tion and life: the message sent direct out of Heaven, which
this earth has to conform to, and walk by; the thing to be read. Their
Judges decide by it; all Moslem are bound to study it, seek in it for
the light of their life. They have mosques where it is all read daily;
thirty relays of priests take it up in succession, get through the whole
each day. There, for twelve-hundred years, has the voice of this Book,
at all moments, kept sounding through the ears and the hearts of so many
men. We hear of Mohammedan Doctors that had read it seventy-thousand
times!

Very curious: if one sought for "discrepancies of national taste," here
surely were the most eminent instance of that! We also can read the
Koran; our Translation of it, by Sale, is known to be a very fair one. I
must say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome
confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness,
entanglement; most crude, incondite;--insupportable stupidity, in short!
Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran.
We read in it, as we might in the State-Paper Office, unreadable masses
of lumber, that perhaps we may get some glimpses of a remarkable man. It
is true we have it under disadvantages: the Arabs see more method in it
than we. Mohammed's followers found the Koran lying all in fractions, as
it had been written-down at first promulgation; much of it, they say, on
shoulder-blades of mutton flung pell-mell into a chest; and they
published it, without any discoverable order as to time or
otherwise;--merely trying, as would seem, and this not very strictly, to
put the longest chapters first. The real beginning of it, in that way,
lies almost at the end: for the earliest portions were the shortest.
Read in its historical sequence it perhaps would not be so bad. Much of
it, too, they say, is rhythmic; a kind of wild chanting song, in the
original. This may be a great point; much perhaps has been lost in the
Translation here. Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to
see how any mortal ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in
Heaven, too good for the Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed as a
_book_ at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody; _written_, so far as
writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever was! So much for national
discrepancies, and the standard of taste.

Yet I should say, it was not unintelligible how the Arabs might so love
it. When once you