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John-Mary. Among the many causes of exultation..

John-Mary. Sad alternative!
Ferdinand. Sad enough for them: but show me

Ferdinand. Well, well! go on.. why the devil another king, in our times, whom God and his

do you stop?

John-Mary. It would be difficult to hit upon the precise one. Perhaps by your majesty being the Most Catholic.

blessed Mother, and those about them, have thought worthy of a special prophecy. The most favoured of my ancestors never had in their dominions more than half the number, of those who held such tickets of admission to the kingdom of heaven. All orders of monks, all ranks of reli

Ferdinand. That only led to it. Surely you know well enough I am the object of a particular prophecy in the Holy Bible. I have a whole pro-gionists, cry "Beati pauperes !" What a number phecy to myself.

First I must inform you, what I understand is believed by every sect of Christians. . if indeed any are to be called Christians who refuse to obey the vicar of Christ.

of people have I made eternally happy, without any care or trouble about 'em! And the very best in my dominions. . I mean of laymen. Priests and monks do not require a similar state of probation. They are ready for martyrdom, when their Lord calls them, but would fare reasonably well seven days in the week, in order to work the better in his vineyard. The rest I have made

John-Mary. No, no, no. There may be Pelagians, Arians, Protestants, Freemasons; but Holy Mother Church, as Canon Bento Pinto da Cunha preached to us in my chapel, is no Amphisbæna.light for the long journey, and almost as ready to Ferdinand. Who is Amphisbæna?

John-Mary. I could not rightly understand him, whether it was really a single beast with two heads, tugging two ways, one of them where the tail should be ..

Ferdinand. Nonsense! nonsense!

John-Mary. He seemed to explain it in this manner; but I fancy he must have meant two creatures of the canine race, pelted in the street for immorality.

undertake it as their spiritual guides. Have I not reason then to be superlatively joyful?

John Mary. Certainly, my brother, God hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.

Ferdinand. Hold! Have you a dispensation, my brother and cousin, for using the words of the Bible? I would not venture to go beyond Saint Isidore or Saint Augustin.

John-Mary. They may always be used toward

Ferdinand. Ay, ay; there is sense in that. But crowned heads. It is generally thought by theolowhat has it to do with the prophecy? gians that the best of them were made expressly for us.

John-Mary. Your majesty was about to mention a tenet of the Church that every man adhered to. Ferdinand. Right! right! Whatever the prophets, and doctors, and evangelists, and disciples said to people, the people took as if it was said to them.

John-Mary. Certainly.

Ferdinand. The more fools they for their pains. Nothing was meant as it was spoken: and if it was said to one it was intended for another. The prophets had a sort of squint in their tongues. If they promised anything good to anyone, the simpleton was sure to be disappointed in it and if they threatened a rogue or a city, the threat fell on other folks a thousand miles off. Now you are prepared in some sort for my prophecy. Many at the time believed our Lord was talking to some people who grudged him a little essence of vanilla, and who pretended they would have given the three "reals" (the price of it in those days) to the poor, rather than perfume his stockings and pantaloon with it, much as they might want it in that hot country. They did not observe him looking over his shoulder toward me, who was not then born; nor understand him, saying, "The poor ye have always with you."

Habetis pauperes semper vobiscum. John-Mary. Gloria Deo in excelsis!

Ferdinand. Now I have, in Spain alone, not counting the Americas and Indies, above eight hundred thousand mouths, that must either be filled by alms or stopt by halters.

Ferdinand. Not unlikely. You are deep, my brother, in the dogmatists.

John-Mary. Discreetly; sufficiently; not much amiss: but I began to doubt whether the said oil of gladness ..

Ferdinand. The devil you did! to doubt about it!

John-Mary. Whether it is an oil that is likely to keep, though it has been in great demand of late among the champions of legitimacy. I am afraid some hot weather may affect it.

Ferdinand. And now, Don John-Mary, my brother and cousin, I must come to the point with you, in the most amicable way possible, on your invasion of my territories.

John-Mary. May it please your majesty to inform me, what portion of your majesty's territory has been rashly entered by my troops, without my knowledge?

Ferdinand. I know not whether your forces, my brother and cousin, have invaded it; but you style yourself King of India. How can this be, when I myself am King of both the Indies! Your majesty is legitimately (inasmuch as what is founded on usurpation can be legitimate) King of Portugal, Algarve, Brazil, Guinea, Ethiopia, Arabia, and Persia.

John-Mary. Certainly, my brother, and of India; not of both Indies.

Ferdinand. No, by the Mother of God! nor of one.

