the exact track of his natural thoughts, feelings, and suggestions, and were in fact nothing else than these thoughts, feelings, and suggestions issued, so to speak, in a red-hot state, it is clear that his inspirations must have pursued a course and exhibited a development predetermined by the circumstances through which he moved. Thus, during the three years of probation and private proselytism that succeeded his call, the revelations that arose within him and were written down for his own benefit and that of his few disciples, were doubtless of a general and simple character-confirmations of the pure Theistic faith he had arrived at; denunciations of the Polytheism and Sadduceeism of the Meccans; and exhortations to him to persevere in his chosen path. During the ten years, again, of his public apostleship in Mecca, his revelations would be more specific and complex; there would be vehement objurgations of his adversaries; imprecations on the most conspicuous of them; indignant replies to those that charged him with imposture; consolations to his persecuted followers; precepts for their direction in special situations; rules for the new worship; and practical hints relating to difficult cases of conscience, referred to the Prophet for decision. Finally, during his ten years of triumphant power and conquest, his revelations would assume a wider scope, and become still more practical and shrewd in their tenor: there would then be commands to go forth to battle; songs of victory; judicial threats against refractory subjects; intimations of bold designs; and dexterous lessons in theocratic statecraft. Nor, in all this, would there be the slightest suspicion on the part of Mahomet himself that the passions and calculations of the Man were determining the inspirations of the Prophet. As it is the very nature of the orator to become lucid, shrewd, and practical, in precise proportion as he becomes ungovernable and excited; so may Mahomet's belief in his absolute inspiration have gained rather than lost as his aims became worldly, politic, and specific.

Here, accordingly, if anywhere, it is that it might be possible to show cause for real and solid charges against the character of Mahomet. For, though it is definitively decided that he is not to be accused of the imposture of palming off as revelations what he knew to be merely a class of the more intense suggestions of his own mind, yet, seeing that the theory still necessarily implies that the revelations were but such suggestions, it is of course open to any one to

treat these revelations critically as illustrations of their author, and by forcing them to yield up whatever of his actual self is lodged in them, thereby to expose, more or less severely, whatever may have been foul or insincere in the character of the man. Nor is there the slightest doubt that traces of foulness and insincerity would thus be discovered. There can be no doubt, for example, that in the sensuality of the Mahometan descriptions of the future Paradise of believers, (a sensuality on which the Arabian theologians have improved since Mahomet's time, but which is still discoverable in the Koran,) the peculiar personal weakness of the Prophet, as well as his consideration for the Arabic temperament, very clearly betray themselves. The following passage will indicate the highest degree of sensuality present in these descriptions:

"And when the heaven shall be rent in sunder, and shall become red as a rose, and shall melt as ointment, on that day neither man nor genius shall be asked concerning his sin. The wicked shall by their forelocks and the feet, and shall be cast be known by their marks, and they shall be taken into hell. This is hell which the wicked deny as a falsehood: they shall pass to and fro between the same and hot boiling water. But for him who dreadeth the tribunal of his Lord are prepared two gardens, planted with shady trees. In each of them two fountains shall be flowing; in each of them shall there be of every fruit two kinds. They be of thick silk, interwoven with gold; and the shall repose on couches, the linings whereof shall fruit of the two gardens shall be near at hand to gather. Therein shall receive them beauteous damsels," &c., &c.-Koran, (Sale's Translation,) chap. 55.

