! An anecdote is related respecting Mosab's beauty.* Being seated in the court of his house at Bassorah, a female, passing, stopped and looked at him attentively. Mosab asking why she stood there, she replied, "my lamp is out, and seeing your brilliant face, I fancied I could light it there."+ The deficiencies of Hamzah becoming more and more apparent, one of his officers, whom he had threatened with the bastinado, wrote to Abdallah ben Zobayr, that if he wished to retain Bassorah, he must remove his son, and re-appoint Mosab. Complaints had reached Abdallah from all sides against the administration of Hamzah, causing him to apprehend a rising of the people of Bassorah, and he was at length constrained to recal his son and restore Mosab to the government of Irak. When Hamzah, whose generosity, which is celebrated by the poets, as of the most prodigal character, returned to his father, the latter inquired what had become of the treasury? Hamzah replied that he had distributed its contents amongst his partizans. Abdallah asked him sternly, whether the money belonged to him or to his father? He ordered his son immediately to be arrested, loaded with chains, and confined in the prison of Arem. It was in the beginning of the year 67, that Mosab, then governor of Bassorah, was visited by the personages from Kufah, already mentioned, who had quitted that city precipitately to avoid the fury of Mokhtar. They assured him, if he would march thither, the people of the province would join him; but he declined unless he could depend upon the co-operation of Mohalleb ben AbiSafrah, whom Abdallah, sensible of his talents, had shortly before invested with the government of Ahwaz, Pars, and the adjoining provinces. Mosab sent to him Mohamed ben Ashath, who prevailed upon Mohalleb to put himself at the head of his army and march to Kufah. The people of this city sallied out, under Mokhtar, were defeated and driven in disorder within the walls. Mosab arrived at the same time at the head of his troops. Mokhtar prepared to sally forth, and repel his rival in person, but was assured by his spies that he could depend upon the attachment of no person in Kufah; and whilst Mosab prosecuted the siege of the city, the inhabitants vented their imprecations against Mokhtar at the very ramparts of his palace. He had 6,000 men ; want of provisions beginning to be felt, Mokhtar told them that death was unavoidable, and that they had better perish in battle. They offered to capitulate for him as well as themselves; he refused, and declared he knew how to die with arms in his hands. At break of day, after prayer, he washed his head and body, placed linen under his cuirass, and prepared to sally forth against the enemy. "It is my turn to die to-day," he observed to his companions in arms; "it will be your's to-morrow; be assured that not one of you will be spared." But this address failed to revive the courage of these timid and cowardly men. Mokhtar opened the gate, and rushed forth followed by nineteen persons, who soon fell, as well as himself, under the swords of the enemy. Mokhtar's head was cut off, by order of Mosab, and stuck up at the gate of the mosque. The soldiers in the citadel surrendered at discretion; they were bound and marched to a large open space in the centre of the city, where they were beheaded to the number of 6,000. Mosab felt inclined to pardon them; but Mohamed ben Ashath protested against this lenity towards men guilty of such atrocities. * Marg. note to the Rabi-alabrar. ↑ A parallel to this compliment may be found in the well-known address of a dustman to a certain English duchess: "allow me, madam, to light my pipe at your eyes." One of the followers of Mokhtar escaped by his effrontery.