nearly half the work. The Arabic text, accompanied by a commentary of Tabrizi, Latin translation and notes, was published by Freytag at Bonn in 1851.
Perhaps the best specimen of the poetry of Blood-revenge to be found in any literature is a poem of this Hamâseh assigned to Taʾabbata Sherrâ, but attributed on better grounds to his sister's son, and believed to refer to the vengeance taken by the nephew on his uncle's slayers. Mr. C. J. Lyall, who has attempted to translate the poem into a metre resembling the Arab in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal for 1877, would find its author in Khalaf el-Ahmar, a famous imitator of old Arab poetry. But when we remember that early Arab poems were regarded as partially the property of the poet's clan, we cannot treat the authorship of these poems as a profitable inquiry. So far as Mr. Lyall's effort to express the Arab metres in English is concerned, we can only regard it as a brilliant failure. Even if the English language permitted exactly the same metres as the Arabic—which was not to be expected and is not the case—the repetition of the same rime throughout an entire poem, a repetition which Mr. Lyall has not attempted except in a few very short poems translated in the same journal for 1881, would be fatal to such well-intended efforts. No moderniser of the Chansons de Geste could try to reproduce in modern French the medieval monorimes with any hope of success; and in English the attempt to transplant the Arab monorimes in any poem longer than a few lines must only result in a comic repetition of sounds so far as the attempt is even practicable. Since, therefore, the very structure of the English language prevents imitation of the most striking characteristic of early Arab poetry in point of form, why should we with Mr. Lyall seek to retain the Arab measures wâfir, tawîl, and the rest?
