the Prophet, and the decisions of the four Mahometan Patriarchs. The mufti, who is at once the head of the law and the head of the state, forms the only check devised by the constitution upon the supreme power. His person is held to be inviolable; and he is the only arbiter of the conformity of the sultan to these transcendant sources of law. He is supposed to be empowered to pronounce sentence of deposition against a sultan who should invade them. But it happens, on the other hand, that this inconvenient inviolability of the person of the mufti, as such, is got rid of by a sentence of deposition pronounced by the sultan against the mufti, on the occurrence of which the infallibility ceases. Practically, therefore, the only safeguard of the constitution rests in the alertness of the mufti in first pronouncing, before he is himself reciprocally pronounced against.

6

The Ulema, or order of lawyers, was entirely the creation of the same prince; and it affords the fairest evidence of the Ottoman civilisation which the legislation of the Mahometan world has exhibited in that period. Regular systems of study, grades of rank, and schemes of promotion, from legists to judges, were then established. Let us quote, on this head, the professor's words :

"Mahomet established and endowed numerous public schools of the higher order, or colleges, called Medresses, in addition to the elementary schools, called Mektebs, that are to be found in every quarter of every town The students at the Medresses went through ten regular courses of grammar, syntax, logic, metaphysics, philology, the science of tropes, the science of style, rhetoric, geometry, and astronomy. This is a curriculum which will certainly bear comparison with those of Paris and Oxford in the middle of the fifteenth century. The Turkish collegian, who had mastered these ten subjects, received the title of Danis-chmend (or gifted with knowledge'); and in that capacity, like the western Masters of Arts, instructed the younger students."

So far, so like the system first enunciated by the Paris University. But the zeal of the Mahometan finally surpassed that of the Christian.

"To become a member of the Ulema, it was necessary to commence and complete an elaborate course of study of the law, to pass repeated examinations, (!) and to take several successive degrees. While care was thus taken to make the Ulema consist of men of the highest learning and abilities, great outward honour, liberal endowments, and many important privileges, were conferred on those who attained that rank."-Vol. i. pp. 169-171.

KING ARTHUR AND THE SANGREAL.

35

We have here endeavoured to trace the rise and establishment of the Mahometan power in Europe; the character of its political institutions, and the historical relations of its government with the Christian states. We thus see before us the marvellous anomaly of an anti-Christian state developing free notions of internal and external policy; aiming to be an European empire in all but its religious creed; and even, for the while, overshadowing those Christian empires themselves. But we have also seen how a state, not endowed with those elastic powers which the Christian religion alone. can supply, by bringing home civilisation to the door of each member of the community, has fallen step by step, and now dwells under the protectorate of those that it once sought to overthrow. This is the justice of Christian history, and the triumph of the Christian faith.

ART. III.-1. Arthour and Merlin: a Metrical Romance now first edited from the Auchinleck MS. (Printed for the Abbotsford Club). Edinburgh: 1838.

2. The Byrth, Lyf, and Actes of King Arthur, of his noble Knyghtes of the Round Table, their marveyllous enquestes and aduentures Thachyeuying of the Sanc Greal: and in the end le Morte D'Arthur. With an Introduction and Notes, by ROBERT SOUTHEY, Esq. London: 1817. 3. Le Morte d'Arthur. The Adventures of Sir Launcelot du Lake. (Printed for the Roxburghe Club). London: 1819.

HISTORY has two phases-the true and the ideal-the one the record of life as acted, the other the record of life as imagined: each of them is full of interest to us, the former, as showing what men really did; the latter, as showing what they conceived right or possible to be done. The past is like a long corridor filled with statues-the heroes of real history-behind which are painted windows, streaming with sunlight, on whose dazzling brightness we catch now and then mysterious glimpses of the heroes of poetry and legends. And yet in spite of their indistinct unreality these imaginary pictures have often far more fascination for us than the others their brilliance, their unearthliness, their very impossibility, robes them in a glory which acts upon us like a spell, rivetting our attention, and enforcing our admiration. The more we know of a man's life-however great or noble may be-the less are we inclined to look at him as a hero:

he

he becomes to us a mere flesh-and-blood being like ourselves, liable to human accidents, and yielding to human infirmities. But when all that we know of him is his glory and his greatness, we look at him almost as a being of a higher order, we connect with him no idea of weakness, we regard him with unmingled reverence and delight. And thus, when the Marlboroughs and Wellingtons of real history come before our mental vision, girt with the many failings of ordinary men, they shrink almost into insignificance compared with those whose histories are more shrouded in a hazy mist of fancied glory-the Hectors and Æneases of fiction.

