very cordial reception given to the "Wisdom of the East" Series,
they wish to state that no pains have been spared to secure the
best specialists for the treatment of the various subjects at
hand.

L. CRANMER-BYNG.
S. A. KAPADIA.

NORTHBROOK SOCIETY,
158, PICCADILLY, W.



INTRODUCTION TO THE DIWAN

God help him who has no nails wherewith to scratch himself.
_Arabian proverb_.

An effort has been made to render in this book some of the poems
of Abu'l-Ala the Syrian, who was born 973 years after Jesus
Christ and some forty-four before Omar Khayyam. But the life of
such a man--his triumph over circumstance, the wisdom he
achieved, his unconventionality, his opposition to revealed
religion, the sincerity of his religion, his interesting friends
at Baghdad and Ma'arri, the multitude of his disciples, his
kindliness and cynic pessimism and the reverence which he
enjoyed, the glory of his meditations, the renown of his
prodigious memory, the fair renown of bending to the toil of
public life, not to the laureateship they pressed upon him, but
the post of being spokesman at Aleppo for the troubles of his