hat 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. 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 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 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 author-craft are of small amount to
that. One would say the primary character of the Koran is this of its
_genuineness_, of its being a _bona-fide_ book. Prideaux, I know, and
others have represented it as a mere bundle of jugglerie