barbarian aggression, by which the pride and power of Rome were gradually shaken, dilapidated, overthrown, and finally broken to pieces on the banks of the Tyber, never to be reinstated.

Literature during the Middle Ages.

For nearly ten centuries succeeding, the literature both of Greece and Rome was of a character so heterogeneous, that this epithet alone will be sufficient to designate it,-the necessary brevity of the present review not allowing us to waste another word upon it in reference to antiquity. Meanwhile, revolution after revolution changed the condition of the people that inhabited the provinces of the western empire from the death of Constantine the Great. The Goths, Vandals, Huns, with numberless and nameless tribes of barbarians, emigrating in mass,— like mountains undermined, and sliding from their base; or forests on morasses, slowly ruptured, and engulphing their own growth as well as inundating the adjacent plains, — from Scythia, Sarmatia, Siberia, and the inexhaustible regions of Tartary, overran Germany, Gaul, Italy, and Spain; out of whose partitions of the spoil of Europe gradually arose its modern empires, kingdoms, and commonwealths. From the stern and summary principles of equity among these rude people, grafted upon the Roman institutes embodied by Justinian, sprang the laws and policy of Christian nations at this day. In Britain itself we owe more of the rights and freedom we enjoy, to those hordes, which have been held up to indigna

we owe

tion as the ravagers and destroyers of every thing great, and good, and glorious, in government and literature, during that revolutionary struggle, which compelled the Romans to withdraw their legions and their colonists from our remote island, and reduced the enfeebled natives to call in the aid of the Saxons to repel the inroads of the Picts and Scots; more to these vilified savages than to their illustrious victims, whose fate has so often excited the compassion of historians, poets, moralists, and declaimers of every class. Yet it must be acknowledged, after all, that the Romans, from their degeneracy, were worthy of no better a fate; -nay, they were so irrecoverably corrupt and emasculate, that the infusion of purer blood from the full fountains of the north, had become requisite to restore human nature itself in the south of Europe to health, vigour, and temperance,-the true standard both of mental and bodily enjoyment and perfection.

The fate of the eastern empire was longer held in suspense: it stood a thousand years on its new base, at the point where Europe and Asia meet on the opposite shores of the Hellespont; but it fell, in the sequel, after many a long and furious struggle against the encroachments of the Saracens and the Turks. Nothing in history is more extraordinary than the sudden rise, the rapid progress, and the amazing extension of the empire of the former. In less than a hundred and fifty years the Saracen arms had conquered all the western, southern, and eastern provinces of the Roman world, including Spain, Barbary, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia-Minor, and the

adjacent regions; to which were added Arabia, whence they issued, with Persia, a great part of Tartary, and in process of time the whole of India within the Ganges, where the eagles of Rome had never even alighted, much less gathered themselves together upon the prey. It is true, that all these countries were never, at the same time, under the immediate sovereignty of one prince; but it is not the caliphate of Bagdad alone of which we now speak,-the reference is to the domination at large of the Saracens, whom their kindred origin, language, manners, religion, and the rage, first for conquest, and afterwards for knowledge, assimilated with each other, and distinguished from every people under heaven beside.

Mahomet.

At the beginning of the seventh century, an unlettered slave and a renegade monk invented a new form of superstition, a triple cord to bind the human spirit, composed of certain parts of Judaism, Christianity, and Paganism, so subtly and inextricably implicated, that to this day it continues to hold in captivity as great a multitude of our divided race as ever professed the same form of faith.

Among the innumerable millions of those who have lived and died in this world of change and mortality, if we were to fix on one, whose existence, opinions, and actions, in their results, have more extensively influenced the destinies of a larger proportion of their fellow-creatures than those of any other, we should name the false prophet of Mecca.

There have been

warriors, legislators, and fanatics, who, in their circle, have equalled and even excelled him in prowess, policy, and extravagance; but not one can be brought into entire competition with Mahomet for the spread and permanence of his fame, either as conqueror, law-giver, or impostor. His empire, institutes, and superstition have been rooted and perpetuated over so vast a portion of the old world, that the tail of his elborach (the beast which carried him on his miraculous journey to Paradise),- the tail of his elborach, like that of the dragon in the Apocalypse, may be said to have drawn after him a third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them down to the earth. Interpreting these stars agreeable to the hieroglyphic language of prophecy, as signifying kings and their kingdoms, states and their people, this has been literally the case for twelve centuries,—a longer date than that of any single empire, ancient or modern. In this view Mahomet may be called the greatest and most extraordinary man that ever had being on earth.

The former part of this impostor's life, compared with the latter, presents one of the most striking contrasts that can be found even in the fictions of poetry. According to the generally received accounts, he was the posthumous son of his father, early left an orphan by his mother, and adopted by an uncle, who being too poor to provide for his wants, sold him into bondage at sixteen years of age. Then, however, he grew into such favour with his master, that he was entrusted by him with many valuable mercantile enterprises, and into such favour with his mistress,

that, on the decease of her husband, she conferred on her slave her person and her wealth.

Had one of the numberless deaths that lie in ambush day and night around the path of man, and to which, from the ill-fortune of his childhood, and the misery of his circumstances till he had passed maturity, Mahomet was more imminently exposed than it is the chance (so to speak) of most people,- had one of those deaths cut him off, in some unexpected moment, it is impossible to imagine what would have been the actual religious and political condition of many of the richest provinces of Asia, Africa, and Europe, during the ages upon ages in which his successors- as true to his religion as that religion is true to the worst passions of human nature, have followed him in his track of blood; carrying the sword and the Koran from the heart of Arabia to the extremes of east and west of the ancient continent. What has been the condition of those most magnificent, and, from sacred and classic associations, those most venerable countries of the globe, is well known, and need not be particularised here.

But it is humiliating to the pride of human intellect, that the most comprehensive moral change that ever was effected by a mere man in the character of an immense proportion of the species, was the work of a barbarian, unacquainted with the literature and science of his own Arabia, as scanty at that time as the herbage in its deserts; and it is yet more derogatory to the vaunted pretensions of human virtue, unaided by a really divine influence, that this moral