time can clear them away; tragedy is at first bewilderment, hardly more than a sense of disquiet. It is this moment which is seized with such wonderful insight in the poem 'Departure,' a picture of grief which does not yet perceive that it is grief. The Azalea,' with its desolating contrast of perfumed warmth and chill solitude, touches even more consummately the actual reality of suffering. No mystic vision, no intangible abstraction, here lifts the mood into an air too rare for human sympathy and understanding. It is incredible that a man who in his poetry lived so persistently in an exotic world of his own should yet have been able to identify himself thus closely with life at the very moment when its prison-walls seem most insurmountable. two other well-known poems, 'The Toys,' and 'If I were dead,' the thought itself is scarcely more touching than the thought of that inaccessible spirit, for the most part so scornfully detached, sharing after all in such woundings as await strong and weak, with no other hope than lies open to the weakest.

In

'I have written little, but it is all my best; I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared time or labour to make my words true. I have respected posterity; and should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me.'

So Patmore wrote in the note which heads his final collection of poems. Popularity was nothing to him; and, though he had it in his own time, the narrow line which he faithfully followed seems now to have led him away from the possibility of it. Among the many greater writers who have devoted long lives to poetry, he stands out, perhaps almost alone, as one who allowed no consideration to turn him aside from the exact path which he saw was his own. It was indeed his own; the greatest and broadest imaginations have not achieved more profoundly original work. Such new forms of beauty, offered by an interpreter so little inclined to conciliate or to explain, may be long in producing their full effect; but it is impossible to doubt that they contain the indestructible element which, as time goes on, will make them more and more conspicuous among the falling ruins of their day.

PERCY LUBBOCK.

Art. V.-MOHAMMED AND ISLAM.

Annali dell' Islām. Compilati da Leone Caetani, Principe di Teano. Vol. 1: Introduzione; Dall' anno 1 al 6 н. Vol. II: Dall'anno 7 al 12 H. Con tre carte geografiche, due piante, parecchie illustrazioni, e l' indice alfabetico dei volumi I e II. Ulrico Hoepli, editore-libraio della real casa Milano, 1905-7. Fol.

THE biographies of the Prophet Mohammed issued in the nineteenth century illustrate the truth of the maxim that the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, if strength and swiftness in this region be represented by acquaintance with the subject. The public verdict, which Horace assures us is as often wrong as right, assigns the prize without hesitation to an author who was not an Orientalist, and had access to a small portion of the material. Washington Irving's is the only Life of Mohammed that has been a great literary success, has been re-issued in a variety of shapes, and won admission to Tauchnitz's academy of popular favourites. Others may be studied for instruction, but his is read for pleasure. He enlists the sympathy of his readers for his hero, and the hero's helpers, the faithful Khadijah, the brave Ali, deprived time after time of his rightful inheritance, the mighty warrior Khalid, the loyal and devoted Abu Bekr; but he has no doctrine to inculcate, no theory, religious or philosophical, to uphold. If Oriental history has few readers, the success of Washington Irving's monograph shows that the historians rather than the history are responsible for this.

After Washington Irving comes Sir William Muir, though at a long distance; for his scholarly and admirable work was never actually reprinted, but survived for a time in an abridged edition, of which there was more than one impression, yet which appears now to have fallen to the remainder booksellers. Sprenger's standard treatise seems to have had a second impression, but it has not been reprinted since 1869; no writer on the subject has come to it with fuller knowledge or a keener historical instinct, though he blunders shockingly when he leaves the region of Islam; his Greek, his Hebrew, and his Syriac afford food for mirth. His attempt at an

English Life was less successful than his German work, as the former was never even finished. A short and popular life appeared at Hanover in 1863, by Nöldeke, the most venerated of Orientalists; the 1863 edition appears never to have been exhausted. Weil's Life, in several ways epoch-making, and the basis of Washington Irving's, has not been reprinted since its appearance in 1843, though the rest of his history of Islam has had the honour of a photographic reproduction. French writers on the subject have been no more successful in winning popular favour, though the theme has been handled by many, including Barthélémy St Hilaire. The secret of interesting the world in Mohammed and his successors seems to have been revealed to Washington Irving and to no one else, unless Syed Ameer Ali's 'Spirit of Islam,' which is popular among the Indian Moslems, and not unpopular in this country, should be mentioned in this context.

