that simplicity in form and coloring, which is ever the life of poetry, nor mar the real excellence to which we do homage, by an excess of adventitious ornament.

ART. VII. GEORGII WILHELMI FREYTAGII Lexicon Arabico-Latinum, præsertim ex Djeuharii Firuzabadiique et aliorum Arabum operibus, adhibitis Golii quoque et aliorum libris, confectum. Halis Saxonum, 1830-37. 4 vol. 4to.

THE first announcement of Professor Freytag's plan, some few years since, led the learned to expect no more

than a reimpression of Golius. For this they waited long; and when it was told, that the work was to be entirely original, they cheerfully waited longer still. This interest in the work, caused by a growing desire to cultivate the language and literature of that Arab race, whose history, and whose position among the nations of the earth, are almost as peculiar and mysterious as those of the outcasts of Israel, whose dwelling is everywhere, and whose home is nowhere, was highly favorable to its reception. It gave to the author the power of realizing the most brilliant dream of a German mind, in making an epoch of his age. How he has used his opportunity, how he has met the wants and expectations of his compeers and his followers in Oriental learning, can now be decided; for the work has been long enough before the public to admit of its being not only examined, but used. But, since the obligation of the author to give to the world a work of substantial merit, depends much on the actual importance of Arabic literature, and its present state of culture, a short digression on these matters may be pardoned.

The advancement of Arabic learning among European scholars has been slow, but solid. Its relation to Hebrew literature gives it a permanent importance for students of the Old Testament Scriptures. Who can estimate the biblical labors of Schultens, and his successors, down to Gesenius in our day, and not render homage to the Arabic language, in whose rich mines they have so successfully wrought? Its commercial value, too, is beginning to be great. It would become of the first consideration, if the commerce of the East should again flow through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, as it did in the days of the Ptolemies and the Fatimite caliphs; an event now by no means improbable, since the British government, after Colonel Chesney's careful survey of the Euphrates, has fixed on the Red Sea route for the great Oriental mail line. There is, further, in our age, an interest in it among learned men, belonging to that search which they are prosecuting after the literary treasures of every language, time, and country; an interest in which Christian men participate, from their determination to send both the documents and the teachers of their religion to all nations.

The literature of these cavaliers of the desert is not more useful than it is delightful. Its very existence is a romance, as wild, as bewitching, and to the first view seeming almost

as unreal, as the wildest of its enchanting tales. In studying the works which compose it, the Orientalist finds that fresh and racy feeling often renewed, which he had in his boyhood, when reading, by the wasting light of his bed-lamp, the "Arabian Nights," which he had smuggled to his chamber. Amid the dulness of a study so dry and spiritless as numismatics, where every coin is almost like every other, this feeling is revived, with peculiar force, by the specimens of the medals of Arabian countries. A Cufic coin of gold is in the antiquary's hand. Cufic! there is poetry in the name; there is mystery and gracefulness together in the curves of those noble old letters. The gold is virgin gold, purer than the western sovereigns could afford. Nor is it any vulgar ore, washed from the red clay of Carolina, mined from the earth by the half-savage Brazilian, or picked from the sand by naked Guinea negroes. No; it is the gold of Ophir, coined from the hoarded ingots of Solomon, Darius, and Alexander. And its inscription, how strange !

"In the name of the most merciful God, Abdallah Imam Abu'l Abbas Ismael Al Mansur Billah, Prince of the faithful. "Son of Imam Abi Abdallah Mohammed, the son of Imam Kaiem Beamrallah Al Sherif Hosein.

"O servant of God! God is the Lord, he will take away thy calamities.

"Coined in the castle of Segelmassa, may God defend it. 340 Hegira."

What a fulness of words is here; and what a simple and fervent religious feeling in the third legend, making the coin a sort of circulating homily. What an antidote to hard times. it must have been.

The

The Fictions of Arabic literature are inimitable. collection named "Alf Lail u Lail," or Thousand Nights and a Night, of which our "Arabian Nights" are a small part, has received the irreversible verdict of Asia, Africa, Europe, and America. It is the model of most of the Arabic fictitious writing, and of some of the many traditionary stories of Mohammed and his companions. In these tales, while the scene is in a fairy land, and fairy beings are its denizens, the character of the persons is sternly true to nature, and that of the Peris (fairies) as true to tradition.

