ience and
indiscretion, and threatened them with a sentence of divorce, both in
this world and in the next; a dreadful sentence, since those who had
ascended the bed of the prophet were forever excluded from the hope of a
second marriage. Perhaps the incontinence of Mahomet may be palliated by
the tradition of his natural or preternatural gifts; he united the manly
virtue of thirty of the children of Adam; and the apostle might rival
the thirteenth labor of the Grecian Hercules. A more serious and decent
excuse may be drawn from his fidelity to Cadijah. During the twenty-four
years of their marriage, her youthful husband abstained from the right
of polygamy, and the pride or tenderness of the venerable matron was
never insulted by the society of a rival. After her death he placed her
in the rank of the four perfect women, with the sister of Moses, the
mother of Jesus, and Fatima, the best beloved of his daughters. "Was she
not old?" said Ayesha, with the insolence of a blooming beauty: "has not
God given you a better in her place?" "No, by God," said Mahomet, with
an effusion of honest gratitude, "there never can be a better! She
believed in me when men despised me; she relieved my wants when I was
poor and persecuted by the world."

THE ALEXANDRIAN LIBRARY

I should deceive the expectation of the reader if I passed in silence
the fate of the Alexandrian library as it is described by the learned
Abulpharagius. The spirit of Amrou was more curious and liberal than
that of his brethren, and in his leisure hours the Arabian chief was
pleased with the conversation of John, the last disciple of Ammonius,
and who derived the surname of _Philoponus_ from his laborious studies
of grammar and philosophy. Emboldened by this familiar intercourse,
Philoponus presumed to solicit a gift, inestimable in _his_ opinion,
contemptible in that of the Barbarians--the royal library, which alone
among the spoils of Alexandria had not been appropriated by the visit
and the seal of the conqueror. Amrou was inclined to gratify the wish of
the grammarian, but his rigid integrity refused to alienate the minutest
object without the consent of the caliph; and the well-known answer of
Omar was inspired by the ignorance of a fanatic: "If these writings of
the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless, and need not be
preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious, and ought to be
destroyed." The sentence was executed with blind obed