True to its parentage, but unshackled by the stringent laws and anti-social ceremonies of its more favoured brother, it rioted in all those tastes and pursuits which the latter delighted in, but was restrained from; and became celebrated for a splendour which was rivalled by that of Solomon alone, and a traffic which far outvied that of all contemporaries or predecessors—except, perhaps, the cognate nation—the Phœnicians.
Rich in barbaric pearls and gold, and boasting all the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind, the court of the Caliphs verified the visions of the “Arabian Nights;” which, if true, were true here only. All the gauds and trinkets, the golden palaces, the jewelled walls, the glittering roofs, in which the other branch[52] of the Hebrew nation displayed their highest ideas of magnificence, shone resplendent in the halls of the Caliphs.
But as to the boasted literature of the Arabs, it resolves itself into an ardent pursuit of physical science—astronomy, chemistry, and the mechanical arts, for nearly all the more important of which we are indebted to the Arabs; not, however, as inventors, but as carriers, like the Phœnicians. In the higher departments of literature, the Arabs made no progress. Metaphysical disquisitions and intellectual pursuits were repugnant to their tastes, which rather delighted in the physics of Aristotle than the metaphysics of Plato.
Nor were they less true to their nasal development in their success and skill in commercial pursuits. The commerce of Arabia, for several centuries, encircled the whole known world. From the frigid shores of Scandinavia, from the torrid sands of Africa, from silken Cathay, from jewelled Ceylon, from vine-clad Europe, from spicy Araby, flowed the rich streams of produce. The amber of the north was exchanged for the gold of the south; the wines of Spain for the silks of China; the pearls of Ceylon for the slaves and gold-dust of Africa; and a commerce now excelled only by that of England, carried arts and literature from one end of the Old World to the other, and was mainly instrumental in raising the more highly-organized nations of Europe from barbarism to a physical and intellectual splendour hitherto unknown.