John-Mary. Pardon me there, Don Ferdinand!

this gold piece will prove it. (Aside.) He pockets it! No matter!

Ferdinand. Will you resign it, my dear brother? John-Mary. Willingly, willingly! five hundred. Ferdinand. What do you mean, my brother and cousin?

John-Mary. The crusado.
Ferdinand. What crusado?

John-Mary. That upon which I exhibited to your majesty my arms and rights.

Ferdinand. Blood of the martyrs belly and backbone of the confessors! you never showed me one such in the whole course of your life.

John-Mary. I intended it then, and will at any

time.

Ferdinand. No shuffling, my brother and cousin! Will you resign my kingdom?

John-Mary. I will never resign the kingdoms that the Holy Trinity hath placed under my sceptre. My good people of India shall not be deprived of a father by an unworthy cession. Ferdinand. Then God and my right! I will fight for it to the last drop of my blood.

John-Mary. By proxy, as usual, I hope, my brother Ferdinand. Your majesty has already spilt in this manner the best belonging to you, enough to float more than your fleets, and never soiled frill nor ruffle . . though you once (to do you justice) had your stocking down at heel from it.

Under the administration of Canning, who, threatening to establish at one time absolutism, at another time republicanism, was abjured by both parties, it was permitted Louis XVIII. to undo all that our armies, from the time of Peterborough to the time of Wellesley, had been fighting for in the Peninsula, and ultimately had attained. French influence was restored. After a long series of cruelties, judicial and extra-judicial, and after the death of Ferdinand, Spain turned on her side again, but never could rise up. However, there was one honest man still left in public life; and, singular enough, he was placed at the head of the nation. Louis Philippe saw this, and thought it a personal affront. To supplant Espartero,

he sent across the Pyrenees small sums, but sufficient to make the nearest of the military stumble and fall; and they were prepared to receive that person of his family who united most of harlotry and bigotry. She disbursed more largely, from what had been deposited by her in

France, both during her husband's reign, and after his decease. Spain was instantly prostrate before her. Such is the result of a long and sanguinary war against the Intruder here lie her constitutions, every chapter of every one: even their title-pages, indexes, and covers: here lie the laurels of Wellesley, withered, weightless, and bestrewing the path of Narvaez. What misery will not kings inflict on nations for the aggrandisement of a family! But what misery, what degradation, what infamy, ever equalled those inflicted upon Spain, in thrusting back against her, first a pensioner, then an outcast; and constraining her, with traitors and assassins at her throat, to lick up again those two vomits! Let it never more be questioned that Louis-Philippe is a genuine branch of the Bourbons, whatever may be the resemblance he bears in person and demeanour to the catchpole at the Stinca in Florence.

MAHOMET AND SERGIUS.

Mahomet. Thou knowest, my dear Sergius, that heretofore the bishops of Rome have conferred and counselled on the necessity of depriving the priesthood of marriage, that the brethren may be devoted to them entirely, and insulated from the people.

Sergius. Such a scheme indeed hath been agitated more than once; yet I suspect it can never be carried into execution. If the Roman pontiff should succeed in his intentions, would the Greek follow?

Mahomet. There hath always been jealousy between them, of each other's weight and authority. Sergius. It began about dresses and jewels, then flamed forth again on the comparative number of rich widows and holy virgins, in the convents of East and West. As beauty and embroidery, music and mutilation, are matters of taste and opinion, they looked for something to split upon decorously. An iota served: this iota clove many thousand skulls, and found nothing. Latterly they have fought upon surer ground, over the relics of confessors and martyrs, and, in time of truce, have bidden high against each other for the best odour of sanctity any Jew or Arab would bring them. Mahomet. I myself keep in reserve the thighbone of an honest jade of a mule; the fellow of which thigh-bone is inclosed in a glass case at Ancona, as belonging to Saint Eufemia. My saint was rather a wincing one. I should not have liked

to put my muzzle quite so near her crupper, in her state of probation, as the faithful do now she is canonised. I introduced oil of amomum, a perfume unknown among the Italians, into both bones. The first, like a fool, I sold for three hundred gold pieces: the remaining one shall bring me, with God's help, five hundred: proving its authenticity by identity of odour, and thus confounding the sceptic and scoffer. If men are wilfully blind, let them remain so they shall fall into the ditch when there is none to help them. In vain does the cresset shine from the tower, if the perverse will run upon the shoals and rocks. In vain does the cryer's voice cry "God is great,” if we hang back and budge, and will not lend him even our little finger, to try a portion of his strength thereon. But he saith, "I am a sword to the wicked, and a shield to the good, and a mountain-encampment fed with living waters, to him and him only who placeth his trust in me." Thus saith the strong and merciful, whose name be praised evermore, through his servant, the dust of his feet. "Did I not," saith he, "hide the prophet Jonas three days and three nights in the whale's belly? But my prophet Mahomet, whom I have chosen to be cover and clasp, pumice stone and thong, to the book of prophecy, hath lain three times three in a locust's."

