And be a haughty-culturist in persona. Book-binders to Morocco would be bound, The charitable, cash-collecting trades, Could still Cant-on in China if they 're put. 'Mongst mankind's millions, when I gaze around, Without our home's best ornament, a wife; N. B. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MUSSULMAN. BY THE AUTHOR OF SHIP AND SHORE.' A REDEEMING trait in the character of the Mussulman, is that spirit of honesty which pervades his commercial conduct. His naked word is as safe as a bond, though guaranteed by penalties severe as those exacted by the mercenary Jew of Venice. If reverses defeat his just intentions, and he becomes unable to meet your full demand, he lays his last farthing at your feet; and should Fortune smile upon him again, he considers your claim, at whatever distance of time, still obligatory and paramount. Any other conduct would in his eyes be fraudulent and base. If situations are reversed, and you become his insolvent debtor, he will not shut you up in a prison, and deprive you of the means of supporting your dependant family, as we do in our Christian land. will exonerate you for the time being; but if you subsequently acquire or inherit the means of liquidating his claim, he expects it at your hand; and if in your abundance and his penury you refuse it, it will not be safe for you to dash past his hovel in your gilded carriage. He If you purchase a horse of him, which he warrants to be sound, and free from vicious habits, you may confidently rely upon that animal's taking you to your journey's end within the reasonable time contemplated, and without a broken limb. And if you sell him an animal of the same noble species as unexceptionable, and he finds him otherwise, he returns him to you, and expects you to take him back not as an act of gratuitous kindness and consideration, but as an act of mere jus tice, and if you refuse to do it, you may expect from him the treatment which a knave deserves from the hands of an honest man. He will look upon you much as Adam may have looked upon the devil, when the fatal fruit had opened his eyes. Or if you enter his bazaar, to purchase any particular article it may contain, instead of deluging you with an ocean of words about its excellent qualities, he simply says good; and it is ordinarily safer for you to rely upon his declaration, than the decision of your own eyes. I speak now of the pure Ormanlee, pursuing the rare vocation of a merchant, unsustained and uncorrupted by station: for place this same individual in power, intoxicate him with ambition, and though he may not then defraud you in a bargain, yet to meet the exorbitant demands of a superior, or to secure some darling object of personal aggrandizement, he may oppress you, he may levy upon your property, till your patience and ability are both exhausted. Ambition and state necessity appear to confound his vague moral distinctions, and to deprive him of those restraining checks, which in private life he recognises and obeys. Nor is this surprising, when we consider the texture and source of these restraints. He is honest in his dealings, not mainly because a want of this uprightness would involve a moral culpability, but because it would imply a sordid meanness of soul, beneath his dignity and selfrespect. Pride, self-esteem, and a regard for his reputation, take with him essentially the place of a moral sense; and secure from him, in his private relations to society, the practice of many important and commendable virtues. Far be it from me to condemn an action that is good in itself, because its motive is not the purest offspring of conscience: my simple object is to exhibit the true character of the Mussulman, and to show why this same individual, in one situation, is humane and upright, and in the other, cruel and unjust. It is owing mainly to the practical substitution of secular and self-regarding motives for the stern, unvarying decisions of quick and enlightened moral sense. The man who invariably listens to this voice from within, is the same, whatever changes may occur in his outward condition. No apologies of station, no exemption from the censures of others, nor even the ability to set the opinion of mankind at defiance, can exonerate him, in his own eyes, from the sacred obligations of virtue, humanity, and justice. But the Turk does not act under these imperious restraints: he does not recognise their existence; his morality springs from a different source; he is governed by motives which fluctuate with his condition, and seem to lose their force, as he ascends in the scale of despotic power. He will practice as a general, what he condemns in the humble subordinate; and applaud the Sultan for an act, which, if committed by a private citizen, would curdle his blood with horror. He is prone to believe, when an action highly criminal in itself flows from high, irresponsible authority, that there must be some great end in view, by which it is redeemed and sanctified. In this spirit, though naturally humane and averse to the infliction of what he may deem unnecessary pangs, he justifies the massacre of a thousand citizens in a revolted province, to overawe and intimidate the rest, and prevent perhaps a still greater effusion of blood. In the same spirit, he justifies that impenetrable duplicity, especially