e
the utmost fear in the breasts of all who approach him. Such is their
notion of his ferocity, that one of the emperors, Muley Ismael, in order
to terrify his refractory subjects into obedience, was in the habit of
threatening to have them eaten up by the Christians.

From the inferior value set on human life by the races of the East, we
accuse them of barbarity: forgetting, that, owing to the absence of all
analogy between our origin, races, and education, we are incompetent to
appreciate their feelings, and the motives of their conduct, and have
consequently no right to condemn them. If we abstain from taking our
neighbour's life, we set also a proportionate value on our own: a native
of the East displays, it is true, less veneration for his own species.
Deeply impressed with the dogmas of his religion, which form the guide
of his every day life, the habit of acting up to the doctrines which he
has been taught to believe, diminishes his estimate of the value of
temporal life, whether that of others, or his own, which he exposes on
occasions on which we should not be inclined to do so. He does not take
life for cruelty's sake, nor without provocation. Were he to be
furnished with Arabian accounts of the treatment of a London or Paris
hackney-coach horse, he would think of the noble and friendly animal
which carries him to battle, and turn in disgust from such a page.

The system practised at Constantinople of nailing to his door-post the
ear of the culprit detected in the employment of false weights, is, no
doubt, very discordant with our customs; but this mode of punishment is
said to be attended with such success, as to do away almost entirely
with the occasion for it. Were it adopted in some other capitals, it
would certainly at first disfigure many a neatly adorned entrance, and
give additional occupation to painters; but the result might possibly be
a more universal observance of the injunction contained in the eighth
commandment. As far as regards the Arabs of Spain, it may be securely
affirmed, that, during the course of their triumphs, and long before
they had attained their highest civilization, no cruelties were
exercised by them, which came near to the barbarity of those practised
subsequently by their Christian adversaries on victims of a different
creed, when in their power. We may instance the example set by St.
Ferdinand, who, it is said, when burning some Moors, piously stirred up
the fire himself in