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Hermit,[1] or Abou Durraj and the Leper? For sustained romantic exultation, it would be hard to surpass The City of Brass or the legend of Many-columned Irem, and few languages can produce such masterpieces of melancholy beauty as The Blacksmith who could handle fire without hurt or The Man who never laughed again, strains that linger in the thought like the tones of that “alte, ernste Weise” which haunts the hearing of the dying Tristan in the greatest of musical dramas. Nor is the power of effective poetical portraiture lacking, when required, teste the vivid picture of the Khalif’s pleasure garden at Baghdad[2] and the exquisitely imaginative description of the lute in Ali Noureddin and the Frank King’s Daughter;[3] and when the movement of the story calls for the exercise of an austerer faculty, as in the battle-scenes of Omar ben Ennuman or Gherib, the text quickens into a stern and nervous energy, a vivid and unfaltering concision, that could hardly be excelled by Homer or Dante. Equally remarkable is the wealth of humour and wit that characterizes the work, whether (as in Ali the Persian and the Kurd Sharper) it bring to mind the headlong horseplay of Rabelais or (as in the episode of the Stoker,[4] of the Hashish-Eater in Ali Shar,[5] or of Jaafer and the old Bedouin) the rough but effective burlesque of John Heywood and the mediæval farce-writers, whether (as in the anecdotes of Abou Nuwas) it recall the cynical humour
- ↑ A story of distinctly Christian origin, possibly suggested by some vague reminiscence of the hermits of the Thebaïd.
- ↑ Vol. I. p. 341.
- ↑ Vol. VIII. p. 80.
- ↑ Vol. II. p. 305.
- ↑ Vol. IV.
