n twelve times the
number of effeminate Bengalese and Mahrattas, etc. (2) At Aden, where as
rude fighters without the science of war they have been most ugly
customers. (3) In Algeria, where the French, with all advantage of
discipline, science, artillery, have found it a most trying and
exhausting war. Well, as they are now, so they were before Mahomet, and
just then they were ripe for conquest. But they wanted a _combining_
motive and a _justifying_ motive. Mahomet supplied both these. Says he,
'All nations are idolaters; go and thrust them into the mill that they
may be transformed to our likeness.'

Consequently, the great idea of the truth, of a truth transcending all
available rights on the other side, was foreign to Mahometanism, and any
glimmering of this that may seem to be found in it was borrowed, was
filched from Christianity.

9.--LITERARY.

The three greatest powers which we know of in moulding human feelings
are, first, Christianity; secondly, the actions of men emblazoned by
history; and, in the third place, poetry. If the first were represented
to the imagination by the atmospheric air investing our planet, which we
take to be the most awful laboratory of powers--mysterious, unseen, and
absolutely infinite--the second might be represented by the winds, and
the third by lightning. Napoleon and Lord Byron have done more mischief
to the moral feelings, to the truth of all moral estimates, to the
grandeur and magnanimity of man, in this present generation, than all
other causes acting together. But how? Simply by throwing human feelings
into false combinations. Both of them linked the mean to the grand, the
base to the noble, in a way which often proves fatally inextricable to
the poor infirm mind of the ordinary spectator. Here is Napoleon, simply
because he wields a vast national machinery, throwing a magic of
celerity and power into a particular action which absolutely overpowers
the _genus attonitorum_, so that they are reconciled by the dazzle of a
splendour not at all _in_ Napoleon, to a baseness which really _is_ in
Napoleon. The man that never praised an enemy is shown to this vile mob
by the light thrown off from the radiant power of France as the greatest
of men; he is confounded with his supporting element, even as the
Jupiter Olympus of Phidias, that never spared a woman in his lust,
seemed the holiest of deities when his rottenness was concealed by ivory
and gold, and his libidinous head w