The Prince of Teano does not-at any rate at firstcontemplate being read by a large public, since his work is only printed in 250 copies, and of these a large number are generously presented by him to his fellow-students. It is planned on a great scale, being destined to cover the whole history of Islam, and executed in magnificent style; should he complete it, as every Arabic scholar hopes he may, his history will rank in bulk with the most sustained efforts in this branch of literature which any language can show. Rampoldi, who wrote a history of Islam in twelve octavo volumes about a century ago, will be easily surpassed. For the prince's two first volumes, comprising over 2300 folio pages, bring the history down only to the commencement of the Caliphate. How many will be required to cover the well-chronicled thirteen centuries that separate us from that time?

The vastness of the plan is due to the method employed by the prince, who reproduces the content of the original authorities, sometimes without condensation, in numbered paragraphs, to which notes are attached, giving the results of modern research, including the author's own, where there are conflicting traditions, or where the veracity of the narratives is questionable on other grounds. Where the author launches out into lengthy discussions, he shows that he can write with vigour and

eloquence in the noble language of Italy; but whether it be the fact that fine paper and types help the reader more than they are ordinarily supposed to do, or whether it be that the prince possesses skill similar to that which belonged to de Sacy, who could make grammatical paragraphs pleasant reading, his book takes less time to peruse and leaves a more definite impression on the mind than many of far smaller compass which deal with the same events. And owing to the profound and exhaustive studies on which it is based, over which it is clear that the prince has spared neither labour nor expense, it seems likely that his Annali will in any case form the groundwork for future researches, as summing up the results acquired by the labours of the nineteenth century, and securing intending workers from wasting their efforts on problems that have already been solved.

The sources for the Life of the Prophet appear to be very numerous, but critical inspection restricts them considerably. It might have been expected that so remarkable a personage would have had a Boswell-some friend and admirer who aspired to the honour of being the great man's biographer, and who therefore kept notes and collected materials till the time arrived when a large circle would be glad of an exhaustive memoir containing the truth about him. If the idea did not occur to an Arab, because no Arab had till then composed a biography or other prose monument, there were converts from the Jewish and Christian communities to whom models for such a performance must have been familiar. Though the Prophet's own notions about the nature of the 'Injil' were hazy, some of his followers must have been aware that the Gospels were biographies of the Christian Saviour and might have guessed that an authentic account of the founder of the new religion, destined to supersede all others, would bring its author lasting fame. That no such memoir was attempted agrees with a tradition according to which the Koran tolerated no written literature beside itself. Letters might be written and contracts, but a book would constitute a possible rival to God's book, and it was not permissible to write one. Since the proof of the divine character of the Koran lay in its inimitable eloquence, the risk of such rivalry was serious. A man who had shown the Meccans that he, too, could tell the

stories of the Ancients, had been executed by the Prophet's order as a specially dangerous enemy; because, it would seem, ' de gustibus non est disputandum,' and there might be persons with the bad taste or the want of candour to prefer some other style to that ascribed to the Divine Being. Translations of the older Scriptures might have been thought not only innocent, but even necessary, since the Koran claims to be in agreement with them; but the perusal of such translations was not permitted. Eulogistic odes would appear to have been the only literary efforts patronised at the Prophet's court, and even for the beauties of these he had no critical ear, and at one time had to deliver a polemic against the poets.

No one, therefore, making it his business to collect materials, such were not collected. The contents of the Prophet's letters were afterwards cited, not from originals jealously guarded, but from some traditionalist's memory. These are, till the last years of his life, few, obscure, and meagre. Collections which would have been of unique value to the historian, such as the correspondence of the Prophet with his agent at Medinah before the Flight, have perished without leaving a trace. There may also have been an Abyssinian correspondence going back far into the Meccan period. Towards the end of the Prophet's life he carried on a diplomatic correspondence with the aid of official secretaries, of which rather more has come down.

What was done in lieu of compiling biographies was to remember casual sayings, or, long after the events, to get persons who had been present to narrate them. The order of the chief occurrences between the Flight and the Prophet's death was probably recorded, not because any one had kept a journal, but because his second successor assigned pensions to the Companions of the Prophet, which varied in amount according to their precedence in conversion. When the date of conversion became an asset, with a fixed cash value, it got into the public registers, and thence found its way into history.

From the registers, then, of state pensioners the dates of the chief battles are likely to have been obtained, and from these some portions of the Koran can be dated and interpreted. Other portions are dated by conjectures, based usually on psychological considerations. A certain