The fierce and generally illiterate Mohammedan harangued his troops; preach he could not; he had no subject for preaching.* Now this function of man in almost all states

"No subject:"-If he had a subject, what was it? As to the sole doctrines of Islam-the unity of God, and the mission of Mahomet as his chief prophet (i.e., not predictor or foreseer, but interpreter) —that must be presumed known to every man in a Mussulman army, since otherwise he could not have been admitted into the army. But these doctrines might require expansion, or at least evidence? Not at all; the Mussulman believes them incapable of either. But at least the Caliph might mount the pulpit in order to urge the primary duty of propagating the true faith? No; it was not the primary duty, it was a secondary duty, else there would have been no option allowed-tribute, death, or conversion. Well then, the Caliph might ascend the pulpit for the purpose of enforcing a secondary duty? No, he could not, because that was no duty of time or place; it was a postulate of the conscience at all times alike, and needed no argument or illustration. Why then, what was it that the Caliph talked about? It was this: He praised the man who had cut most throats; he pronounced the funeral panegyric of him who had his own throat cut under the banners of the Prophet; he explained the prudential merits of the next movement or of the next campaign. In fact, he did precisely what Pericles did, what Scipio did, what Cæsar did, what it was a regular part of the Roman Imperator's commission to do, both before a battle and after a battle, and universally under any circumstances which make an explanation necessary. What is now done in "general orders" was then committed to a vivâ voce communication. Trifling communications probably devolved on the six centurions of each cohort (or regiment); graver communications were reserved to the Imperator, surrounded by his staff. Why we should mislead the student by calling this solemnity of addressing an army from a tribunal or suggestus, by the irrelevant name of preaching from a pulpit, can only be understood by those who perceive the false view taken of the Mohammedan faith and its relation to the human mind. It was certainly a poor plagiarism from the Judaic and the Christian creeds, but it did not rise so high as to conceive of any truth that needed or that admitted intellectual development, or that was susceptible of exposition and argument. However, if we will have it that the Caliph preached, then did his lieutenant say Amen. If Omar was a parson, then certainly Caled was his clerk.

of society, the function of public haranguing, was, for the Pagan man who had no printing-press, more of a mere necessity through every mode of public life than it is for the modern man of Christian light; for as to the modern man of Mohammedan twilight, his perfect bigotry denies him this characteristic resource of Christian energies. Just four centuries have we of the Cross propagated our light by this memorable invention; just four centuries have the slaves of the Crescent clung to their darkness by rejecting it. Christianity signs her name; Islamism makes her mark. And the great doctors of the Mussulmans take their stand precisely where Jack Cade took his a few years after printing had been discovered. Jack and they both made it felony to be found with a spelling-book, and sorcery to deal with syntax.

Yet with these differences, all of us alike, Pagan, Mussulman, Christian, have practised the arts of public speaking as the most indispensable resource of public administration and of private intrigue. Whether the purpose were to pursue the interests of legislation, or to conduct the business of jurisprudence, or to bring the merits of great citizens pathetically before their countrymen ; or (if the state were democratic enough) oftentimes to explain the conduct of the executive government; oftentimes also to prosecute a scheme of personal ambition, whether the audience were a mob, a senate, a judicial tribunal, or an army, equally (though not in equal degrees) for the Pagan of 2500 years back, and for us moderns, the arts of public speaking, and consequently of prose as opposed to metrical composition, have been the capital engine, the one great intellectual machine of civil life.