Arabic History, too, is enchanting. Such works as Bohadini's Life of Saladin, or Arabshah's Life of Timour

(Tamerlane), or Elmacin's Saracenic History, cannot be read without that high excitement, which no history creates that does not preserve the rich, pictorial style of an eyewitness, that does not bear on every sentence a seal, whose motto is "Quorum pars fui."

Arabic Poetry is interesting for its very strangeness. It is measured indeed, but more in that free way, in which the people measure their country, by hours and days' journeys, than by any accurate scansion. Rhyme, too, is used, but often strangely applied, as in the Lamiats of Thograi, Shafari, and Abu Mansur, whose lines all end with the letter L, and in the Bordah and the Nuniat of Ibn Zadun, whose lines end respectively with M and N; while the Dha Argiouzat of Al Gazi contains all the words in the Arabic language, in which the letter Dh occurs, and the scheme of another work consists in using a word in each line, in three different senses. Even the Syrian Casiri, whose enthusiasm was strongly kindled, could not explicitly praise the Arabic poetry, and therefore devised that equivocal compliment, which is often repeated, that it is like the rich wines of the East, which cannot be removed to other lands without losing the delicacy of their flavor, and their fragrant aroma. But Arabic poetry loses not its interest because it has not a Homeric, or a Miltonic richness, strength, and grandeur. It is wild and melodious, and often fervent and tender. Its very formality is like that of a military parade, brilliant, beautiful, and imposing.

Arabic literature had a peculiar growth. Before the Hegira, it consisted, mainly, of a few historic legends, warsongs, and hymns, which had, perhaps, never been written. These, like the northern Sagas, were preserved by tradition, and constituted the oral library of the tribes. The professed story-teller, while entertained in the tents of the desert, repeated these fragments to the tribe, seated around him, à la sultana, till every child came to know them well. The Koreish, who dwelt at Mecca, the centre of the old idolatry, the keblah of the black-stone religion, may have had some written literature before Mohammed, since the confluence of the rovers of the desert to that mart of commerce and temple of religion conferred on them peculiar privileges of refinement, and gave them the means of collecting the dialects of the language, and the traditionary literature of all the tribes. When Mohammed arose, the art of writing among them was

so recent and so rare, that the composition of the Koran was deemed a miracle. Not, as we imagine, because its style or language is so wonderful, for it can maintain no pretensions of this kind, although the author of the Bordah was said to have been converted by the eloquence of one passage; nor because its matter is so sublime, for it is a mere compound of Judaism, corrupt Christianity, and nonsense, in about equal proportions; but merely, that an Arab should have written a book of any sort. This was the real miracle. From this low state, Arabic literature sprung into existence, as if by the working of a charm. Under the genial influence of the caliphs, Al Mansur, Al Rashid, and Al Mamon, it flourished like the grass upon the sun-scorched desert, when the early rain comes sweetly down upon it. The Cufic character, whose unsuitableness for literary purposes would have been a hindrance, was consecrated to the solemn inscriptions of medals and monuments; and, at a very early period, its place was filled by the more cursive and graceful neski. The oldest document in this character has been recently discovered in a Memphis manuscript, by De Sacy, bearing a date much earlier than has been given to the neski, namely, Heg. 133.

The conquests of the Saracens made them acquainted with the literature of Europe, and, in their universal ambition, they also conquered it. The light of literature had gone out in the academies of Greece; it was dim in the forum of the papal city, and in the basilicas of the Christian church; and it was dying in the marble palaces of the queen of the Bosphorus, when the Arab caught the flickering torch, and bore it away to the plains of Babylon.

The basis of the learning of the Arabs lies in translations from Greek writers. Certainly as early as the ninth century, they had translated Euclid, Diophantus, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Theophrastus, and Ptolemy. The poetry of the west they neglected; for their taste was too rude to enjoy poetry without rhyme. Its history they omitted; for they felt the proud consciousness, that their own swords were destined to carve out a new history of the world, which would bear but a slender relation to the annals of the past. Native authors soon appeared and were fostered; and literature extended with the march of the Moslem, and paused in its march only when they were weary of conquest, and