ief. One day, in England, when, in
the presence of his sister and a lady friend, he had thought fit to
enlarge on a number of purely fictitious misdeeds, he was put to some
shame. His sister having in vain tried by signs to stop him, the friend
at last cut him short with: "Am I to admire you, Mr. Burton?" And he
accepted the reproof. Still, he never broke himself of this dangerous
habit; indeed, when the murder report spread abroad he seems to have
been rather gratified than not; and he certainly took no trouble to
refute the calumny.

On another occasion he boasted of his supposed descent from Louis XIV.
"I should have thought," exclaimed a listener, "that you who have such
good Irish blood in your veins would be glad to forget your descent from
a dishonourable union."

"Oh, no," replied Burton vehemently, "I would rather be the bastard of a
king than the son of an honest man."

Though this was at the time simply intended to shock, nevertheless
it illustrated in a sense his real views. He used to insist that the
offspring of illicit or unholy unions were in no way to be pitied if
they inherited, as if often the case, the culture or splendid physique
of the father and the comeliness of the mother; and instanced King
Solomon, Falconbridge, in whose "large composition," could be read
tokens of King Richard, [138] and the list of notables from Homer to
"Pedro's son," as catalogued by Camoens [139] who said:

"The meed of valour Bastards aye have claimed
By arts or arms, or haply both conjoined."

The real persons to be pitied, he said, were the mentally or physically
weak, whatever their parentage.

28. El Islam.

Burton now commenced to write a work to be called El Islam, or the
History of Mohammedanism; which, however, he never finished. It opens
with an account of the rise of Christianity, his attitude to which
resembled that of Renan. [140] Of Christ he says: "He had given an
impetus to the progress of mankind by systematizing a religion of the
highest moral loveliness, showing what an imperfect race can and may
become." He then dilates on St. Paul, who with a daring hand "rent
asunder the ties connecting Christianity with Judaism." "He offered to
the great family of man a Church with a Diety at its head and a religion
peculiarly of principles. He left the moral code of Christianity
untouched in its loveliness. After the death of St. Paul," continues
Burton, "Christianity sank into a species of