* Whilst being led to the fatal spot, he cried to Mosab, "what a frightful spectacle will it be when, at the day of the resurrection, I shall appear before your handsome form and brilliant countenance, grasp hold of you and say to God, 'Lord, ask Mosab wherefore he took my life!" Mosab ordered him to be liberated. Emir," rejoined the soldier," add to the gift of life that of fortune." Mosab presented him with 100,000 pieces of silver. "I call God and the emir to witness," added the fellow," that half of this sum should belong to the poet Ebn Rokiah, who says: A star from heaven is Mosab; his bright face The fear of God his every action rules. Prosperity attends such holy fear." Mosab burst out laughing. "I see you deserve my kindness," he said; and kept the man near his person. After administering the oath of fidelity to Abdallah ben Zobayr to the people of Kufah and Sawad (Chaldea), he wrote to Ibrahim ben Malek Ashtar, who was at Mausel, at the head of his army, inviting him to submit, and promising to confer a vast government upon him. Ibrahim came, and acknowledged Abdallah; but Mosab failed in his engagement, telling Ibrahim that when they had conquered Syria, he should have that government. Towards the close of 67, Mosab left Kufah to perform the pilgrimage. On arriving at Mecca, he visited Abdallah ben Omar, who saluted him coldly. Surprised at this indifference, he requested to know the cause. Abdallah asked him how he could, without scruple, put to death, in the month of Ramadan, 6,000 Musulmans, who had surrendered in the hope of saving their lives? Mosab replied that they were infidels. "Wretched man," said Abdallah, had they been sheep which your father had bequeathed to you, God would call you to account for their blood; how much more, when they were sherifs of distinguished birth!" Mosab took leave immediately. He departed for Bassorah, still retaining the government of Irak, and appointed Hareth to command in his name at Kufah. Regularly every year did Abdallah ben Zobayr perform the ceremonies of the pilgrimage at the head of his partizans; and the year 68 (A.D. 687-8), offered to the astonished Meccans a spectacle unexampled since the origin of Islamism. On the spot named Arafat were assembled four banners: that of Abdallah ben Zobayr and his adherents; that of the Ommiade khalif; that of Mohamed ben Hanefiyah, and that of Nejdah ben Amer, which the Kharejis had wrested from the Harawris: yet the presence of so many adverse parties produced not the slightest disturbance. The tragical death of Mokhtar was a terrible blow to the party of Mohamed ben Hanefiyah. Abdallah, availing himself of this circumstance, pressed him to submit, threatening, in case of refusal, to compel him by force of arms. Mohamed retreated towards Syria; but retracing his steps, he returned towards Mecca, and fixed his residence at Shaáb Abu-Taleb, or the Defile of Abu Taleb. Abdallah ordered him to quit the country. Mohamed, imprécating curses on his rival, retired to Tayef. Abdallah had nominated Abdallah ben Abdalrahman to govern one of the + Makrizi. Fási. Tabari. Zamakhshari, Rabi alabrar. Asiat. Jour. N.S. VOL. 9. No. 35. 2 D 1 : provinces of Yemen. This man appropriated to himself the wealth of the country, which he employed in gratuities, which gained him a high reputation for liberality. The Koraishes, in return for his presents, chaunted his praises and attended him in crowds. Ebn Zobayr, jealous of the popularity of this governor, removed him and appointed Ibrahim, the son of Saad ben AbiWakas, his successor. The latter wishing to settle accounts with Ben Abdalrahman, he replied arrogantly, "I have no accounts to settle with you; we have nothing to do with each other ;" and set off immediately for Mecca. The Koraishes attended him armed, their slaves burning incense before him, and in this manner he appeared at the mosque, and made the tour of the Kabah. With the same attendants, he presented himself before Ebn Zobayr, who, sensible of the impolicy of uselessly compromising his dignity, evinced no dissatisfaction towards him, and suffered him to proceed quietly to his home. Abdallah ben Zobayr did not take sufficient pains to conciliate an illustrious personage, Abdallah ben Abbas, whose birth and high qualities secured to him the respect of all Musulmans. Free from personal ambition, but sincerely devoted to the family of Ali, Ebn Abbas beheld in the son of Zobayr only an ambitious usurper, on whom success could confer no genuine rights. This feeling kept up an irritation between these two individuals, formed for mutual esteem, which manifested itself upon all occasions, either in public acts, unfriendly proceedings, or pointed sarcasms. In these disputes, Ebn Abbas retained that superiority which his wit and talents gave him over his adversary. Abu bekr ben Hojjah, an Arabian writer, relates a discussion between these two personages, concerning the respectability of their descent, in which Ebn Abbas placed Abdallah in a