Arabic language and literature had gained too firm a footing to be supplanted at once by a new literary idiom still in its infancy; nevertheless the few poets who arose under the Tahirids and Saffgrids show already the germs of the characteristic tendency of all later Persian literature, which aims at amalgamating the enforced spirit of Islamism with their own Aryan feelings, and reconciling the strict deism of the Mahommedan religion with their inborn loftier and more or less pantheistic ideas; and we can easily trace in the few fragmentary verses of men like Iianzala, I~akim FirUz and Abu Salik those principal forms of poetry now used in common by Forms of all Mahommedan nationsthe forms of the qa~ida Eastern (the encomiastic, elegiac or satirical poem), the Poeti~.