n in
speech; silent when there was nothing to be said; but pertinent, wise,
sincere, when he did speak; always throwing light on the matter. This
is the only sort of speech _worth_ speaking! Through life we find him
to have been regarded as an altogether solid, brotherly, genuine man.
A serious, sincere character; yet amiable, cordial, companionable,
jocose even;--a good laugh in him withal: there are men whose laugh is
as untrue as anything about them; who cannot laugh. One hears of
Mahomet's beauty: his fine sagacious honest face, brown florid
complexion, beaming black eyes;--I somehow like too that vein on the
brow, which swelled-up black when he was in anger: like the
'_horse-shoe_ vein' in Scott's _Redgauntlet_. It was a kind of feature
in the Hashem family, this black swelling vein in the brow; Mahomet
had it prominent, as would appear. A spontaneous, passionate, yet
just, true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light: of wild
worth, all uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the
Desert there.

How he was placed with Kadijah, a rich Widow, as her Steward, and
travelled in her business, again to the Fairs of Syria; how he managed
all, as one can well understand, with fidelity, adroitness; how her
gratitude, her regard for him grew: the story of their marriage is
altogether a graceful intelligible one, as told us by the Arab
authors. He was twenty-five; she forty, though still beautiful. He
seems to have lived in a most affectionate, peaceable, wholesome way
with this wedded benefactress; loving her truly, and her alone. It
goes greatly against the impostor theory, the fact that he lived in
this entirely unexceptionable, entirely quiet and commonplace way,
till the heat of his years was done. He was forty before he talked of
any mission from Heaven. All his irregularities, real and supposed,
date from after his fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. All his
'ambition,' seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest life; his
'fame,' the mere good opinion of neighbours that knew him, had been
sufficient hitherto. Not till he was already getting old, the prurient
heat of his life all burnt out, and _peace_ growing to be the chief
thing this world could give him, did he start on the 'career of
ambition;' and, belying all his past character and existence, set-up
as a wretched empty charlatan to acquire what he could now no longer
enjoy! For my share, I have no faith whatever in that.

A