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. Mahomet'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 pellmell 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 get this confused coil of a Koran fairly off
your hands, and have it behind you at a distance, the essential type
of it begins to disclose itself; and in this there is a merit quite
other than the literary one. If a book come from the heart, it will
contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small
amount to that. One would say the primary character of the Koran is
that of its _genuineness_, of its being a _bona-fide_ book. Prideaux,
I know, and others have represented it as a mere bundle of juggleries;
chapter after chapter got-up to excuse and varnish the autho