Would that it were in my power to pay a more adequate tribute to his memory! [FN#22] Even Juno, in the most meaningless of idolatries, became, according to Pausanias (lib. ii. cap. 38), a virgin once every year. And be it observed that Al-Islam (the faith, not the practice) popularly decided to debase the social state of womankind, exalts it by holding up to view no fewer than two examples of perfection in the Prophet’s household. Khadijah, his first wife, was a minor saint, and the Lady Fatimah is supposed to have been spiritually unspotted by sin, and materially ever a virgin, even after giving birth to Hasan and to Hosayn. [FN#23] There is no objection to intermarriage between equal clans, but the higher will not give their daughters to the lower in dignity. [FN#24] For instance: “A certain religious man was so deeply affected with the love of a king’s daughter, that he was brought to the brink of the grave,” is a favourite inscriptive formula. Usually the hero “sickens in consequence of the heroine’s absence, and continues to the hour of his death in the utmost grief and anxiety.” He rarely kills himself, but sometimes, when in love with a pretty infidel, he drinks wine and he burns the Koran. The “hated rival” is not a formidable person; but there are for good reasons great jealousy of female friends, and not a little fear of the beloved’s kinsmen. Such are the material sentiments; the spiritual part is a thread of mysticism, upon which all the pearls of adventure and incident are strung. [FN#25] It is curious that these pastoral races, which supply poetry with namby-pamby Colinades, figure as the great tragedians of history. The Scythians, the Huns, the Arabs, and the Tartars were all shepherds. They first armed themselves with clubs to defend their flocks from wild beasts. Then they learned warfare, and improved means of destruction by petty quarrels about pastures; and, finally, united by the commanding genius of some skin-clad Caesar or Napoleon, they fell like avalanches upon those valleys of the world—Mesopotamia, India, and Egypt—whose enervate races offered them at once temptations to attack, and certainty of success. [FN#26] Even amongst the Indians, as a race the least chivalrous of men, there is an oath which binds two persons of different sex in the tie of friendship, by making them brother and sister to each other. [FN#27] Richardson derives our “knight” from Nikht ([Arabic]), a tilter with spears, and “Caitiff” from Khattaf, ([Arabic]) a snatcher or ravisher. [FN#28] I am not ignorant that the greater part of “Antar” is of modern and disputed origin. Still it accurately expresses Arab sentiment. [FN#29] I wish that the clever Orientalist who writes in the Saturday Review would not translate “Al-Layl,” by lenes sub nocte susurri: the Arab bard alluded to no such effeminacies. [FN#30] The subject of “Dakhl” has been thoroughly exhausted by Burckhardt and Layard. It only remains to be said that the Turks, through