Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. I.djvu/453

THE SPANISH ARABS. 309 With all this poetic feeling, however, the Arabs chapter never availed themselves of the treasures of Gre- '— cian eloquence, w^hich lay open before them. Not a poet or orator of any eminence in that language seems to have been translated by them.^^ The temperate tone of Attic composition appeared tame to the fervid conceptions of the east. Neither did they venture upon what in Europe are considered the higher walks of the art, the drama and the epic.^^ None of their writers in prose or verse show much attention to the developement or dissection of character. Their inspiration exhaled in lyrical effu- sions, in elegies, epigrams, and idyls. They some- times, moreover, like the Italians, employed verse as the vehicle of instruction in the grave and recon- dite sciences. The general character of their poet- ry is bold, florid, impassioned, richly colored with imagery, sparkling with conceits and metaphors, and occasionally breathing a deep tone of moral sensibility, as in some of the plaintive effusions as- cribed by Conde to the royal poets of Cordova. The compositions of the golden age of the Abas- sides, and of the preceding period, do not seem to have been infected with the taint of exaggeration. 47 Andres, Letteratura, part. 1, Sismondi says that Sir W. Jones cap. 11. — Yet this popular asser- is mistaken in citing the history of tion is contradicted by Reinesius, Timour by Ebn Arabschah, as an who states, that both Homer and Arabic epic. (Litterature du Mi- Pindar were translated into Arabic di, torn. i. p. 57.) It is Sismondi by the middle of the eighth centu- who is mistaken, since the English ry. See Fabricius, Bibliotheca Grae- critic states that the Arabs have ca, (Hamb. 1712-38,) torn. xii. p. no heroic poem, and that this poet- 753. ical prose history is not accounted 48 Sir William Jones, Traite such even by the Arabs them- sur la Poesie Orientale, sec. 2. — selves.