A less defensible specimen still of this intrusion of personal desire into the matter of Koran is the following, revealed at Medina, and consequently during the height of the to quote it, as it is decidedly the least sinProphet's power. We feel ourselves bound cere-looking bit in the whole Koran, and the most likely to suggest thoughts discreditable to the Prophet

"O Prophet, We have allowed thee thy wives unto whom thou hast given their dower, and also the slaves which thy right hand possesseth, of the booty which God hath granted thee, and the daughters of thy uncle, and the daughters of thy aunts, both on thy father's side and on thy mother's side, who have fled with thee from Mecca, and any other believing woman, if she give herself unto the Prophet, in case the Prophet desireth to take her to wife. This is a peculiar privilege granted unto thee above the rest of the true believers [four wives each was the number allowed

to ordinary Mahometans.] * * * Thou mayest take unto thee her whom thou shalt please, and her whom thou shalt desire of those whom thou shalt have before rejected; and it shall be no crime in thee. *** O true believers! enter not the houses of the Prophet, unless it be permitted you to eat meat with him, without waiting his convenient time; but when ye are invited, then enter. And when ye shall have eaten disperse yourselves, and stay not to enter into familiar dis course; for this incommodeth the Prophet. He is ashamed to bid you depart; but God is not ashamed of the truth. And when ye ask of the Prophet's wives what ye may have occasion for, ask it of them from behind a curtain. This will be more pure for your hearts, and their hearts. Neither is it fit for you to give any uneasiness to the Apostle of God, or to marry his wives after him forever; for this would be a grievous thing in the sight of God."--Koran, (Sale's Transla tion,) chap. 33.

Evidently, if we are to extend a generous belief in the honesty of Mahomet, even to such a passage as this, we can do so only in virtue of the hypothesis, that in certain states of his mind he regarded even his own meanest and least dignified desires as divinely allowed and accredited. Occasionally, however, he seems to become aware of the possibility of such a substitution of the personal and mean for the revealed and glorious; for not only is he sometimes rebuked in the Koran for what he has just said or done, but not unfrequently one passage of the Koran is sent, as it were, expressly to abrogate another. Of the splendid naïveté, too, with which, in the above passage, he vindicates his own title to peculiar dignity and respect, there are other instances in the Koran. In chap. 68, for example, it is revealed, "O Mahomet, through the grace of God thou art not distracted. Verily, there is prepared for thee an everlasting reward; for thou art of a noble disposition." Even Mahomet's secret thoughts about himself, it would seem, conceived, we may suppose, in his moments of exulting consciousness, were liable, therefore, to be cast out red-hot in the general eruption, like the tell-tale sandal of the missing Empedocles.

The very minute descriptions that have been left to us of the personal appearance and habits of Mahomet are of great assistance to us in conceiving his character. The following details are taken from the work of the Arabic historian Abulfeda, (1273-1331,) "De vita et rebus gestis Mohammedis," (Oxon, 1723 Arabicè et Latinè,) or from the notes appended to that work by its Oxford editors; in which notes are embodied all the scraps respecting Mahomet personally that

have come down to us from his contemporaries. The Prophet, say these accounts, was a very handsome man of middle stature, with a broad chest, a powerful neck, large hands and feet, a large head, long black hair, a thick beard, flashing black eyes, with a kind of redness or fire in them, and a complexion more ruddy than was common among the Arabs. At his death there were but a few white hairs in his beard, and a few on his head near the top. The extremities of his forehead, (this fact we will tell to the phrenologists, if it is not already in their stock,) projected far over the temples.(Extremum frontis latus supra tempora prominens exporrectum); i.e., as Mr. Donovan would say, "Ideality and wonder very large." His eyebrows were long and thin; and between them was conspicuously seen a vein, the swelling of which was a sign of anger. Between his shoulders was a mole or mark as large as a pigeon's egg, which his followers called the sign of his Prophetship. Other particulars even more minute are added, such as the longa cilia palpebrarum, the villosa admodum brachia et spatule, and the presence of a thin ductus pilorum a jugulo usque ad umbilicum. He had a powerful memory; did not speak much, and would remain long silent; was extremely affable, and so studiously polite that he would listen patiently to the most tedious speaker, and always remain seated till his visitors chose to depart, notwithstanding that, as we know, such politeness cost him an effort. He often visited his friends, and asked how matters were going on with them. When talking in an easy way he had a habit of sitting with his hands folded, striking his left thumb with his right. When he wanted to persuade he stretched the palm of his hand wide out; when anything surprised him he raised it upward; when he was pleased with anything he looked down. He could not contain himself if he heard any one tampering with the truth, but became angry immediately. He milked his own ewes, and mended his own shoes and garments. In his living he was temperate and even abstemious; fasting often, and never making remarks on what was set before him. He had a passion, however, for ointments and sweet scents, and was wont to say that there were two things in the world that particularly exhilarated and excited him-women and perfumes. Whenever he looked at a woman, says one of his contemporaries and followers, he began to rub his brow, and smooth his hair, as if trying to please her; and once he was seen to

