guished from medieval chivalry by its communal rather than personal spirit; it is, in fact, the generosity of a group rather than that of an individual, of a brotherhood of kinsmen alike noble and not of an isolated knight. The lines occur after a graphic description of the camel (to which we may elsewhere refer), and have been rendered as follows by Mr. Lyall in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal for 1877. "There sought refuge by my tent-ropes, every wretched one clad in scanty rags and wasted like the camel by his master's grave. And they fill brimful with meat, when the winds are blowing shrill, great bowls of broth in which their fatherless ones come to drink. Verily we of ʿÂmir, when the tribes are met together, there wants not of us a chief to lead in the doing of a noble deed, or a divider to portion out to the tribe its due, or a prince to give less or more as he deems right and good in his headship; or a generous man who helps men with his bounty freehanded, a gainer of all good gifts and one who takes them by force. For he comes of a stock to whom their fathers laid down the way—and every people has its own way and its leader therein."
It is interesting to contrast this picture of the open-handed Bedouin with another Semitic poem, in which, however, the desert is in the background and city life in the front. Ibn Khaldoun tells us that "writing in towns reaches a degree of beauty greater or less in proportion to the progress men have made in civilisation; so we see that the nomads for the most part can neither read nor write." This difference between the culture of the towns—purchased by division of labour and new distinctions of property and rank—and the rude freedom of the desert was deeply experienced by the Hebrews; their ideal life was clearly that of the pastoral tribe, the Hebrew state of nature so vividly symbolised by the preference of Abel the
