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This ploughman of course is Piers. Mistaking the cause of the wayfarer's sorrows, he proffers "such good as God has sent." When he learns the real cause of the weeper's grief, he confirms his opinion of the friars in a diatribe against the whole body, and then teaches the pilgrim the Apostles' Creed. The poem concludes with a brief hortative and prayer.

It seems probable that some exaggeration may exist in these pictures of the ignorance of the friars; for they are constantly painted as very active in their vocation of mendicants, and possessed of many popular arts. If true, the simplest resolution of the problem would seem to be, that Christianity was really so corrupted by the Romish Church that the Gospels, and even the Creed, were abandoned for legends, lives of saints, and matter even more superstitious. One thing, however, is clear: these representations must have chimed in with the popular belief, and been generally true, if erroneous or exaggerated in some particulars. Had the "Vision" and the "Creed," the comic tales of Chaucer, and other works of those times, not been founded on fact, they would have dropped still-born from the penmen, without attaining popularity or permanence; for no genius can render palatable what is believed to be falsehood and slander. And if it be said that the works of Chaucer and of the Monk of Malvern contain a good deal besides attacks on the clergy, such is not the case with the Creed of Piers Ploughman, which is a fierce or mocking denunciation of the friars from beginning to end. Yet so effective was the poem in its own period, and so pertinaciously was it pursued by the churchmen, that no manuscript copy is known to exist of an earlier date than the first printed edition.

ART. III. THE GREAT ARABIAN.

The Life of Mahomet. By W. Muir, B.C.S. London: Smith, Elder, and Co.

WITH these two volumes Mr. Muir has worthily completed a great task. In a review of the former half of the work we commented slightly on its obvious defects, an occasional indifference to sound canons of evidence, and a tendency to overrate the undoubted value of unbroken tradition. But, reading his work as a whole, we are half disposed to retract even those gentle animadversions in our keen appreciation of the duty he has so successfully performed. His book is a distinct addition, if not to human at least to English learning; and the books of which that can be said are so few, that the inclination to criticise, however just, is almost forgotten in the rich pleasure of new and perfected knowledge. Our business in this Number is not with Mr. Muir, but with the great Arabian, whose life he has undertaken to narrate, and we may therefore state at once in what we conceive the special merit of this biography to consist. It is not a history of Mahometanism, or a diatribe against Mahomet, or even an analysis of the special influence Mahomet's opinions have exercised on the world. There are books of that sort enough and to spare, and the effect of them all has been to shroud the life of their hero in that dim cathedral gloom which covers as with a mist the lives of all great religious teachers, and through which their forms and acts are only fitfully apparent. The real life of the man, the successive steps by which he attained power, the influences which produced his opinions, and the circumstances which, if they did not produce him, at least allowed full scope for his grand and consecutive action, are lost in a cloud of opinions, till the bewildered Englishman falls back on Gibbon's imperfect but lucid narrative as a relief from the deluge of mere commentary. It is as difficult to extract any notion of Mahomet's actual life from the majority of books about him, as to compile a life of Kant from the libraries written on the Kantian philosophy. Mr. Muir has avoided that gross mistake. His work is a real life, a life as minute, as reasonable, and, with an exception here and there, as impartial, as if Mahomet had been only a king, a great politician, or a successful leader of revolution. The development of the man is shown as much as his full maturity. The slow and painful efforts by which he rose to power in Medina, the almost as slow operations by which he first sub

dued and then amalgamated the clans of the desert into one mighty and aggressive dominion, are set forth with a patient accuracy, which rather increases than weakens their native dramatic force. The reader sees clearly, without being directly taught, how far Mahomet was indebted to existing circumstances, and how far to his own genius, and discerns for the first time the true influence of that strange personnel, slaves and chiefs of clans, relatives and hereditary toes, among whom the prophet had to pass his daily and outer life. He comes to regard Mahomet at last in his true light, as a great man, instead of a mere abstraction, to predict his action in his own mind as a new obstacle reveals itself, to feel something of that glow of personal interest with which a clever boy traces the conquests of Alexander, or exults and desponds with the alternating fortunes of Cortez or Christopher Columbus.

To create such an impression about any man is no mean triumph; but to elicit it of Mahomet is a positive gain to the generation among whom it is produced. In the whole compass of knowledge, looking down all that stately line of figures whose mere names serve as the best landmarks of human history, there is not one whose life better deserves to be known, to become, as some of Shakespeare's characters have become, an integral part of thought rather than a subject for thought, than that of the great Arabian. That a man's opinions should circulate widely, survive himself, and help to modify human action for ages after he is forgotten, is, though a wonderful, not an infrequent phenomenon. That a man obscure in all but birth, brought up among an unlettered race, with no learning and no material resources, should by sheer force of genius extinguish idolatry through a hundred tribes, unite them into one vast aggressive movement, and, dying, leave to men who were not his children the mastery of the Oriental world, even this career, however wondrous, is not absolutely unique. But that a man of this kind, living humbly among his equals, should stamp on their minds the conviction that he whom they saw eat, and drink, and sleep, and commit blunders, was the vice-gerent of the Almighty; that his system should survive himself for twelve centuries as a living missionary force; that it should not merely influence but utterly remould one-fourth of the human race, and that fourth the unchangeable one; that it should after twelve centuries still be so vital that an Asiatic, base to a degree no

• Mahometanism is still widely propagated in India and Africa. In Africa it is marching south, and in India its gains are supposed to counterbalance its losses every where else. In Bengal alone the converts number thousands yearly, and one of the most serious dangers of the government arises from the frantic zeal of the new converts made by the Ferazee Mussulmans.

