AN ANCIENT EPIGRAM.
(To TIM EDITOR 07 THE "SPECTATOR.") Sin„—Your courtesy will, I am sure, allow me to occupy a small space in your columns for the purpose of proving that the epigram assigned in the " Epigrammatista " to the Khaliph Radhi Billah was not "composed in a London drawing-room about sixty or seventy years ago." Mulready—who, according to your corre- spondent, challenged the composer to exercise his faculty for impromptu versification—was born in 1786, and was only ten years old when the epigram appeared in print. Allow me to refer your correspondent to the work of an acknowledged scholar —" Specimens of Arabian Poetry, from the earliest times to the Extinction of the Khaliphat, with some account of the authors," by J. D. Carlyle, B.D., F.R.S.E., Chancellor of Carlisle, and Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1796)— where he will find the original Arabic, and the Professor's English version, as given in the "Epigrammatists." In 1797 the English version, avowedly taken from Carlyle's work, appeared in a col- lection entitled "Select Epigrams." It was, perhaps, in this latter and more popular book that the gentleman celebrated as an impromptu versifier saw the epigram which afterwards proved so useful to him in the London drawing-room.—I am, Sir, &c.,
HENRY PHILIP DODD.
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