FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club THE LIVING AGE with another periodical. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-olice money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY. From Macmillan's Magazine. BY W. GIFFORD PALGRAVE. external influences, may long remain, under the feebleness of decrepit or malformed Governments, Papal or Turkish, Spanish or Hellene, the dread of the wayfaring merchant and the defenceles s tourist. In lands like these, the town gates are often the ultimate limits of security. Indeed it is not, as we all know, many centuries since that scantiness of inhabitants, combined with a defective, because an incipient, organization, rendered large tracts of France, of Germany, and of England itself, dangerous travelling for the unarmed and unescorted. A FEW months' experience of Arabia Proper suffices to teach the traveller of our day that the terms "Arab" and "Bedouin," though not unfrequently used as if convertible, are by no means such in reality. It may further teach him, if he knew it not before, that "Bedouin " and "robber" are also not necessarily synonymous; that the latter designation is no less ill-sounding to the ordinary Arab ear, than it would be to the European; and that the class which it represents is amen- But nowhere, perhaps, in the old world able to whatever penalties Arab law and at least, does there exist an equal extent society can inflict, much as it would be in of land in which all the sinister conditions more civilized lands of juries and police- that favour brigandage are so perplexingforce. Nor is this, so far as Arabia itself ly combined and aggravated, as in Arabia is concerned, a recently introduced order Proper. There, for distances measured, of things, due to comparatively modern not by miles but by degrees, vast expansinfluences, social or political; on the con-es of stony, irreclaimable desert, of pathtrary, a retrospective view of the national less sands and labyrinthine rocks, place annals, even when carried back to the first utterly disproportionate intervals of enday-dawn of præ-Islamitic history, presents forced solitude between the watered valno other aspect; and full five centuries leys and green slopes where alone anybefore the appearance of the Meccan law-thing like settled life and social union can giver, we find the thief, the robber, and the brigand already paled off from and at war with established order and right; already marked with the outlaw's brand, and subject to all its sternest consequences. And yet, in spite of these facts, it cannot be denied that, in these same earliest times, the great peninsula bore, as it still. and to a certain extent not undeservedly, bears, an evil name for the number and the audacity of its robbers. The cause is inherent, and not far to seek. make good its footing. A week of suns may not seldom rise and set on the slowmoving caravan without bringing into view a single roof: indeed, the known lifesparing clemency of the Arab robber is chiefly due, not to any favourable speciality of character, but to this very circumstance of solitude; in other words, to the brigand's certainty that long before his plundered victims can reach help, or even give tidings, he himself and his booty will be far beyond pursuit. "DesA population much too scanty in pro- ert means licence," says the Arab proverb; portion to the geographical extent of the the wild lands breed wild men; and thus land it occupies, as also, though from dif- it is that centuries of comparative law and ferent reasons, one notably over-crowded, order, the organizing vigour of Mahomet must always render the efficacious protec- and his first successors, the sceptre of the tion of individual life and property a diffi- Caliphs, and the military discipline of the cult task, even for the strongest and most Turks, have each in their turn failed to energetic administration; and the difficul- render the sand-waves of the "Nefood " ty will, under a weak or negligent rule, and the gullies of "Toweyk" wholly safe amount to absolute impossibility. Thus, ventures for the traveller; while even the for example's sake, the open spaces of the rigour, amounting almost to tyranny, of lonely Campagna, the wild glens of Al- the more recent Wahhabee rulers, who bania or Koordistan, the parched sierras avowedly tolerate no spoilers besides themof Central Spain, and the defiles of South-selves, cannot render permanently secure ern Greece, have long been, and, bating the intercourse and traffic of one Arab province oasis, I might better say-nascent organization and primal morality with another. were they who-having, in consequence of some special deed of blood, sudden mishap, or occasionally sheer innate fierceness of temperament, become nearly or quite detached from their own particular clan and its alliances — led, henceforth at large, a life of "sturt and strife," of indiscriminate plunder and rapine; disavowed by all, hostile to all, yet holding their own; and that, strange though it may seem, not by physical force merely, but also by intellectual pre-emminence. They stand before us in the national records, apart from the great chiefs and leaders of their age, apart from the recognized heroes, the Antarahs and Barakats of epic war, wild, half-naked, savage, inured to hardship, danger, and blood; yet looked upon by their countrymen with a respect amounting almost to awe, and crowned with a halo of fame visible even through the mist of centuries, and under the altered lights of Islam: men to be admired, though not imitated; to be honoured while condemn agreed to condemn, arose the præ-IslaBut during the latter years of the præ- mitic brigand class. This, although reIslamitic period, when the entire centre of cruited in the main, after the fashion of the peninsula, and no small portion of its other lands, by idleness, want, and the circumference that is, whatever was not half-idiocy that has much, if physiology immediately subject to the rule of the Ye- tell true, to do with habitual vice, yet commenite kings, and of their or the Persian prised also men who under more propitiviceroys resembled best of all a seeth-ous circumstances might have led a differing caldron, where the overboiling ener-ent and an honourable career. These gies of countless clans and divisions of clans dashed and clashed in never-resting eddies; when no fixed organization or political institution beyond that of the tribe, at most, had even a chance of permanence in the giddy whirl,- open robbers were, as might have naturally been expected, both numerous