European can comprehend, should still, if appealed to in the name of Mahomet, start up a hero, fling away life with a glad laugh of exultation, or risk a throne to defend a guest; that after that long period, when its stateliest empires have passed away, and its greatest achievements have been forgotten, it should still be the only force able to hurl Western Asia on the iron civilisation of Europe;-this indeed is a phenomenon men of every creed and generation will at least be wise to consider. What this Mahomet was, and what he did, is a question the masters of the second Mahometan kingdom may well think as important as Pompey's intrigues or Diocletian's policy, and it is this which Mr. Muir has enabled them for the first time fully to comprehend. There is much to be told besides, and libraries will yet be exhausted in the description of all the effects which this man's life produced on the world; but of the life itself, of the manner of man Mahomet was, of the deeds he really did, and of the things he can be proved to have said, no man who can read Mr. Muir's book need henceforward remain ignorant. We shall, we believe, best serve our readers if we reduce for them, into a few pages, some idea of the life of the great man who is here presented. Our object in so doing, like Mr. Muir's, will not be to analyse opinions, except so far as they are indispensable to a true comprehension of his acts, but to give succinctly an accurate account of his career, passing somewhat lightly over the history already well known to Europeans, and depicting more in detail those facts which intervened between his assumption of supernatural knowledge and the complete success of his mission, an interval of which the popular histories make one unintelligible jumble. Throughout, it is as the great Arabian -the character in which he is not known, and not as the prophet, the character in which he is known-that we intend to consider him.

Mahomet was born at Mecca, in the autumn of the year 570 A.D.; the posthumous son of Abdallah, a younger son of the hereditary chief of the Koreish clan, and therefore of the highest and purest blood possible in Arabia; of the only blood, in fact, in which resided any claim, however slight, to superiority throughout the entire peninsula. Englishmen, deceived by the epithet "camel-driver," so often applied to Mahomet, are accustomed to consider him low-born, and, indeed, so greatly underrate both his own position and that of his country, that it is necessary to expend a few words in showing to what he really was born. Arabia, then, is not what Englishmen habitually conceive it to be, a mere sandy desert, flat as sands generally are, traversed by bands of half-starved horsemen, with two little but sacred cities, and a port which an English frigate can reduce

to reason by a bombardment. It is a vast, though secluded, peninsula, with an area 100,000 square miles greater than that of Europe west of the Vistula,-greater, that is, than the territories of four of the five Powers, with Germany, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Scandinavia, Poland, and Italy added thereto. This enormous region, so far from being a mere sandy plain, is traversed by high ranges of mountains, filled with broad plateaus, many of them as wide as European kingdoms, and full of magnificent, though dreary and awe-inspiring, scenery. The highest Arab tribes-and the point is one too often forgotten-are mountaineers; share in the fervid imagination, the brooding and melancholy thought, which have in all ages distinguished men bred on the higher regions of the earth. Even the aridity of the soil of Arabia, though great, is, as a political fact, seriously exaggerated, partly because the districts nearest to civilisation are the worst, partly because travellers select the winter for explorations, a time when even the fertile plains of Upper India look hideously desolate; but chiefly because the European mind has a difficulty in realising territorial vastness, or comprehending how enormous may be the aggregate of patches of cultivation spread over a peninsula like Arabia. When, some two years ago, the Governor of Aden was permitted to visit Lahej, he, filled like all other Englishmen with the "idea" of Arabia, was startled to find himself, only a few miles from his own crackling cinders, amidst pleasant corn-lands and smiling villages, in which dwelt a population showing every sign of prosperity and content. There are thousands of such spots in Arabia, to which the eternal boundary of the desert blinds all but the keenest observers. In such oases, scattered over the broad plateaus, and down the arid slopes, and amidst the half-watered valleys, dwelt, in the time of Mahomet, a series of clans, divided politically as much as the modern nations of Europe. What the aggregate of their numbers may have been is a point which for ages to come must remain uncertain. Orientals object to counting, and similes derived from the stars and the sands by the sea-shore satisfy only the imagination. Burckhardt believed them to be fourteen millions; and, tried by the only test observers can apply, that number is within the truth. It is nearly certain, that at one time during the second great outflow to conquer the world, Arabia had more than a million and a half of her children scattered over Western Asia and the shores of the Mediterranean. They colonised whereever they conquered; and from Syria to Tetuan, through a belt of country a thousand miles in depth, the basis of the population is still Arabian. It may be affirmed safely, that no race that ever existed ever sent ten per cent of its resident popula

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