In the last sentence of my paper on Part I of the ufrān (J.R.A.S., October, 1900) I described the Second Part as “more difficult, but also more characteristic and interesting.” Further study has led me somewhat to modify this view. It is more difficult to read, because the scribe, hastening to the goal, drove his pen furiously. On the first reading a good deal of it seemed to me almost hopeless, but a closer acquaintance has removed not a few of these stumbling-blocks, and I am convinced that only patience and determination are needed to remove all, or nearly all, that are left. If indeed Abū'l-‘Alā had always written as he writes in the section to which this article is mainly devoted, his readers would have no cause for complaint: it comprises many anecdotes and comparatively little rhetoric ; hence it is, beyond doubt, less difficult than any other section of the Risāla. Unfortunately, these twenty or thirty pages are but an oasis in the surrounding desert. Elsewhere Abū'l-‘Alā seldom escapes from his artificial prose with its forced metaphors and tyrannous rhymes. The passages of which I have attempted a, translation, on pp. 127–129 and 161–163, may serve to illustrate his typical manner. But on the whole, when account is made of the large number of scattered anecdotes, the Second Part is scarcely equal in difficulty to the First. That it is more characteristic will be admitted, in the sense that it is more personal.