I have been told by men who have resided long in the East, and have had good opportunities for knowing the people well, that the facts of life there have conformed themselves to this anticipation. The houris of earth are the end-all and be-all of oriental life. Unlike anything amongst ourselves, it is with a view to them that even the arrangements of oriental houses are designed. No wonder men think they cannot make too much of, or guard too carefully, this treasure, for what more can heaven itself give them? Each, therefore, at once makes for himself in this matter, as far as his means allow, a present Paradise. The Sheik of the Great Mosk of Omar at Jerusalem introduced me to his son, a lad of sixteen, who was, as I have lately mentioned, already the master of two houris. It is said at Cairo that this part of the present Khedivé’s household does not at all fall short of what might be expected of the ruler of Egypt. To oriental thought there is nothing incongruous, nothing unbecoming, in their prophet, the chosen recipient of the Divine mind, and of all men the most absorbed in holy things, having been a matrimonial pluralist. This is the very opposite to a sentiment with which the European world has been made familiar: the sentiment that husband, or wife, cannot be loved, except at the expense of the love of God; that it would be well if love were no worse than of the earth earthy; that those who do life-long violence to this master sentiment of our youthful nature, who trample upon it, and endeavour to extinguish it, and who put in its place such feelings as minds, that do this despite to nature, can alone originate, are better, and purer, and holier, than those who accept the duties, and cares, and happinesses of wedded life. It is strange that these ideas, which, through a natural reaction, had their birthplace in the East, are now most alien to oriental modes of thought. Orientals are not more luxurious than ourselves. The difference is that their luxury is directed more exclusively to one object; and that that one object is of such a nature as to make their luxury more enervating than ours. Their luxury is houris, and all that appertains to them; and all that contributes to investing their society with a halo of sensuous delights; gorgeous apartments; plashing fountains; shady, and colour-enamelled gardens; exquisite odours. Our universal luxury does not relax the fibre of our minds, and bodies, as much as their one particular luxury does theirs.