Sergius. Quiet! quiet! never say that! The Catholics will think either that thou mockest or

that thou surpassest their impudence, and will rites of Cybele. An excellent regimen for priests! stone thee. but it would ruin monachism.

Mahomet. I will preach where there are no stones

big enough.

Sergius. They will crucify thee.

Mahomet. So far is the Greek church from a desire to imitate the Roman, that I am well convinced she would, for contradiction, in

Mahomet. I will preach where there are no trees stantly order both priests and monks to marry. high enough.

Sergius. They will burn thee alive.

Mahomet. I will preach where they shall be burnt alive themselves if they come near me, and without a faggot, a wisp of straw, or a match. Men are very humane in the desert it is only where there are meadows and corn-fields, and young nuns and choristers, that the gadfly of persecution pricks them.

Sergius. Thou talkest reasonably again, dropping in thy phraseology from the third heaven of orientalism.

Mahomet. Leave me my third heaven: we agreed upon it.

Sergius. We will pick the mule's thigh-bone together.

Mahomet. My mule, I promise thee, Sergius, shall carry both of us the first stage on our journey.

Again to business.

If my introduction is somewhat long, it is only that I may smoothen the path to arrangements of great advantage to thee, unoffered and unpremeditated in any former conversation. Although the Greeks had the earliest and best claim to supremacy, if indeed the Christian dispensation could admit any (which the first Roman bishops denied), the Emperor Mauritius wished the patriarch of Constantinople to possess it, that something like order might at length be established in his extensive and loose dominions, and that the lust of ecclesiastical power might be controlled by the presence of the imperial. This cost him his life from the pope, who himself did not live long enough to gather the fruits he had engrafted with so skilful and sharp a knife. Popes trip up one another, like children on the icy streets of Cyzicus. Gregory and Sabinian followed in rapid march: then came Bonifacius, who found on the throne Phocas, the murderer of his emperor and patron. Never were two such men so well met; they upheld one another; and Rome from that time forward hath preserved the authority she usurped. She hath always been an auxiliary of the audacious and the unjust, knowing that they pay best and promise most, and that right and equity, peace and honour, want nothing and expect nothing at her hands. Her thunders are composed from chaos; her light from the fragments of civilisation and the flames of war. We will take advantage of the weakness that wickedness leaves behind it, and of the hatred and contempt in which papal ambition is holden through Greece and Asia.

Sergius. I hope the Roman pontiff may at least order the priests to observe celibacy, if he does not subject them to another ceremony, taken, like the greater part of their worship, from the ancient

On this principle, in my institutions I am resolved to allow four wives to every man. In order to strengthen the oriental church against the occidental, and that you never may suppose I would take an undue advantage of you, I recommend that you should prove from the Scriptures how every tenth girl belongs to the religious, as clearly as every tenth lamb and wheat-sheaf, and that monks are more religious than priests. Sergius. Thou canst not prove the former. Mahomet. Nor thou?

Sergius. No.

Mahomet. Nor both together?
Sergius. I question it.

Mahomet. O thou infidel! the Scriptures contain everything.

Sergius. I have no mind, friend Mahomet, they should contain this. I will never have ten wives, nor four, nor any and, if the Ecumenical bishop orders those under his authority to repudiate theirs, certain I am that our church will exhort and command every priest, and perhaps every monk, to take one.

Mahomet. Well! what harm?

Sergius. Short-sighted mortal! what harm indeed! If she bids us have wives of our own, she will shortly come to such a pass that she will bid us have none but our own: a grievous detriment to the vital interests of the faith.

Mahomet, thou art the heartiest laugher under heaven. Prythee let thy beard cover thy throat again. There now! thy turban has fallen behind thee. Art thou in fits? By my soul, I will lay this thong across thy loins, if thou tossest and screamest in such a manner, to the scandal of the monastery.

Mahomet. Words are magical. The blindest and tenderest young saintling that ever was whelped, could not have whined so pathetically, A grievous detriment to the vital interests of the faith!'

Sergius. There is a time for all things. Now a serious word with thee.

