tween
revolutions so widely different in their aims and results, though
following each other closely in the outward sequence of incident and
character--would be between the Puritan struggle and the first
revolutionary period in France, and between 1688 and the flight of
James II, and 1830 and the abdication of Charles X. Both Guizot, whose
memoirs of the English Revolution had appeared in 1826, and his master
Louis Philippe intended that France should draw this comparison--the
latter by the title "King of the French" adroitly touching the
imagination or the vanity, whilst deceiving the intelligence, of the
nation.

[4] I have employed the phrase "Islam of Omar" throughout the present
work as a means of designating the period of nine-and-twenty years
between the death of Mohammed, 12th Rabi I. 11 A.H., June 8th, A.D.
632, and the assassination of Ali, 17th Hamzan, 40 A.H., January 27th,
A.D. 661. Even in the lifetime of Mohammed the genius and personality
of Omar made themselves distinctly felt. During the caliphate of Abu
Bekr the power of Omar was analogous to that of Hildebrand during the
two pontificates which immediately precede his own. Omar's is the
determining force, the will, and throughout his own, and the caliphates
of Osman and Ali which follow, that force and that will impart its
distinction and its direction to the course of the political life of
Islam. The nature and extent of the sway of this extraordinary mind
mark an epoch in world-history not less memorable than the Rome of
Sulla or the Athens of Pericles. From the Arab historians a portrait
that is fairly convincing can be arranged, and the threat or promise
with which he is said to have announced the purpose for which he
undertook the caliphate is consonant with the impression of his
appearance and manners which tradition has preserved--"He that is
weakest among you shall be, in my sight, as the strongest until I have
made good his rights unto him; but he that is strongest shall I deal
with like the weakest until he submit himself to the Law."

[5] Thwarted in his schemes of world-conquest in the East by Nelson and
Sir Sidney Smith, Bonaparte returned to pursue in Europe the same
visionary but mighty designs. In Napoleon's career the voyage on the
frigate _Muiron_ marks the moment analogous to Caesar's return from
Gaul, January, 49 B.C. But Caius Julius crossed the Rubicon at the
head of fifty thousand men. Bonaparte returned from Egypt al