Promotion of Learning in India during Muhammadan Rule (by Muhammadans) c10.29

c10.29

“It is written in the books of the learned authors that during the first years, Firdausī took great pleasure in versification. It happened one day that he received ill-treatment from somebody and went to Ghaznī to lodge his complaint to Sulṭān Maḥmūd. On arriving near the city, he saw three men conversing together in a garden and the poet talked with them, hoping they would help him in the matter for which he came. The men said that they were the Sulṭān’s poets and that they did not talk with anybody who was not a poet—(the three men being ’Unṣurī, Aṣjudī and Farrukhī) and took into their society only that man who could add a fourth verse to the three verses they would recite.”