Promotion of Learning in India during Muhammadan Rule (by Muhammadans) c3.7

c3.7

Sulṭān Maḥmūd’s injustice to Firdausī did not take place till after many years of patronage, and was the inevitable result of morose old age and religious bigotry. It may be said too with truth that his extravagant promise of a gold coin for every line that Firdausī wrote, by awaking dreams of the potentiality of wealth, did more harm to the poet than was caused by the subsequent repudiation. It encouraged Firdausī to spin out his poem to the length of nearly 120,000 lines, and so caused the repetitions and the “intolerable length” of which his editor, Captain Turner-Macan, so justly complains. And though Maḥmūd’s reputation must suffer for his faithlessness, yet it brought this compensation, that it called forth from Firdausī in his old age the *Satire*, which is perhaps the most forcible and heart-felt thing that any poet, Eastern or Western, ever wrote. Here we are reminded how literature is indebted to Chesterfield’s neglect of Johnson for rare old Samuel’s celebrated letter. Firdausī’s *Satire* was not all just, and he forgot