Mentone, Cairo and Corfu . o read and to write those para-graphs ; in this way he goes through the entire vol-ume. Grammar comes next; at El Azhar the wordincludes logic, rhetoric, composition, versification, elo-cution, and other branches. Then follows law, secu-lar and religious. But the law, like the logic, like allthe instruction, is founded exclusively upon the there is no inquiry into anything new, the preceptshave naturally taken a fixed shape ; the rules were longago established, and they have never been altered; thestudent of 1890 receives the information given to thestudent
Mentone, Cairo and Corfu . o read and to write those para-graphs ; in this way he goes through the entire vol-ume. Grammar comes next; at El Azhar the wordincludes logic, rhetoric, composition, versification, elo-cution, and other branches. Then follows law, secu-lar and religious. But the law, like the logic, like allthe instruction, is founded exclusively upon the there is no inquiry into anything new, the preceptshave naturally taken a fixed shape ; the rules were longago established, and they have never been altered; thestudent of 1890 receives the information given to thestudent of 1490, and no more. But it is this very factwhich makes El Azhar interesting to the looker-on;it is a living relic, a survival in the nineteenth centuryof the university of the fourteenth and fifteenth. It istrue that when we think of those great colleges of thepast, the picture which rises in the mind is not one ofturbaned, seated figures in flowing robes; it is ratherof aggressively agile youths, with small braggadocio. 223 caps perched on their long locks, their slender waistsoutlined in the shortest of jackets, and their long- legsincased in the tightest of party-colored hose. But thisis because the great painters of the past have given im-mortality to these astonishing scholars of their ownlands by putting them upon their canvases. They con-fined themselves to their own lands too, unfortunatelyfor us; they did not set sail, with their colors andbrushes, upon Homers misty deep. It would be in-teresting to see what Pinturicchio would have made ofEl Azhar; or how Gentile da Fabriano would havecopied the crowded outer court. The president of El Azhar occupies, in native estima-tion, a position of the highest authority. Napoleon,recognizing this power, requested the aid of his influ-ence in inducing Cairo to surrender in 1798. Thesheykh complied; and a month later the wonderfulFrenchman, in full Oriental costume, visited the univer-sity in state, and listened to a recitation
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, bookidmentonecairo, bookyear1896