This to some people may seem a matter of course: "Would you have men speak in rhyme?" We answer,

that when society comes into a state of refinement, the total uses of language are developed in common with other arts; but originally, and whilst man was in his primitive condition of simplicity, it must have seemed an unnatural, nay an absurd thing to speak in prose. For in those elder days the sole justifying or exciting cases for a public harangue would be cases connected with impassioned motives. Rare they would be, as they had need to be, where both the "hon. gentleman" who moves, and his "hon. friend" who seconds, are required to speak in Trimeter Iambic. Hence the necessity that the oracles should be delivered in verse. Who ever heard of a prose oracle ? And hence, as Grecian taste expanded, the disagreeable criticisms whispered about in Athens as to the coarse quality of the verses that proceeded from Delphi. It was like bad Latin from Oxford. Apollo himself to turn out of his own temple, in the very age of Sophocles, such Birmingham hexameters as sometimes astonished Greece, was like our English court keeping a Stephen Duck, the thresher, for the national poet-laureate, at a time when Pope was fixing an era in the literature. Metre fell to a discount in such learned times. But in itself metre must always have been the earliest vehicle for public enunciations of truth among men, for these obvious reasons: 1. That if metre rises above the standard of ordinary household life, so must any truth of importance and singularity enough to challenge a public utterance. 2. That because religious communications will always have taken a metrical form by a natural association of feeling, whatsoever is invested with a privileged character will seek something of a religious sanction by assuming the same external shape; and, 3. That expressions, or emphatic verbal forms, which are naturally courted for the sake of pointed effect, receive a justification

from metre as being already a departure from common usage to begin with, whereas in plain prose they would appear so many affectations. Metre is naturally and necessarily adopted in cases of impassioned themes, for the very obvious reason that rhythmus is both a cause of impassioned feeling, an ally of such feeling, and a natural effect of it; but upon other subjects not impassioned, metre is also a subtle ally, because it serves to introduce and to reconcile with our sense of propriety various arts of condensation, of antithesis, and other rhetorical effects, which, without the metre (as a key for harmonizing them) would strike the feelings as unnatural or as full of affectation. Interrogations, for example, passionate ejaculations, &c., seem no more than natural when metre (acting as a key) has attuned and prepared the mind for such effects. The metre raises the tone of colouring so as to introduce richer tints without shocking or harshly jarring upon the presiding key, when without this semi-conscious pitching of the expectations, the sensibility would have been revolted. Hence, for the very earliest stages of society, it will be mere nature that prompts men to metre; it is a mode of inspiration, it is a promise of something preternatural; and less than preternatural cannot be any possible emergency that should call for a public address. Only great truths could require a man to come forward as a spokesman; he is then a sort of interpreter between God and man.

At first, therefore, it is mere nature which prompts metre. Afterwards, as truth begins to enlarge itself—as truth loses something of its sanctity by descending amongst human details that mode of exalting it, and of courting attention, is dictated by artifice, which originally was a mere necessity of nature raised above herself. For these reasons, it is certain that men, challenging high authentic character, will

continue to speak by metre for many generations after it has ceased to be a mere voice of habitual impulse. Whatsoever claims an oracular authority, will take the ordinary external form of an oracle. And after it has ceased to be a badge of inspiration, metre will be retained as a badge of professional distinction; Pythagoras, for instance, within five centuries of Christ, Thales or Theognis, will adopt metre out of a secondary prudence; Orpheus and the elder Sibyl, out of an original necessity.

Those people are, therefore, mistaken who imagine that prose is either a natural or a possible form of composition in early states of society. It is such truth only as ascends from the earth, not such as descends from heaven, which can ever assume an unmetrical form. Now, in the earliest states of society, all truth that has any interest or importance for man will connect itself with heaven. If it does not originally come forward in that sacred character, if it does not borrow its importance from its sanctity; then, by an inverse order, it will borrow a sanctity from its importance. Even agricultural truth, even the homeliest truths of rural industry, brought into connexion with religious inspiration, will be exalted (like the common culinary utensils in the great vision of the Jewish prophet) and transfigured into vessels of glorious consecration. All things in this early stage of social man are meant mysteriously, have allegoric values; and week-day man moves amongst glorified objects. So that if any doctrine, principle, or system of truth, should call for communication at all, infallibly the communication will take the tone of a revelation; and the holiness of a revelation will express itself in the most impassioned form, perhaps with accompaniments of music, but certainly with metre.

Prose, therefore, strange as it may seem to say so, w:s