in public men and their agents, to which he may perhaps himself fall the first victim. He regards it simply as the means of effecting a result, that may cancel its turpitude. This power of dissembling, is one of the most prominent and fearful traits in his character. It is so profound and entire, that the greatest adept in it frequently finds himself in the very snare, the intricacies and meshes of which he has spent his life in studying. The perfidiousness through which Ali of Yenena came to his death, is a forcible illustration of this fact. He had a hundred times concealed his dagger beneath a kiss, and was at last blinded and betrayed by the same artifice. You may bring a Turk before his superior; he may there be loaded with the most heavy and unjust accusations; flayed with the most cutting invective; scorched with the most burning sarcasm; yet not a word or look betrays the indignant conflict within. He is as meek, silent, and patient, as the most submissive martyr; or rather, he seems to stand in statue-like insensibility; but when the day of change and retribution comes, he will reveal upon you the vengeance of a deep and cherished wrong! You may scale his harem, dishonor his house, and wound him in the very quick of his sensibilities, and he may meet you the next day at the Cafena, quietly smoking his pipe at your side, and perhaps solicit you to walk with him; but if you consent, you go out never to return!-and the yielding object of your criminal passion, equally unwarned and unapprized, will follow your lifeless body in a sack, to her grave in the Bosphorus. Or suppose in a less exceptionable shape you should induce him to accompany you to Naples, and you introduce him into the theatre a place of which he has not the slightest conception into the very centre of its magnificent architecture, and gorgeous decorations. And now the curtain that conceals the ballet, suddenly rises; the orchestra bursts into full harmony; and two or three hundred young females, with only the apology of drapery upon their soft forms, float in concert to the swelling richness of the music. Though all the houri'd beauty of Mohamed's heaven could not surprise him more, yet not a muscle moves - not an emotion disturbs the saturnine gravity of his countenance. This ability to veil the feelings, so powerful in the working of good and evil, so essential in avoiding the mistakes of momentary embarrassment, and the committals of unconcealed anger, is not entirely the effect of education, for it has never been manifested in any nice degree of perfection, except by orientals, with whom it has become, whatever it may have originally been, in a measure constitutional. It is a trait of character that may justly interest and amuse the innocent, and alarm the guilty. The serpent rarely coils himself for the timid heel of the passing traveler, but for the presumptuous foot which comes rustling and trampling too near his solitude. He The equanimity with which a Turk bears misfortune, is a lesson to many who may be his superiors in every other kind of wisdom. may be reduced at once from affluence to poverty; the tempest, the flame, or a plundering edict of his emperor, may strip him of his last piastre; but instead of looking around for a halter, or sullenly sitting down to madden over his destitute condition, you may find him, perhaps, in a few days, selling the bowl, the stem, or the amber mouth-piece of his pipe; carrying the whole of his little capital in one hand, and with the other adjusting his consolatory chibouque. Yet he is the same dignified, uncringing being that he was before, and considers his claims to respect not at all affected by his new and humble occupation. He connects no reproach with his poverty, and will not tolerate the contemptuous look, which is prone to follow the frown of Fortune. Let those who dispute the good sense of his deportment, take to arsenic, leave their families to the charities of strangers, and go the fearful journey before their time. They have not the resolution and fortitude of men on whom heaven has set its highest impress. They are examples of that weakness and vanity, from which our nature is not entirely exempt. But the man who thus wickedly sneaks out of the world, deserting his responsibilities, and betraying the trust reposed in him by the author of his existence, is unworthy of being sepulchred in company with those who have struggled with adversity, lived with respect, and died with honor. There is not in the Turk, as many have been led to believe, a real contempt for learning. He has been induced to discourage it, from a just apprehension of the innovations it might introduce upon his ancient and venerated customs. He looks upon these transmitted usages as something sacred; he connects them with the highest splendors of his nation, the loftiest triumphs of his religion, and submits to a departure from them with clinging reluctance. It is not the elegance of the Fez, or the richness of the coiled cashmere, that makes him love the turban; it is because his ancestors wore that turban, because they fought and bled beneath it because they bowed with it upon their venerable, toil-worn brows, toward Mecca. He still wears his belt, his yataghan, and pistols, not because they are mounted with jewels and gold, or for fear of surprise from