of it, in that way, lies almost at the end:  for the earliest portions were the shortest.  Read in its historical sequence it perhaps would not be so bad.  Much of it, too, they say, is rhythmic; a kind of wild chanting song, in the original.  This may be a great point; much perhaps has been lost in the Translation here.  Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any mortal ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven, too good for the Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed as a book at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody; written, so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever was!  So much for national discrepancies, and the standard of taste.

Yet I should say, it was not unintelligible how the Arabs might so love it.  When once you get this confused coil of a Koran fairly off your hands, and have it behind you at a distance, the essential type of it begins to disclose itself; and in this there is a merit quite other than the literary one.  If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that.  One would say the primary character of the Koran is this of its genuineness, of its being a bona-fide book.  Prideaux, I know, and others, have represented it as a mere bundle of juggleries; chapter after chapter got-up to excuse and varnish the author’s successive sins, forward his ambitions and quackeries:  but really it is time to dismiss all that.  I do not assert Mohammed’s continual sincerity:  who is continually sincere?  But I confess I can make nothing of the critic, in these times, who would accuse him of deceit prepense; of conscious deceit generally, or perhaps at all;—­still more, of living in a mere element of conscious deceit, and writing this Koran as a forger and juggler would have done!  Every candid eye, I think, will read the Koran far otherwise than so.  It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words.  With a kind of breathless intensity he strives to utter himself; the thoughts crowd on him pell-mell:  for very multitude of things to say, he can get nothing said.  The meaning that is in him shapes itself into no form of composition, is stated in no sequence, method, or coherence;—­they are not shaped at all, these thoughts of his; flung-out unshaped, as they struggle and tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate state.  We said “stupid”:  yet natural stupidity is by no means the character of Mohammed’s Book; it is natural un-cultivation rather.  The man has not studied speaking; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself into fit speech.  The panting breathless haste and vehemence of a man struggling in the thick of battle for life and salvation; this is the mood he is in!  A headlong haste; for very magnitude of meaning, he cannot get himself articulated into words.  The successive utterances of a soul in that mood, colored by the various vicissitudes of three-and-twenty years; now well uttered, now worse:  this is the Koran.