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Hussein presses his own lips to those of Kassem, who, refreshed, again rushes forth, and returns bleeding and stuck with darts, to die at the Iman's feet in the tent. So_ends the marriage of Kassem.

bridal garment!" All give way to the Hussein. "Beloved child, what the will of their sacred Head. The women Prophet forbids, that cannot I make and children surround Kassem, sprinkle lawful." him with rose-water, hang bracelets and Kassem. "I beseech thee, let my lips be necklaces on him, and scatter bon-bons but once moistened, and I will vanquish around; and then the marriage procession thine enemies!" is formed. Suddenly drums and trumpets are heard, and the Syrian troops appear. Ibn-Said and Shemer are at their head. "The Prince of the Faith celebrates a marriage in the desert," they exclaim tauntingly; we will soon change his festivity into mourning." They pass by, and Kassem takes leave of his bride. "God keep thee, my bride," he says, embracing her, "for I must forsake thee!" One moment," she says, "remain in thy place one moment! thy countenance is as the lamp which giveth us light; suffer me to turn around thee as the butterfly turneth, gently, gently!" And making a turn around him, she performs the ancient Eastern rite of respect from a new-married wife to her husband. Troubled, he rises to go: "The reins of my will are slipping away from me!" he murmurs. She lays hold of his robe: "Take off thy hand," he cries, "we belong not to ourselves!"

Then he asks the Imam to array him in his winding-sheet. "O nightingale of the divine orchard of martyrdom," says Hussein, as he complies with his wish, "I clothe thee with thy winding-sheet, I kiss thy face; there is no fear, and no hope, but of God!" Kassem commits his little brother Abdallah to the Imam's care; Omm-Leyla looks up from her son's corpse, and says to Kassem: "When thou enterest the garden of Paradise, kiss for me the head of Ali-Akber!"

The Syrian troops again appear; Kassem rushes upon them and they all go off fighting. The Family of the Tent at Hussein's command, put the Koran on their heads and pray, covering themselves with sand. Kassem re-appears victorious; he has slain Azrek, a chief captain of the Syrians, but his thirst is intolerable. "Uncle," he says to the Imam, who asks him what reward he wishes for his valour, "my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth; the reward I wish is water.' "Thou coverest me with shame, Kassem," his uncle answers; "what can I do? Thou askest water; there is no water!"

Kassem." If I might but wet my mouth, I could presently make an end of the men of Kufa."

Hussein. "As I live, I have not one drop of water!"

Kassem. "Were it but lawful, I would wet my mouth with my own blood.”

But the great day is the tenth day of the Moharrem, when comes the death of the Imam himself. The narrative of Gibbon well sums up the events of this great tenth day. The battle at length expired by the death of the last of the companions of Hussein. Alone, weary and wounded, he seated himself at the door of his tent. He was pierced in the mouth with a dart. He lifted his hands to heaven - they were full of blood-and he ut tered a funeral prayer for the living and the dead. In a transport of despair, his sister issued from the tent, and adjured the general of the Kufians that he would not suffer Hussein to be murdered before his eyes. A tear trickled down the soldier's venerable beard; and the boldest of his men fell back on every side as the dying Imam threw himself among them. The remorseless Shemera name detested by the faithful - reproached their cowardice; and the grandson of Mahomet was slain with three-and-thirty strokes of lances and swords. After they had trampled on his body, they carried his head to the castle of Kufa, and the inhuman Obeidallah (the governor) struck him on the mouth with a cane. "Alas!" exclaimed an aged Mussulman, "on those lips have I seen the lips of the Apostle of God!"