and daring; nor can we wonder if, when every man did more or less what was right in his own eyes, the list of the colour-blind to the moral tints of "mine" and "thine" should have been a long one, and have included many names of great though not good renown. Indeed, it might almost have been anticipated that the entire nation would have been numbered in the ill-famed category, till the universality of fact absorbed the distinction of name; and none would have been called robbers, because all were so. Fortunately the clan principle interfered; and by tracing certain, though inadequate, limits of social right and wrong, rendered transgression alike possible and exceptional. He who, led astray by pri-ed: a moral paradox, explained partly by vate and personal greed, plundered, not on his own clan's account, but on his own; who, without discrimination of peace-time or war, of alliance or hostility, attacked the friends no less than the foes of his tribesmen, was, from the earliest times, accounted criminal; while he who, in concert with his kin, assailed and spoiled a common and acknowledged enemy, was held to have performed an honourable of brute force, cunning. and cruelty, is duty. After this fashion the Arabs learned to draw the line-in no age or country a very broad one-between war and brigandage; and, by vehement reprobation of the latter, stood self-excused for their excessive proneness to the former. the character of the times they lived in, partly by their own personal qualities. When a nation is either wholly barbarous or wholly civilized, the records of its "criminal classes" are of little interest, and of less utility. In the former case, they form, indeed, the bulk of the local chronicle; but the tale they tell of utter and bestial savagery, the mere repetition alike purportless, tedious, and disgusting. On the other hand, among nations well advanced in civilization, the ban laid on exceptional rebels against the reign of law is so withering, and the severance between them and the better life of the land so enFrom such a state of things, where geo- tire, that nothing remains to a Jack Shepgraphical configuration and political con-pard or a Bill Sykes but stupid, hateful, fusion conspired to encourage what unmeaning vice, unfit either to point the moral of the novelist or to adorn the tale | and even generosity; while some of them of the historian. in addition attained lasting fame for excellence in poetry, then, as now, the proudest boast of the Arab. Thus it was that although rapine, bloodshed, and, not rarely, treachery, might dim, they could not wholly eclipse the splendour of their better qualities and worthier deeds. Such was the classical præ-Islamitic brigand, as portrayed to us in the pages of the Hamasah, of Aboo-l-Faraj, Meydanee, and others; not indeed the full image, but the skeleton and ground-plan of his race: a type in which the Arab character, not of those ages only but of all succeeding generations, is correctly though roughly given: untameable, self-reliant, defiant, full of hard good sense and deep passion, a vivid though a narrow imagination, and a perfect command of the most expressive of all spoken languages; while at the same time these very men, by their isolation, But between the two extremes of barbarism and of culture, the records of most nations exhibit a middle or transition period, when the bonds of society, though formed, are still elastic; while public morality is already sufficiently advanced to disallow much that public order is as yet too feeble to repress. In such a period the highway robber is apt to be regarded with a sort of half-toleration, as a relic of the "good old times;" and even becomes in the estimation of many a sort of conservative protest against the supposed degeneracies and real artificialities of progress; a semi-hero, to be, metaphorically at least, if not in fact, hung in a silken halter, and cut down to the tune of a panegyric. On these frontier lines between order and anarchy, in this twilight between licence and law, flourish Robin Hoods, Helmbrechts, Kalewi-Poegs, and their like; equivocal their inaptitude for organized combination, celebrities, brigands by land and corsairs at sea; feared, respected, and hated by their injured contemporaries; more honoured by later and securer generations, and ultimately placed on pedestals of fame side by side with their betters in the national Valhalla. And what the era of King John was to England, the "Interregnum" to Germany, the days of Sueno and his peers to Scandinavia, that were to Arabia the two centuries that preceded the appearance of Mahomet, but chiefly the former. Heroes had ceased to be robbers, but robbers had not wholly ceased to be heroes. their contempt for all excellence or development save that of the individual, their aversion to any restraint however wholesome, and above all their restless inconstancy of temper, give the measure of Arab national weakness, and too clearly illustrate that incoherent individualism which ruined the Empires of Damascus, Bagdad, and Cordova, and blighted even in its flower the fairest promise of, the Arab mind. Their muster-roll is a long one; but at its head stand eminent three names of renown, illustrated by records of exceptional completeness. These are Ta'abbet-Shurran, Shanfara', and Soleyk, men each of whom deserves special mention, because each represents in himself a peculiar subdivision of the great brigand class. A more special reason for the peculiar and prominent rank held in præ-Islamitic Arab story by these wild rovers of the desert, is to be sought in the intense vigour and activity of the prevailing national "Ta'abbet-Shurran," or, "fle has taken spirit, of which these very men were an an evil thing under his arm," is the comill-regulated and exaggerated, yet by no posite appellation by which Arab story means an unfaithful, representation. To recognizes its robber-hero of predilection. the physical advantages of strength, fleet. His real name was Thabit, the son of Janess, quickness of eye, and dexterity of bir; the clan of Fahm, to which he behand-all objects of deliberate and syste- longed, formed part of the great Keysmatic culture in Pagan Arabia, no less than 'Eglan family, the progeny of Modar; and in Pagan Greece - they added many of accordingly of "Most-'areb" (that is "adthe moral qualities then held in the high-scititious Arab," or, in mythical phrase, of est esteem by their countrymen: patient Ismaelitic), not of "'Aarab," "pure Arab," endurance, forethought, courage, daring, or of Southern and Kahtanee origin. The |