[75] The Eastern love of the wonderful may be readily seen in the well-known “Arabian Nights,” in the Koran, and in Oriental literature generally. Mohammed tells us, in his sacred book, that he saw in Heaven infinite companies of angels, each a thousand times bigger than the globe of the earth: each had ten thousand heads; every head threescore and ten thousand tongues; and every one of those tongues praised God in seven hundred thousand languages. The throne of Allah was supported by seven angels, each so great that a falcon, if he were to fly a thousand years, could not get so far as the distance from one of their eyes to the other. Gabriel, the doorkeeper of Paradise, has seventy thousand keys which pertain to his office, every key being seven thousand miles long. This exaggerated balderdash is but childish stuff; it contains no element of grandeur or sublimity; and, in reading it, one only wonders, when astonishment and awe were to be excited by an artifice so commonplace, that, while he was about it, all the numbers were not doubled, quadrupled, multiplied ten or a hundred fold; so that we finally come to the conclusion that, with all the arithmetical possibilities open to him, he was but a poor bungler at his business after all. [76] “She dwelleth and abideth on the rock, upon the crag of the rock, and the strong place. From thence she seeketh the prey and her eyes behold afar off.”—_Job_ xxxix. 28, 29. [77] “The nature of the Eagle is to bend her eyes full into the sunne beams. So strong is her sighte that she can even see into the great and glaring sunne.”—FERNE, _The Blazon of Gentrie_. [78] “As eagle fresh out of the ocean wave Where he hath left his plumes, all hoary grey, And decks himself with feathers, youthful, gay.” SPENSER. [79] Dryden. [80] Hence Dante terms the Saviour of the World “Nostro pelicano;” and an enthusiastic admirer of Charles I., and an evident believer in the idea that he shed his blood for his people, wrote in the year 1649, a book on that king, entitling him “the Princely Pelican.” [81] Byron. [82] It is curious that until this species was discovered at the Antipodes a black swan was regarded both by ancient and mediæval writers as the very emblem and type of extravagant impossibility, so that those who found no difficulty in believing in centaurs, mermaids, and fifty other extravagances, felt that they really must draw the line at this. [83] In “Camden” we read that the device of Anne, queen of Richard II., was “an ostrich with a nayle in his beake.” [84] Thalaba.