far over the temples.-(Extremum frontis latus supra tempora prominens exporrectum ;) i.e., as Mr. Donovan would say, "Ideality and wonder very large." His eyebrows were long and thin; and between them was conspicuously seen a vein, the swelling of which was a sign of anger. Between his shoulders was a mole or mark as large as a pigeon's egg, which his followers called the sign of his Prophetship. Other particulars even more minute are added, such as the longa cilia palpebrarum, the villosa admodum brachia et spatula, and the presence of a thin ductus pilorum a jugulo usque ad umbilicum. He had a powerful memory; did not speak much, and would remain long silent; was extremely affable, and so studiously polite that he would listen patiently to the most tedious speaker, and always remain scated till his visitors chose to depart, notwithstanding that, as we know, such politeness cost him an effort. He often visited his friends, and asked how matters were going on with them. When talking in an easy way he had a habit of sitting with his hands folded, striking his left thumb with his right. When he wanted to persuade he stretched the palm of his hand wide out; when anything surprised him he raised it upwards; when he was pleased with anything he looked down. He could not contain himself if he heard any one tampering with the truth, but became angry immediately. He milked his own ewes, and mended his own shoes and garments. In his living he was temperate and even abstemious; fasting often, and never making remarks on what was set before him. He had a passion, however, for ointments and sweet scents, and was wont to say that there were two things in the world that particularly exhilarated and excited him-women and perfumes. Whenever he looked at a woman, says one of his contemporaries and followers, he began to rub his brow, and smooth his hair, as if trying to please her; and once he was seen to arrange his hair, looking at himself in the water. When sleeping, says another, he breathed gently, and never snored-nunquam ronchos emittens. He was extremely liberal to all and sundry, especially to the poor; and most scrupulously just in his dealings. He liked a laugh, and sometimes joked himself. Once an old woman came to him, and asked him to pray to God that she might be admitted into paradise. "O mother of such a one," was his reply, "there will be no old women in paradise at all;" on which she was going away weeping, when it was explained to her that the Prophet's meaning was, that in paradise women would not be nor become old. Still better is the following, told by the Prophet's wife Ayesha herself: "Once, as the Prophet was mending his shoe the perspiration broke out on his face, so that I could not see the peculiar light that used to radiate from it. By Allah!'

said I, 'if Abu Kaber were to see you now, he would learn whether that poem of his about you is more applicable to you than to any one else.' Then said he, But what poem is it that Abu Kaber has written about me?' He says,' replied I, 'nothing less than this: When I beheld the Prophet I was all overjoyed; his countenance shines as the cloud shines glittering with glory.' Hearing this, the Prophet, wiping away the perspiration, and showing a merrier face than usual, said, Ayesha, God give thee a great reward." As nice an anecdote of its kind as we know, and one calculated to leave a very agreeable impression of the Prophet and his household ways! His lasting affection, too, for his first wife Kadijah, asserted once in a very emphatic manner even to the face of his later and younger favourite, the saucy Ayesha, when she teased him on the subject, is a fact which it is highly pleasant to contemplate.

One word, in conclusion, in lieu of that elaborate appreciation of the faith and system of Islam, with which, had space permitted, it would have been so fitting to follow up our sketch of the life and character of its founder.

And first, regarded historically, and in its relation to the state of religious anarchy, which both in its native soil and in other parts of the East it was the means of displacing, there can be no doubt, we think, that the Theism promulgated by Mahomet, noble protest as it was against the Atheism and Sadduceeism inherent in the heart of man, and incorporating, as it did, such essential portions of the Hebrew revelation, was a real step in advance, a revolution of vast moment to all that were affected by it. To the Arabic race, in particular, to whom the publication of the Koran was not only the origin of a new polity, but also the commencement of a new literature, Islamism was an intellectual boon. The Mussulman recognises this when he names the age prior to Mahomet, the Age of Ignorance. Even among the Arabians themselves, however, there have been sceptics who have formed a different opinion. "There were good heads," says Goethe, "who recognised a better style of writing in the old time than that exhibited in the Koran, and maintained that had not God chanced once for all to reveal His will, and a determinate legal system through Mahomet, the Arabians would have spontaneously climbed by degrees to a similar or even higher position, and developed purer conceptions in a purer language. Others, more audacious, have asserted that Mahomet injured their language and literature to an extent that they can never recover." These, however, are but the complaints of the Zoiluses.

Considered absolutely, on the other hand, or in comparison

with what, as civilized men and partakers of the Christian inheritance, we are able to set in contrast with it, Islamism assumes quite another look and value. In the first place, created, as it was, under the pressure, and within the mould, so to speak, of a narrow physical conception of the universe, it wants that scientific transparency and largeness, without which it could now be a tenement for no cultivated mind, and which, not diminishing in the least its moral intensity, even a natural Theist might have succeeded in giving to it. In the Theism of Plato, Pagan and Polytheistic as it was, we see the earth hung like a dark ball in the midst of an azure universe, through which stars glitter at intervals, and round whose outer bosses the chariots of the gods career. In the Theism of Mahomet, on the other hand, vastly more terrible on the conscience as it is than that of Plato, we seem to stand on a flat unspacious plain, down over which, and so near above us that we can scarcely breathe, there presses an impenetrable iron roof. Further, taking the higher view that still remains, and permitting ourselves for a moment the final contrast, where in İslamism—all its natural merits allowed for to the utmost-shall we find aught of that exquisite adaptation to the nature and necessities of man as a sinful and sin-loving being, by which Christianity is so wonderfully distinguished; aught of that transcendent reciprocation of offer on the one hand, and aspiration of free grace and human acceptance on the other, by which heaven and earth are brought nigh, and an invisible descending cone, as it were, is interposed, the basis of which is the whole face of the supernatural, and the apex of which is in the heart of man; aught, either, of that spirit of meekness and love which Christianity diffuses through life like a balm, and discharges on the world like a plenteous dew? Of the poverty of Islamism in all these respects, the present state of the Mahometan parts of the world is but too sad a confirmation. Many are the revolutions in the future to which the civilized man and the Christian ought to look forward with hope and desire; but of all these we know not one that should be more ardently expected than the dawn of a new day of power and progress on those patriarchal lands of the East wherein man was cradled, the rising of a new star especially for that little portion of them

