Of any deep appreciation of Christianity or of any strong impression made by its ideas upon them personally, we do not find much evidence in the Arab poets, even in those who were nominally Christian. The same applies to Judaism. First impressions of the pre-Islamic poets are therefore discouraging to the idea that either of these religions had obtained much hold in Arabia. But we have to remember that this ancient poetry was very conventional in character. In the oldest specimens we have its form is already fixed; and not only its form, but the very order of the subjects treated of in a poem. Each poem must begin in a certain way, and pass by a recognised route to its main subject, the nature of which, at least, we may suppose to have been likewise prescribed by tradition. The same things are described again and again, the skill of the poet consisting not in finding new themes, but in finding new similes to describe the recognised objects or different words in which to express the old similes. These characteristics are retained until the poetry of the desert dies out. Islam made almost as little impression upon it in the century after Muhammad as Christianity did in the century before his appearance. Evidently its spirit was as much a matter of tradition as its form. It belonged to the old desert life of love and war with its tribal pride and tribal feud. Its spirit was the spirit of the old pagan life. Convention did not allow room for any treatment of religious themes as such. They could hardly be referred to in any other way than that in which we find them referred

to—by way of simile, illustrating the well-worn themes. Only now and then did the poet give expression to his attitude to life in a few moralising reflections. The end of a qasida was the recognised place for these, but we sometimes find them in other parts of the poems. Even these are usually of the hard-bitten worldly-wise type appropriate to a condition of things in which a man's fortune and life were apparently at the mercy of chance and blind Fate:

Aweary am I of life's toil and travail: he who like me
has seen pass of years fourscore, well may he be sick of life!
I know what To-day unfolds, what before it was Yesterday,
but blind do I stand before the knowledge Tomorrow brings.
I have seen the Dooms trample men as a blind beast at random treads
—whom they smote, he died: whom they missed, he lived on to strengthless eld.¹

So sings Zuhair; and perhaps we may feel in that a wistfulness of longing for something better which is not very common, and may have been the harbinger of the coming of a better faith. But we do sometimes find among these moralisings a kindlier view of life, and the conviction of a higher justice over-arching man's hard experience. Thus in the same poem of Zuhair we find the following, which almost reminds us of the Qur'an,