arrange his hair, looking at himself in the water. When sleeping, says another, he breathed gently, and never snored-nunquam | ronchos emittens. He was extremely liberal to all and sundry, especially to the poor; and most scrupulously just in his dealings. He liked a laugh, and sometimes joked himself. Once an old woman came to him, and asked him to pray to God that she might be admitted into paradise. "O mother of such a one," was his reply, "there will be no old women in paradise at all;" on which she was going away weeping, when it was explained to her that the Prophet's meaning was, that in paradise women would not be, nor become old. Still better is the following, told by the Prophet's wife Ayesha herself: Once, as the Prophet was mending his shoe the perspiration broke out on his face, so that I could not see the peculiar light that used to radiate from it. "By Allah!' said I, "if Abu Kaber were to see you now, he would learn whether that poem of his about you is more applicable to you than to any any one else.' Then said he, But what poem is it that Abu Kaber has written about me?" "He says," replied I, "nothing less than this. When I beheld the Prophet I was all overjoyed; his countenance shines as the cloud shines glittering with glory.' Hearing this, the Prophet, wiping away the perspiration, and showing a merrier face than usual, said, 'O Ayesha, God give thee a great reward.' As nice an anecdote of its kind as we know, and one calculated to leave a very agreeable impression of the Prophet and his household ways! His lasting affection, too, for his first wife Kadijah, asserted once in a very emphatic manner even to the face of his later and younger favorite, the saucy Ayesha, when she teased him on the subject, is a fact which it is highly pleasant to contemplate.

One word, in conclusion, in lieu of that elaborate appreciation of the faith and system of Islam, with which, had space permitted, it would have been so fitting to follow up our sketch of the life and character of its founder.

And first, regarded historically, and in its relation to the state of religious anarchy, which both in its native soil and in other parts of the East it was the means of displacing, there can be no doubt, we think, that the Theism promulgated by Mahomet, noble protest as it was against the Atheism and Sadduceeism inherent in the heart of man, and incorporating, as it did, such essential portions of the Hebrew revelation, was a

real step in advance, a revolution of vast mo ment to all that were affected by it. To the Arabic race, in particular, to whom the publication of the Koran was not only the origin of a new polity, but also the commencement of a new literature, Islamism was an intellectual boon. The Mussulman recognizes this when he names the age prior to Mahomet, the Age of Ignorance. Even among the Arabians themselves, however, there have been sceptics who have formed a different opinion. "There were good heads," says Goethe, "who recognized a better style of writing in the old time than that exhibited in the Koran, and maintained that had not God chanced once for all to reveal His will, and a determinate legal system through Mahomet, the Arabians would have spontaneously climbed by degrees to a similar or even higher position, and developed purer conceptions in a purer language. Others, more audacious have asserted that Mahomet injured their language and literature to an extent that they can never recover." These, however, are but the complaints of the Zoiluses.

Considered absolutely, on the other hand, or in comparison with what, as civilized men and partakers of the Christian inheritance, we are able to set in contrast with it, Islamism assumes quite another look and value. In the first place, created, as it was, under the pressure, and within the mould, so to speak, of a narrow physical conception of the universe, it wants that scientific transparency and largeness, without which it could now be a tenement of no cultivated mind, and which, not diminishing in the least its moral intensity, even a natural Theist might have succeeded in giving to it. In the Theism of, Plato, Pagan and Polytheistic as it was, we see the earth hung like a dark ball in the midst of an azure universe, through which stars glitter at intervals, and round whose outer bosses the chariots of the gods career. In the Theism of Mahomet, on the other hand, vastly more terrible on the conscience as it is than that of Plato, we seem to stand on a flat unspacious plain, down over which, and so near above us that we can scarcely breathe, there presses an impenetrable iron roof. Further, taking the higher view that still remains, and permitting ourselves for a moment the final contrast, where, in Islamism all its natural merits allowed for to the utmost-shall we find aught of that exquisite adaptation to the nature and necessities of man as a sinful and sin-loving being, by which Christianity is so wonderfully distinguished;

