were beyond question. Every leader he sent upon plundering or admonitory
expeditions bore witness to his efficiency and his zeal. He subjected the
Muslim to a discipline that brought out their best qualities of tenacity
and daring. He would not allow his soldiery to become individual
plunderers, but insisted that the booty should be equally divided. In the
beginning he possessed few horsemen, but he rapidly produced a squadron
of cavalry as soon as he became convinced of their usefulness. His
readiness to accept advice as to the defence of Medina proved the
salvation of the city. Under him the military prowess of Islam had ample
scope, for he gave his leaders complete freedom of action; the result was
visible in the supreme fighting quality of Ali, Omar, and Hamza, while
the chances of achieving glory under his banner were the moving motives
of the conversion of Khalid and Abbas. He subdued internecine warfare,
and by a bold stroke united the warrior instincts of Arabia against
external foes, laying upon them the sanction of religion and the promise
of eternal happiness.

Though unskilled in the mechanism of knowledge--he could neither read nor
write--he has left his mark upon the literature of his age and the years
succeeding him. The Kuran was the sum of his inspiration, the expression
in poetic and visionary language of his beliefs and ideals. He found the
medium prepared. The Arabs had long previously evolved a poetry of their
own which lived not in written words, but in their traditional songs.
Mahomet's first flush of inspiration, which waned before the heaviness of
his later tasks, is the cumulation of that wild and fervid art with the
breath of the desert urgent within it.

The Kuran was never written down during his lifetime, but was collected
into a jumble of fragments, "gathered together from date-leaves and
tablets of white stone, and from the breasts of men," by Zeid in the
first troublous years of the Caliphate. We have inevitably lost much of
its original fire, and its effect is weakened by any translation into the
unsuitable medium of modern speech. But that it is a valuable
contribution to the literature of its country cannot be doubted,
especially in the earlier portions, before Mahomet's love of harangue and
the necessity of some vehicle by which to make his political dictates
known had transformed its style into the bald reiterative medley of its
later pages.

Through it all runs the fire of his