observe that, despite the immense copiousness of assonants and
consonants in Arabic, the strain is often put upon it
intentionally, like the Rims cars of Dante and the Troubadours.
This rhymed prose may be "un English" and unpleasant, even
irritating to the British ear; still I look upon it as a sine qua
non for a complete reproduction of the original. In the Terminal
Essay I shall revert to the subject.

On the other hand when treating the versical portion, which may
represent a total of ten thousand lines, I have not always bound
myself by the metrical bonds of the Arabic, which are artificial
in the extreme, and which in English can be made bearable only by
a tour de force. I allude especially to the monorhyme, Rim
continuat or tirade monorime, whose monotonous simplicity was
preferred by the Troubadours for threnodies. It may serve well
for three or four couplets but, when it extends, as in the
Ghazal-cannon, to eighteen, and in the Kasidah, elegy or ode, to
more, it must either satisfy itself with banal rhyme words, when
the assonants should as a rule be expressive and emphatic; or, it
must display an ingenuity, a smell of the oil, which assuredly
does not add to the reader's pleasure. It can perhaps be done and
it should be done; but for me the task has no attractions: I can
fence better in shoes than in sabots. Finally I print the
couplets in Arab form separating the hemistichs by asterisks.

And now to consider one matter of special importance in the book-
-its turpiloquium. This stumbling-block is of two kinds,
completely distinct. One is the simple, naive and child like
indecency which, from Tangiers to Japan, occurs throughout
general conversation of high and low in the present day. It uses,