Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. I.djvu/451

THE SPANISH ARABS. 307 of the scientific labors of a people, for truth is the chapter . VIII. same in all languages ; but the laws of taste differ so widely in different nations, that it requires a nicer discrimination to pronounce fairly upon such works as are regulated by them. Nothing is more common than to see the poetry of the east con- demned as tumid, over-refined, infected with mere- tricious ornament and conceits, and, in short, as every way contravening the principles of good taste. Few of the critics, who thus peremptorily condemn, are capable of reading a line of the original. The merit of poetry, however, consists so much in its literary execution, that a person, to pronounce upon it, should be intimately acquainted with the whole import of the idiom in which it is written. The style of poetry, indeed of all ornamental writing, whether prose or verse, in order to produce a proper effect, must be raised or relieved, as it were, upon the prevailing style of social intercourse. Even where this is highly figurative and impassioned, as with the Arabians, whose ordinary language is made up of metaphor, that of the poet must be still more so. Hence the tone of elegant literature varies so widely in different countries, even in those of Europe, which approach the nearest to each other in their principles of taste, that it would be found extremely difficult to effect a close trans- lation of the most admired specimens of eloquence from the language of one nation into that of any other. A page of Boccaccio or Bembo, for in- stance, done into literal English, would have an air of intolerable artifice and verbiage. The choicest