Mahomet. Let me hear it. Sergius. Brother Pemphix, a worthy priest, hath espoused a beautiful creature. O the charms of such a friendship as mine with Pemphix! I am the confessor of the fair Anatolis. Ah, Mahomet! Mahomet! The delight of authority! the diviner power of persuasion! the glory of hearing the appeal, Now ought I, sweet Sergius?'

Mahomet. I discover all her beauty at those words.

Sergius. Perish then those words for ever! Her beauty ought to rest upon my heart, veiled and sacred: no thought should dwell with it, no idea rise from it, but mine.

Mahomet. Is she so very beauteous? Why

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Mahomet. Psha! they all are. God made the rose out of what was left of woman at the creation. The great difference is, we feel the rose's thorns when we gather it; and the other's when we have had it some time.

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Mahomet. I should rather like, if convenient to Sergius, to extend my empire over the plains of Sergius. The gales of Paradise breathe from this Damascus; chiefly because this empire must be opening bud.

Mahomet. Gales never were given for one only. Sergius. The mild even-tempered Anatolis is the coyest and most difficult young creature; and Pemphix complained to me about it, a few days after their union.

"Canst thou do nothing with her, brother Sergius? Try, for the love of God! Rouse thyself! rouse thyself! Be resolute! be brotherly. Meditation is an excellent thing, but man was also made for action."

extended by the sword, which is tempered nowhere in such perfection as by the waters of Abbana and Pharphar.

Sergius. I demur to this. Mahomet. I would engage to give thee in exchange the whole of Europe.

Sergius. Mahomet, thou art ambitious.

Mahomet. To serve my friend; otherwise, no mortal was ever so far removed from it. I have many other faults; none however which a friend can suffer from, or ought to see.

Mahomet. In the plains of Damascus I myself Sergius. Although I little doubt that any planam fain to take exercise. Many gales of Paradise sible new religion would subvert the old rottenness blow about these gardens, and over the banks of that lies accumulated around us, now that people these little streams. We have some pleasant spots find the priests of Christ assuming the garb and in Arabia, more in Idumea; but he who possesseth language of despots, with the temper and trade Syria may hold in contempt the possessors of all of executioners, yet it may be the labour of years the earth beside. Love, and enjoy for ever, Ana-to penetrate with an army from the centre of tolis: retain to thy last breath the pleasure of discoursing on her in confidence, and of forbidding thy friend to think about her! Chide him if he mention her; hate him if he ask nothing concerning her. If he smile, detest his impudence; if he look grave, abhor his insensibility.

Arabia into this country.

Mahomet. Of two or three at most. I have had visions that promise me Syria.

Sergius. Mahomet, the system I laid down for thee contains no visions.

Mahomet. Many spring from it.
Sergius. Thou wouldst alter it, I see.

Mahomet. It was too pure: people have fed upon prodigies: they must have them still. Sito

Sergius! mayest thou long do thus! Earth can afford thee, Heaven can promise thee, nothing more. Sergius. Yet, Mahomet, on cooler thoughts, dear to me as is Anatolis, I am not disposed to resignate the native of a watery plain upon the mounthe power and authority we should participate, and which I am weary of expecting.

Mahomet. Wait but a little while. Everything is most promising in Arabia. It is a difficult matter in my country to persuade the hearers even of our wildest stories that they are but fiction. Where there is such a thirst for the marvellous, it is easier to equip a new religion than a new camel. We must be daring. In spite of thy advice, I am resolved to prove that I have been up in heaven.

Sergius. Take heed! take heed! they can not believe that.

Mahomet. They will not believe a word of truth, until they believe many a falsehood. I must have witnesses.

Sergius. Here lies the difficulty. Let me send to Rome for them. . indeed to any part of Italy: it would ruin thee to purchase them here; the rogues are so exorbitant.

tain, and he will regret the warm comfortable fogs and the low fleeting lights of his marsh.

I would continue on the best terms with my adviser and guide; but verily my entrails yearn for the good people of Damascus.

Sergius. Leave them to me; and, if thy entrails yearn, take a goblet of cyprus.

Mahomet. I dare not drink wine: it aggravates my malady, the only one to which I am subject. Another inspiration here comes over me. I will forbid the use of this beverage. Why should others enjoy what I can not?

Sergius. True religionist! But, Mahomet! Mahomet! will vision upon vision, revelation upon revelation, supersede this delicious habit! Relinquish such an impracticable conceit. Forbid wine indeed! God himself, if he descended on earth, and commanded it in a louder and clearer voice than that at which the creation sprang forth, unless first he altered the composition both

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of body and soul, would utterly fail in this commandment.