aught of that transcendent reciprocation of offer on the one hand, and aspiration of free grace and human acceptance on the other, by which heaven and earth are brought nigh, and an invisible descending cone, as it were, is interposed, the basis of which is the whole face of the supernatural, and the apex of which is in the heart of man; aught, either, of that spirit of meekness and love which Christianity diffuses through life like a balm, and discharges on the world like a plenteous dew? Of the poverty of Islamism in all these respects, the present state of the Mahometan parts of the world is but too sad a

confirmation. Many are the revolutions in the future to which the civilized man and the Christian ought to look forward with hope and desire; but of all these we know not one that should be more ardently expected than the dawn of a new day of power and progress on those patriarchal lands of the East wherein man was cradled, the rising of a new star especially for that little portion of them.

"Over whose acres walked those blessed feet That eighteen hundred years ago, were nailed For our advantage to the bitter cross."

When there was

ion, and useful as a friend. nobody to restrain his dislikes, it was extremely difficult to find anybody with whom he could converse, without being always on the verge of a quarrel, or something too like a quarrel to be pleasing." So long as Mr. Thrale lived, for a period of sixteen or seventeen years, she bore her perpetual confinement, which she tells us was terrifying in the first years of their friendship, and irksome in the last, without a murmur. To the shelter which she and Mr. Thrale gave him in their house, and to her constant kindness and nurs

Madame D'Arblay visited Dr. Johnson late in November, and amongst other things they talked of Mrs. Piozzi, or Mrs. Thrale, as Johnson always called her from the feeling of aversion with which he regarded her second husband. "We talked," says Madame D'Arblay, "of poor Mrs. Thrale [poor Mrs. Thrale, because, after devoting her youth to a man who was much older than herself, she availed herself in due season of her liberty to consult her own feelings in another marriage,] but only for a moment; for I saw him so greatly moved, and with such severity of displeasure, that I hastened to start another subject; and he solemnly enjoined me to mention that no more." Johnson was inexorable on that subject. He never forgave the marriage. He would have had Mrs. Thrale keep up her houses at Streatham and in London for his use, while he made her life, to say the least of it, very uncomfortable by his daily lectures upon her imprudence, his strange habits, and domestic tyranny-for it literally amounted to that. In the very candid account which she has left of the causes of their quarrel or separation, she says that he was "extremely impracticable as an inmate, though most instructive as a compan

Thrale, who supported her through these trials, was gone, she found the weight insupportable. She had not a moment of time at her own disposal. Dr. Johnson absorbed it all, and not in the most agreeable manner. "To have a little portion of time at my own use," she says, "was a thing impossible, as my hours, carriage, and servants, had long been at his command, who would not rise in the morning till twelve o'clock, perhaps, and oblige me to make breakfast for him till the bell rang for dinner, though much displeased if the toilet was neglected, and though much of the time we passed together was spent in blaming or deriding, very justly, my neglect of economy, and waste of that money which might make many families happy." consequence was that she broke up her tablishment, left London, and married Piozzi, an Italian singer. In these letters we find her corresponding with Mr. Lysons, while she is traveling abroad with her husband, and while her old inmate, whom she loved and reverenced to the end, notwithstanding all their vexatious little feuds, is dying in Bolt Court.

The

es

When Dr. Johnson heard of her marriage with Piozzi, he exclaimed, Varium et mutabile semper fœmina!" That there was a personal annoyance mixed up with the pru