For this catastrophe no one tazya suffices; all the companies of actors unite in a vast open space; booths and tents are pitched round the outside circle for the spectators; in the centre is the Imam's camp, and the day ends with its conflagration.

ex

Nor are there wanting pieces which carry on the story beyond the death of Hussein. One which produces an traordinary effect is The Christian Damsel. The carnage is over, the enemy are gone; to the awe-struck beholders, the scene shows the silent plain of Kerbela and the tombs of the martyrs. Their bodies, full of wounds, and with weapons sticking in them still, are exposed to view; but around them all are crowns of burning candles, circles of light, to show that they have entered into glory. At one end of the sakou

is a high tomb by itself. It is the tomb sein. Yezid orders his wife to be put to of the Imam Hussein, and his pierced body death, and sends the head of Hussein to is seen stretched out upon it. A brilliant the children. Sekyna, the Imam's youngcaravan enters, with camels, soldiers, ser- est daughter, a child of four years old, vants, and a young lady on horseback, in takes the beloved head in her arms, kisses European costume, or what passes in Per- it, and lies down beside it. Then Hussein sia for European costume. She halts near appears to her as in life: "Oh! my the tombs, and proposes to encamp. Her father," she cries, "where wast thou? I servants try to pitch a tent; but wherever was hungry, I was cold, I was beatenthey drive a pole into the ground, blood where wast thou?" But now she sees springs up, and a groan of horror bursts him again, and is happy. In the vision of from the audience. Then the fair traveller, her happiness she passes away out of life, instead of encamping, mounts into the she enters into rest, and the piece ends tagnuma, lies down to rest there, and falls with her mother and her aunts burying asleep. Jesus Christ appears to her, and her. makes known that this is Kerbela, and These are the martyrs of Kerbela; and what has happened here. Meanwhile, an these are the sufferings which awaken in Arah of the desert, a Bedouin who had an Asiatic audience sympathy so deep and formerly received Hussein's bounty, comes serious, transports so genuine of pity, love, stealthily, intent on plunder, upon the and gratitude, that to match them at all sakou. He finds nothing, and in a parox- one must take the feelings raised at Amysm of brutal fury he begins to ill-treat mergau. And now, where are we to look, the corpses. Blood flows. The feeling of in the subject-matter of the Persian pasAsiatics about their dead is well-known, sion-play, for the source of all this emoand the horror of the andience rises to its tion? Count Gobineau suggests that it is height. Presently the ruffian assails and to be found in the feeling of patriotism; wounds the corpse of the Imam himself, and that our Indo-European kinsmen, the over whom white doves are hovering; the Persians, conquered by the Semitic Aravoice of Hussein, deep and mournful, callsbians, find in the sufferings of Hussein a from his tomb: "There is no God but God!" portrait of their own martyrdom. The robber flies in terror; the angels, the prophets, Mahomet, Jesus Christ, Moses, the Imams, the holy women, all come upon the sakou, press round Hussein, load him with honours. The Christian damsel wakes, and embraces Islam, the Islam of the sect of the Shiahs.

Hus

sein," says Count Gobineau,“ is not only the son of Ali, he is the husband of a princess of the blood of the Persian kings; he, his father Ali, the whole body of Imams taken together, represent the nation, represent Persia, invaded, ill-treated, despoiled, stripped of its inhabitants, by the Another piece closes the whole story, by Arabians. The right which is insulted bringing the captive women and children and violated in Hussein, is identified with of the Imam's family to Damascus, to the the right of Persia. The Arabians, the presence of the Caliph Yezid. It is in this Turks, the Afghans-Persia's implacable piece that there comes the magnificent and hereditary enemies-recognize Yezid tableau, of which I have already spoken, as legitimate caliph; Persia finds therein of the court of the caliph; the crown jew-an excuse for hating them the more, and els are lent for it, and the dresses of the ladies of Yezid's court, represented by boys chosen for their good looks, are said to be worth thousands and thousands of pounds; but the audience see them without favour, for this brilliant court of Yezid is cruel to the captives of Kerbela. The captives are thrust into a wretched dungeon under the palace walls; but the Caliph's wife had formerly been a slave of But I confess that if the interest of the Mahomet's daughter Fatima, the mother Persian passion-plays had seemed to me to of Hussein and Zeyneb. She goes to lie solely in the curious evidence they see Zeyneb in prison, her heart is afford of the workings of patriotic feeling touched, she passes into an agony of re- in a conquered people, I should hardly pentance, returns to her husband, upbraids have occupied myself with them at all this him with his crimes, and intercedes for the length. I believe that they point to women of the holy family, and for the chil- something much more interesting. What dren, who keep calling for the Imam Hus-this is, I cannot do more than just indi

identifies herself the more with the usurper's victims. It is patriotism, therefore, which has taken the form, here, of the drama to express itself." No doubt there is much truth in what Count Gobineau thus says; and it is certain that the division of Shiahs and Sunis has its true cause in a division of races, rather than in a difference of religious belief.

