with him chanced to be the largest share of it), he spent the remainder
of his life, or seventy years, in the retirement of a recluse, when he
was exemplary in his temperance and edifying in his piety."

Of Sa'di's versatility, these twenty-two works give sufficient evidence.
He could write homilies (Risalahs) in a Mystic-religious fashion. He
could compose lyrics in Arabic and Turkish as well as in Persian. He was
even led to give forth erotic verses. Fondly we hope that he did this
last at the command of some patron or ruler! But Sa'di is known to us
chiefly by his didactic works, and for these we cherish him. The
"Bustan," or "Tree-Garden," is the more sober and theoretical, treating
of the various problems and questions of ethics, and filled with Mystic
and Sufic descriptions of love.

His other didactic work, the "Gulistan," is indeed a "Garden of Roses,"
as its name implies; a mirror for every one alike, no matter what his
station in life may be. In prose and in poetry, alternating; in the form
of rare adventures and quaint devices; in accounts of the lives of kings
who have passed away; in maxims and apothegms, Sa'di inculcates his
worldly wisdom--worldly in the better sense of the word. Like Goethe in
our own day, he stood above the world and yet in it; so that while we
feel bound to him by the bonds of a common human frailty, he reaches out
with us to a higher and purer atmosphere. Though his style is often
wonderfully ornate, it is still more sober than that of Háfiz. Sa'di is
known to all readers of Persian in the East; his "Gulistan" is often a
favorite reading-book.

The heroic and the didactic are, however, not the only forms in which
the genius of Persian poetry loved to clothe itself. From the earliest
times there were poets who sung of love and of wine, of youth and of