When his son
Hassan was four years old, his father-in-law, the old Vizier,
died, and he buried him with great pomp. Then he occupied himself
with the education of his son and when he came to the age of
seven, he brought him a doctor of the law, to teach him in his
own house, and charged him to give him a good education and teach
him good manners. So the tutor taught the boy to read and all
manner of useful knowledge, after he had spent some years in
committing the Koran to memory; and he grew in stature and beauty
and symmetry, even as says the poet:
The moon in the heaven of his grace shines full and fair to see,
And the sun of the morning glows in his cheeks' anemones.
He's such a compend of beauties, meseems, indeed, from him The
world all beauty borrows that lives in lands and seas.
The professor brought him up in his father's palace, and all his
years of youth he never left the house, till one day his father
clad him in his richest clothes, and mounting him on one of the
best of his mules, carried him to the Sultan, who was struck with
his beauty and loved him. As for the people of the city, when he
passed through the streets on his way to the palace, they were
dazzled with his loveliness and sat down in the road, awaiting
his return, that they might gaze their fill on his beauty and
grace and symmetry. The Sultan made much of the boy and bade his
father bring him with him, whenever his affairs called him to the
palace.
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