cate; but indicate it I will, in conclusion, and then leave the student of human nature to follow it out for himself.

guard granted to them alone. Yet how much more safe is it, as well as more fruitful, to look for the main confirmation of a When Mahomet's cousin Jaffer, and religion in its intrinsic correspondence with others of his first converts, persecuted by urgent wants of human nature, in its prothe idolaters of Mecca, fled in the year of found necessity! Differing religions will our era 615, seven years before the Hegira, then be found to have much in common; into Abyssinia, and took refuge with the but this will be an additional proof of the king of that country, the people of Mecca value of that religion which does most for sent after the fugitives to demand that that which is thus commonly recognized as they should be given up to them. Abys-salutary and necessary, In Christendom sinia was then already Christian. The one need not go about to establish that the king asked Jaffer and his companions religion of the Hebrews is a better religion what was this new religion for which they than the religion of the Arabs, or that the had left their country. Jaffer answered: Bible is a greater book than the Koran. The "We were plunged in the darkness of ig- Bible grew, the Koran was made; there lies norance, we were worshippers of idols. the immense difference in depth and truth Given over to all our passions, we knew between them! This very inferiority may no law but that of the strongest, when make the Koran, for certain purposes and God raised up among us a man of our own for people at a low stage of mental growth, race, of noble descent, and long held in a more powerful instrument than the Biesteem by us for his virtues. This aposble. From the circumstances of its origin, tle called us to believe in one God, to wor- the Koran has the intensely dogmatic char- ship God only, to reject the superstitions acter, it has the perpetual insistance on of our fathers, to despise divinities of wood the motive of future rewards and punishand stone. He commanded us to eschew ments, the palpable exhibition of paradise wickedness, to be truthful in speech, faith- and hell, which the Bible has not. Thereful to our engagements, kind and helpful fore, to get the sort of power which all this to our relations and neighbours. He bade gives, popular Christianity is apt to treat us respect the chastity of women, and not the Bible as if it was just like the Koran; to rob the orphan. He exhorted us to and because of this sort of power, among prayer, alms-giving, and fasting. We be- the little known and little advanced races lieved in his mission, and we accepted the of the great African continent, the Madoctrines and the rule of life which he hometan missionaries are said to be much brought to us from God. For this our more successful than ours. Nevertheless countrymen have persecuted us; and now even in Africa it will assuredly one day be they want to make us return to their idol- manifest, that whereas the Bible-people atry." The king of Abyssinia refused to trace themselves to Abraham through surrender the fugitives, and then, turning Isaac, and the Koran-people trace themagain to Jaffer, after a few more explana- selves to Abraham through Ishmael, the tions, he picked up a straw from the difference between the religion of the ground, and said to him: "Between your Bible and the religion of the Koran is religion and ours there is not the thickness almost as the difference between Isaac of this straw difference." and Ishmael. I mean, that the seriousness about righteousness, which is what the hatred of idolatry really means, and the profound and inexhaustible doctrines that the righteous Eternal loveth righteousness, that there is no peace for the wicked, that the righteous is an everlasting foundation, are exhibited and inculcated in the Old Testament with an authority, majesty, and truth which leave the Koran immeasurably behind, and which, the more mankind grows and gains light, the more will be felt to have no fellows. Mahomet was no doubt acquainted with the Jews and their documents, and gained something from this source for his religion; but his religion is not a mere plagiarism from Judea any more than it is a mere mass of falsehood. No; in the seriousness,