Mahomet. I will order it: I will see it executed: for now thou urgest me. Yea, Sergius! men shall abstain from wine in all those regions of the earth where wine hath fragrance and captivation: and they shall continue to drink it and be damned where it is nauseous and fiery and Ethiopian in complexion: and the priests in those regions shall drink the most of it. Thus saith the Lord.

Sergius. He hath said many things which nobody minds. If whole nations abstain from wine, by any ordinance, prophetic or angelic, and from such wine as Syria and Cyprus and Chios and Crete afford us, there will be a miracle not resembling most others; no miracle of a moment, witnessed by the ignorant and run away with by the impostor, a sacrilege to examine; but a miracle to be touched and interrogated, as long, as attentively, as intrinsically, as the most incredulous could require, and such as all the world must acknowledge to be irresistible, and must bend before its divinity.

Mahomet. I do not desire all the world: let me have but Asia, if I can win it over to the faith. Sergius. Win it over and welcome, if thou canst. Mahomet. Faith is so strong in me, I can do 'all things.

Sergius. Do them: leave me Anatolis and the patriarchate, just as they both are now. Mahomet. I begin to imagine and believe that many of those things which I would have communicated as visions, are realities.

Sergius. Thou wilt succeed the better for thinking it.

Mahomet. God guides us mysteriously and changes us miraculously.

Sergius. He doth indeed, if he hath made a religionist of thee.

Mahomet. "God, he is God, and Mahomet is his prophet." By the Eternal! those words are divine.

Sergius. They will be, by the Eternal! if they only win thee some three or four stout cities in Arabia, and deliver into thy hands, with some rich caravan, about as many (or rather more) unbelieving girls, ready and ripe for conversion and ablution, with faces a whit nearer in colour to the snow than to the sands; such as Paphlagonia and Armenia send us, by the blessing of the Lord.

Mahomet. Hitherto, when I dreamed that thou madest to me any cession of territory for the plantation of the faith, thou didst give me thy blessing and cede it.

Sergius. And thou didst to me in like manner. But now thy dreams cover nation after nation; let us agree, my friend Mahomet, to dream no more. Lie on thy left side, man, on thy noble camel-hair couch, white and black like a zebra (as thou boastest in thy poetry), and never turn thy face again toward Syria.

Mahomet. This seems, my friend, like a threat. Sergius. Say rather, like divination.

Mahomet. I can divine better than thou canst. Sergius. Contentment is better than divination or visions. Thou wert born and educated in Arabia: and nothing can transcend the description thou hast given me of thy native country.

Mahomet. All native countries are most beautiful; yet we want something from them which they will not give us. Our first quarrels of any seriousness are with them; as the first screams and struggles of infants, the first tearing of robes and sobs of anger, are against their mothers.

Delightful is it to bathe in the moonsea on the sands, and to listen to tales of genii in the tent : but then in Arabia the anxious heart is thrown into fierce and desperate commotion, by the accursed veil that separates beauty from us. There we never see the blade of that sweet herbage rise day after day into light and loveliness, never see the blossom expand; but receive it unselected, unsolicited, and unwon. Happy the land where the youthful are without veils, the aged without suspicion; where the antelope may look to what resting-place she listeth, and bend her slender foot to the fountain that most invites her.

Odoriferous gales! whether of Deban or of Dafar, if ye bring only fragrance with you, carry it to the thoughtless and light-hearted! carry it to the drinker of wine, to the feaster and the dancer at the feast. If ye never have played about the beloved of my youth, if ye bring me no intelligence of her, pass on! away with you!

Sergius. We may be with the girl we love in many places; so many, that we lose the recollection.

Mahomet. Is that possible? Then you do not sit very near her.

Sergius. Yes, and touch her.

Mahomet. A young girl? beautiful? affectionate? before marriage? Do not nod, but tell me unequivocally.

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Mahomet. Alas! it is not worth my while. However, I am hale enough yet to make another visit to Damascus.

Sergius. As a preacher, I hope, not as a prophet. Mahomet. God's will be done.

Sergius. If thou, in spite of thy faith, shouldst yet happen to fail in thy enterprise, come into our brotherhood: if, in despite of thy rashness, thou shouldst succeed in it, thy friend Sergius follows thy standard, and brings over to thee nine-tenths of the church-establishment. But do not omit the Houris. Quote Solomon ; celebrate his wisdom and concubines; damn his idolatry of wood and stone when he had flesh and blood to idolize;

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