This arises from a necessity of our nature: we have all of us an admiration for noble deeds, and a vague kind of faith in the past, which cannot find satisfaction in sober chronicles of men who were "subject to like passions as we are.” Our hero-worship must have for its object something far different from what we see around us every day: it longs for some ideal which common-place humanity cannot reach: it seeks for men who display the marvellous in every phase of their existence. It cannot tolerate human frailties if they at all cloud the glory of the hero, and, spell-bound by its own incantation, it can see nothing but magnificent pictures of the superhuman, where others see only smoke, and gloom, and feeble apparitions. It carries its abnegation of heroweakness so far as to deny to the chief demi-gods of its pantheon not merely ordinary humanity, but ordinary mortality. The Greeks could not conceive of their Heracles as unable with all his might to combat and vanquish death; they were fain to represent him as yielding for a moment, but then rising up on the wings of his divinity to a higher life. And so in after times: the mediævals could not adore one whose life was limited like their own-who was overcome by a single foe, even though that foe was the common foe of all—and accordingly Frederick Barbarossa was imagined to be merely resting awhile from the toils of earth in the rock-caverns of Thuringia, to re-appear some day with tenfold might, and exert an overpowering sway over the world of the future. And again, our own Arthur (Arturus Rex quondam, rexque futurus') was deemed incapable of ordinary death: it would have been an imperfection in him for which not even unearthly bravery could atone, so that he, too, was pictured as slumbering still in the vales of Avalon, one day to awake as the world's regenerator.

We find, then, that man longs for some object of heroworship a little higher than himself; not so high as to have

THE USE OF LEGENDARY WRITING.

37

escaped altogether from corporeality, but yet high enough to seem something more than ordinarily human. He looks carelessly at his own true shadow, but stands in bewilderment of adoration before some gigantic and distorted reflection, such as that which travellers see of themselves on the summit of the Pyrenees. He seeks refuge, in short, in LEGENDS.

But there are many, probably, who look at legends in a very different light-who form heroes for themselves by magnifying the characters of real history, and consider legends as mere child's play, the relics of an inferior stage of the world's development. This leads us to a more definite inquiry into their nature and necessity; and, first, let us look at them in the abstract.

We have been striving to show how that men, sated with the wearisome monotone which runs through daily life, and the many imperfections of merely human heroes, pant for something higher, and find their satisfaction only in those half-true, half-ideal, images of the past which are too far off to admit of close scrutiny, and too much bathed in glory to allow the imputation of human weakness. That this is a feeling which has everywhere and always existed, is proved by the fact, that its fruits, in the form of legends, have been found in every country, in every age. It cannot, therefore, be despised as unnatural, nor can its blossomings be scorned as morbid offshoots of superstition: for the tenacity with which men have clung to them, and the earnestness with which they have regarded them, is a proof that they cannot be utterly useless-that they are enwreathed round some part of our nature. They are, we think, at once a confession of imperfection, and an aspiration for something higher: an acknowledgment that ordinary life supplies us with no model on which we may type our characters, and yet the indulging of a hope that something may have existed in times gone by, like what we expect in the future; something far more perfectible than what we see around us, and embodying, more than anything we know of from experience, the holiest and best parts of our nature.

We see, then, in legends the reflex of our own conceptions of what is great and good within us; not indeed in its fullest development, but with the absence of some conditions of our present state. We have in them not an Elysium, but merely a Golden Age. The actors are not angels, nor yet men made perfect, they are merely men with much of ordinary frailty removed, and with something of the superhuman added. Our imaginations delight to think of earth, not entirely me

tamorphosed, but freed from some of its curse: they luxuriate in pictures of society as it would be if unshackled by the thousand ills that fetter it, or rather as it was before depravity had gathered such awful strength-before the air had been tainted with the breath of so many sons of sin. Legends tell us not of toil-they seem to ignore its existence, or at least to speak as though it had ceased to be a burden: they tell us not of our weaknesses and wearinesses, but seem to exclude almost altogether the idea that life has its night side as well as its sunlight, its gloom as well as its brightness. And although this view of things is partial and untrue, yet we must not be blind to the fact that men have always loved to look thus at the world: nor yet must we forget that even this one-sidedness is the fruit of what we could not willingly yield. It is, we repeat, at once an acknowledgment of imperfection and the sign of a higher aspiration: it tells us that men in all ages have felt that we are not what we might be now, but that it is possible for us to be better hereafter: it is the echo from the past of the truth which echoes also from the future—the truth of the possibility of the world's renovation.

Legends thus come with a jubilant voice to suffering and struggling men; they supply, in no small degree, the pantings of our humanity to see itself disencumbered of its weary burdens; they are wafted to us in soft low murmurings from the hazy distance of bygone time, cheering us as we march into the future. But more than this: they serve to call forth some of the noblest faculties we possess, which otherwise would slumber, forgotten and uncared for, in the seclusion of our hearts. We cannot doubt but that the work which each of us has to do is the best work that he can performthat none other could do that particular work so well, or God would have commissioned him to do it: nor yet can we doubt, but that although our mission be amongst the lowliest and most toil-stricken, yet it is one which can bring into action every noble faculty of our nature. But since it is impossible that our faculties should all be developed in the same way, or employed about the same subjects, it not unfrequently happens that other modes of development, and other subjects for exercise, strike us as being nobler, in kind, if not in degree, than our own. We have all, for example, the faculty of courage and yet we cannot all be soldiers, nor yet can we be content with fighting bravely in daily life, or forming pictures of real battles; for as with heroic men, so with heroic acts, the nearer and clearer they are, the more does their