That is not quite so; yet thus much we may affirm, that Jaffer's account of the religion of Mahomet is a great deal truer than the accounts of it which are commonly current amongst us. Indeed, for the credit of humanity, as more than a hundred millions of men are said to profess the Mahometan religion, one is glad to think so. To popular opinion everywhere, religion is proved by miracles. All religions but a man's own are utterly false and vain; the authors of them are mere impostors; and the wonders which are said to attest them, fictitious. We forget that this is a game which two can play at; although the believer of each religion always imagines the prodigies which attest his own religion to be fenced by a

first and famous Imams, Ali, Hassan, and Hussein, over the popular imagination. "O brother," said Hassan, as he was dying of poison, to Hussein who sought to find out and punish his murderer, "O brother, let him alone till he and I meet together before God!" So his father Ali had stood back from his rights instead of snatching at them; so of Hussein it was said by his successful rival, the usurping Caliph Yezid :

elevation, and moral energy of himself and of that Semitic race from which he sprang and to which he spoke, Mahomet mainly found that scorn and hatred of idolatry, that sense of the worth and truth of righteousness, judgment, and justice, which make the real greatness of him and his Koran, and which are thus rather an independent testimony to the essential doctrines of the Old Testament, than a plagiarism from them. The world needs" God loved Hussein, but he would not suffer righteousness aud the Bible is the grand teacher of it; but, for certain times and certain men, Mahomet too in his way, was a teacher of righteousness.

him to attain to anything." They might attain to nothing, they were too pure, these great ones of the world as by birth they were; but the people, which itself also can But we know how the Old Testament attain to so little, loved them all the better conception of righteousness ceased with on that account, loved them for their abnetime to have the freshness and force of gation and mildness, felt that they were an intuition, became something petrified, dear to God, that God loved them, and narrow, and formal, and needed renewing. that they and their lives filled a void in We know how Christianity renewed it, car- the severe religion of Mahomet. These rying into these hard waters of Judaism saintly self-deniers, these resigned suffera sort of warm gulf-stream of tender emo-ers, who would not strive nor cry, supplied tion, due chiefly to qualities which may be a tender and pathetic side in Islam; the summed up as those of inwardness, mild- conquered Persians, a more mobile, more ness, and self-renouncement. Mahometan- impressionable, and gentler race than their ism had no such renewing; it began with concentrated, narrow, and austere Semitic a conception of righteousness, lofty indeed, conquerors, felt the need of it most, and but narrow, and which we may eall old gave most prominence to the ideals which Jewish; and there it remained; it is not a satisfied the need; but in Arabs and Turks feeling religion. No one would say that also, and in all the Mahometan world, Ali the virtues of gentleness, mildness, and and his sons excite enthusiasm and affecself-sacrifice were its virtues and the tion. Round the central sufferer, Hussein, more it went on, the more the faults has come to group itself everything which of its original narrow basis became visi- is most tender and touching; his person ble, more and more it became fierce and brings to the Mussulman's mind the most militant, less and less was it amiable. human side of Mahomet himself, his fondNow, what are Ali, and Hassan, and Hus-ness for children,-— for Mahomet had loved sein and the Imams, but an insurrection to nurse the little Hussein on his knee, of noble and pious natures against this and to show him from the pulpit to his hardness and aridity of the religion round people. The Family of the Tent is full of them; an insurrection making its authors women and children, and their devotion seem weak, helpless, and unsuccessful to and sufferings,- blameless and saintly the world and amidst the struggles of the women, lovely and innocent ehildren; world, but enabling them to know the joy there, too, are the beauty and the love of and peace for which the world thirsts in youth; all follow the attraction of the vain, and inspiring in the heart of man- pure and resigned Imam, all die for him; kind an irresistible sympathy. "The their tender pathos flows into his and entwelve Imams," says Gibbon," Ali, Hassan, hances it, till there arises for the popular Hussein, and the lineal descendants of Hus-imagination an immense ideal of mildness sein to the ninth generation, without arms, and self-sacrifice, melting and overpoweror treasures, or subjects, successively en- ing the soul. joyed the veneration of the people. Their names were often the pretence of sedition and civil war; but these royal saints despised the pomp of the world, submitted to the will of God and the injustice of man, and devoted their innocent lives to the study and practice of religion."

Abnegation and mildness, based on the depth of the inner life, and visited by unmerited misfortune, made the power of the

Even for us, to whom almost all the names are strange, whose interest in the places and persons is faint, who have them before us for a moment to-day, to see them again probably, no more for ever,- even for us, unless I err greatly, the power and pathos of this ideal are recognizable. What must they be for those to whom every name is familiar and calls up the most solemn and cherished associations;