an assassin, but because his forefathers wore them; because those great men, who have now gone from the earth, and whom he is left to represent, appeared at the hearth and in the field, at home and abroad, in these weapons of pride and trust. He refuses to relinquish his flowing robe, not that a simpler and less ample habit would not answer its purpose; but it is the mantle that fell from the prophetspirit of his father. With these feelings, it is not surprising that he should wish to avoid coming in contact with those nations who have not this filial reverence, and with whom every novelty has a new charm that he should watch with a jealous eye the spirit of change that is abroad that he should discountenance this arrogance of untried experiment that he should discourage the innovating tendencies of impatient knowledge that he should wish to keep the orb of science upon the dim horizon of his mind, if in its bright and burning ascent, it must melt away the chain that binds him to the graves of his ancestral dead. The violations committed upon these sacred attachments, by the innovations recently introduced under the royal signet, have shaken the Ottoman throne to its base; they have disturbed the confidence of the Mussulman in the piety and wisdom of his sovereign; and it will be an unexampled exhibition of forbearance or weakness in the nation, if this representative of the Prophet does not yet pay with his life the penalty of his presumption. You may trifle with a good man's property, and even sport with his reputation; but you must not touch the sanctity of his respect for those who have it no longer in their power to make their own defence. There is no affection so deep, as that hallowed by the grave; no attachment so profound, as that on which Death hath set its seal; for all that we there discover, remember, and mourn, is Goodness without its faults, Wisdom without its errors. The calmness with which a Turk makes up his mind to die, the composure with which he bows to the hand of the executioner, though innocent of the crime alleged, are among his distinguishing characteristics, and may be traced to the evenness of constitutional habit, and those sentiments of submission, instilled by his education. He is taught from his earliest years to suppress, or at least conceal, his emotions; to preserve a calm exterior, whatever may be the agitation within; so that ere long he resembles a stream moving on with a bright, unbroken surface, though gloomy and pointed rocks darken and disturb its bed. He is taught to consider his personal services, in peace or war, in the discharge of a civil trust, or in the perils of the tented field, ever at the call of his sovereign,—that the preservation or sacrifice of his life is submitted to measures he must not arraign, or to events upon which Fate has set its unalterable seal. When, therefore, death presents itself, whether in the burning breach, or on the sinking deck whether in the shape of disease, or the firman of the Prophet's vicegerent - he submits, like one who feels that his days are numbered, and that tears, regrets, and dismay, are alike unavailing. - When charged with a crime of which he is utterly innocent, and he is required to make restitution with his life, he breathes no angry remonstrance no humiliating supplication. He may whisper of a mistake, and ask a delay: if that be denied, he casts an appealing look to his God, and submits; and there may be no one feature, in the circumstances of his death, calculated to inspire him with fortitude, or a spirit of submissiveness. There may be no responsible tribunal, as in other lands, to sit in judgment upon his alleged offence-no jury, bound to render an impartial verdict, and ever disposed to the side of mercy; no witnesses, with whom pity nearly melts away the stern obligations of an oath no counsel, whose professional ambition lies in the acquittal of his client no solemn and formal delivery of the fatal sentence no prison of preparation, and possible pardon - no prints, promulgating previous virtues, and deprecating the rigors of inexorable Justice lingering visits of unwearied friendship and affection-no consolatory assurances of the pitying priest no gathering and breathless multitude around the last scene no reconciling tears of sympathy, or halfformed threats of deliverance - none of those preludes and appendages which, with us, smooth the way to a death of ignominy, and make the obituary of the hapless victim to be read and wept over by commisserating millions. no He meets his death comparatively alone, -none to counsel, none to console! The headsman comes to him in the street, or the field, as the chance may be, and presents the fatal firman; he kneels, bares his neck; the scimetar flashes through its quick circuit; the sinking body and severed head fall together; the countenance for an instant betrays the parting pang; the eye twinkles a moment, then closes in everlasting night! How sudden, how appalling this transition! Life, light, and all the busy promises of hope, exchanged at once for the silence and perpetual darkness of death! Were life a taper, that, if quenched, could be re-lighted, we might with less dread undergo the darkening change: but there is no Promethean spark that can re-kindle, if once extinguished, this vital flame. Hence |