"Over whose acres walked those blessed feet
That, eighteen hundred years ago, were nailed
For our advantage to the bitter cross."

Southey's Life and Correspondence.

225

ART. VII.-The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. Edited by his Son, The Rev. CHARLES CUTHBERT SOUTHEY, M.A. Vols. 2 and 3. 1850.

SINCE our last publication two more volumes of Mr. Cuthbert Southey's Life of his father have appeared, and the interest of the work continues undiminished. Such letters of the poet as have fallen into his son's hands form almost the whole materials from, which the narrative is framed. The letters, however, from which the son's narrative is put together, differ essentially from those published in the earlier part of the first volume, in which the poet endeavoured in advancing life to summon back his recollections of infancy and childhood. Such recollections are more or less vivid; but even where the affections are strongest and truest, the memory does not, cannot preserve the past. The picture is a fading one, and imagination is called in to perfect the outline or supply the colours. The process is not the less a process of the imaginative faculty that we are unconscious of any power but that of memory being called into active exercise; and we regard the portraits of Southey's uncles and aunts, and the heroes and heroines with whom he has peopled the dream-castles of his childhood with no more assured sense of their having had an existence in the world of realities than his Rodericks and Florindas, who, though the names be found in legends and chronicles, are the creations of the poet's mind as truly as the Ladarluds and Kailyals, who never had any other being than in romance. The pictures of Southey's relatives, given in his letters to Mr. May, affect us in precisely the same way as the Doctor Daniel Dove, and the Bhow Begum of the DOCTOR. The part of the work which more properly belongs to his son, is formed, as far as the work has yet gone, of letters written as the occasions of everyday life required, expressing, always very naturally and often very happily, such thoughts as the impulse of the passing moment suggested; the fixed opinions, too, of a man very opinionative, and often very unreasonably intolerant of all opposition, are repeated in letter after letter. These opinions are seldomn enforced by anything that can be properly called argument, of which, indeed, Southey appears to have been himself, in any true sense of the word, incapable, and of which from others he would seem to have been singularly impatient. Even in his formal works, and in the case of questions which demanded careful investigation and examination of principles, Southey assisted those who sought to form a judgment for themselves rather by accumulating authorities from old writers than by bringing the

VOL. XIII. NO. XXV.

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powers of an original thinker to the inquiry. In his letters it was not to be expected that powers of mind which had not been exhibited in his works should appear. Southey's best letters are those which are occupied with literary gossip, and unluckily for Mr. Cuthbert Southev's book, of this class of letters we find more in Mr. Robberds' Life of William Taylor, and in Sir Egerton Brydges' Autobiography, than he has as yet been able to give us. In the letters to Taylor and to Brydges we have-as also in those to his friends Bedford and Wynn, which are found in Cuthbert Southey's book-in addition to the opinionativeness never at any time absent, that which gives its true charm to Southey's correspondence and to much of his poetry-" the thousand phantasies unsought and undetained" that pass over the mind in a state of dreamy half-consciousness when it can scarcely be described as fully occupied or entirely active, when it is not so much thinking as playing with thoughts. But all Southey's letters, in whatever tone or temper they are written, to whomever or on whatever subject, are illustrative of the peaceful tenor of a fully occupied life; there is no effort in any of them-no display of any kind-no affectation. Those in the second and third volumes of "The Life and Correspondence" are in actual contrast with the autobiographical letters, and if it were not that the business of a man occupied with literature can scarcely be without interest to a very large class of readers, would have no better claim to publication than ordinary business letters. As it is we think they have been published at too great length. The mere fact that a letter has been written by Southey is not an adequate reason for its being printed. The fact that a letter was originally private-was written confidentially, is surely a reason why it should not be published; and though there may be easily imagined quite sufficient reasons to overweigh these considerations, yet it is for the person who prints private letters to make out such a case. The biographers of every man whose name is familiar to the public are sure to imagine that whatever relates to him has to all men an abiding interest, and if there be nothing to give offence to men still living, and, indeed, very often whether there be or not, every idle word becomes fixed in permanent and ineffaceable record. In one volume of biography, which we have been lately looking over, the bill of the upholsterer who furnished a poet's cottage is printed; in another a washer-woman's accounts and a tailor's day-books occupy pages upon pages; a third, mentioning a gentleman's marriage, gives three letters stating the fact, and nothing but the fact, which had never been a subject of dispute or doubt, and not content with this, adds an extract from a local newspaper, and a copy of the entry in the parish register. Why all this? Does it not