Excerpt from History of the Caliphs Extensive as is the reputation of as Suyùti as a distinguished author and scholar, and unsurpassed for the number and range of the works which in every branch of literature known to his age, his unwearied pen never ceased to produce, we are indebted to the malice or envy of but one of his contemporaries and to his own testimony, for the few details of his life and studies that we possess. Reference to one or other of his multitudinous volumes is made by writers of his own and succeeding times where the kindred subject of which they treat naturally calls for it, but only one contemporary biographical notice of him besides his own, is extant. To these I shall presently refer. Haji Khalifah, at the close of his Lexicon, gives a detailed list of as Suyüti's works, prefaced by a column of laudatory epithets which have less the ring of sincere admiration than of conventional panegyric, yet his wonder or his envy might well offer the incense of adulation to the astonishing author of five hundred and four volumes. Kuranic exegesis, Tradition and its cognate subjects, jurisprudence, philology, rhetoric, prose and poetical composition, the phenomena of nature, curiosities of literature, discourses on social questions, criticism, history, biography, all these were fields not too vast for his discursive intelligence and none too minute for his indefatigable industry. Some of his compositions are indeed, nothing more than pamphlets of smaller compass than many an article of a modern Review, but a considerable number, to judge from some of those, about one-fifth of the whole, that have come down to us, must have been of goodly bulk. It would doubtless have been better for his reputation as it would assuredly have been more profitable to the generality of his readers, had he confined his labours to the production of a few works of universal interest and written for posterity rather than for his day. By far the greater part of…