dilemma, which exposed him to the derision of his own wife. Masoudi and Makrizi relate instances of their mutual quarrels and sarcasms. Abdallah ben Abbas, nevertheless, recognized Ebn Zobayr as khalif, and honestly confessed, that he combined, in a more eminent degree than the Ommiades, the qualities which gave a title to supreme rank. When he saw, however, the rigour with which he treated the son of Ali, he went to Ebn Zobayr, reproached him bitterly, retracted his oath, and, quitting Mecca, retired to Tayef, where he died, A.H. 68, universally regretted by the Musul mans. [To be concluded next month.] COINCIDENCE OF THOUGHT IN SUCKLING AND A MOST English readers are familiar with the pretty verse of Sir John Suckling: Th' adorning thee with so much art, Is but a barb'rous skill; 'Tis like the poisoning of a dart, The identical thought appears in the following couplet, quoted by Mr. Ward (vol. ii. p. 402) from the Sanscrit, though without the author's name: Thine eyes have completely eclipsed those of the deer; then why add kajala (a mineral pigment used to darken the lower eye-lid)? Is it not enough that thou destroy thy victim, unless thou do it with poisoned arrows? REMINISCENCES OF AN OLD INDIAN OFFICER. No. II. Bob. By St George, I was the first person that entered the breach; and had I not effected it with resolution, I had been slain if I had had a million of lives. Ed. Know. 'Twas pity you had not ten, your own and a cat's. But was it possible? BEN JONSON. WHEN we next met at the hospitable table of our friend, the colonel, we found him not a little depressed; and I began to be apprehensive that the state of his spirits would be inauspicious to the usual flow of his after-dinner narrations. The fact is, he had dined a day or two before with a member of council, at whose table he met two or three of those coxcombs, who glory in dissipating the enchantment of an Anglo-Asiatic adventure, by finding the cracks and flaws of a story, and hunting out petty discrepancies and trivial incongruities: like the critics, who turn up their noses at Shakspeare, when he disdains to be fettered with the shabby unities of time and place. These blockheads, it seems, were young civilians, fresh from the matter-of-fact land of their birth, whose minds a long residence in India had not yet enlarged to the dimensions of the various prodigies, which are of almost daily occurrence in that country. Accordingly, after the colonel had treated them with one of the most amusing incidents he could pick out from his wallet, which, I need not say, was always well stuffed with singular and awakening facts, they shrugged their shoulders, tossed their heads, and exhibited the most obtrusive symbols of that unpolished incredulity, which had justly given him so much offence. In the party assembled at the colonel's table there chanced to be a barrister of the Supreme Court, a well-informed man and polished in his manners, who endeavoured, by giving a pleasing turn to the conversation, to bring our good friend back to his wonted track of narrative, from which the impertinence he had lately experienced had nearly turned him aside. "It seems to me," said the barrister, "the most unequivocal symptom of a narrow intellect, to throw discredit upon any specific occurrence, merely because it rises above the level of every-day experience; nor is anything more provoking than the foolish exclamations, on such occasions-how improbable ! how incredible! as if 'improbable' and 'incredible' were convertible words; whereas that which seems improbable is not incredible, and that which seems incredible is by no means improbable. It is a mere logomachy, considered apart from false associations. "And do imagine, if you can, a mode of existence from which every thing improbable and incredible is excluded. What, in such a state of things, would become of the most active undying principle of our being,— curiosity? Gone; gasping for breath like the mouse in the philosopher's air-pump, when the receiver is exhausted. Figure to yourselves the dead, cheerless void, the torpid, exanimate stupidity of such a world! The bare imagination of it comes over one with a sensation like that we experienced during the hot nights we have had lately;-an atmosphere so heavy, stag nant, and motionless, that it seemed as if the winds of heaven had sighed their last breath. away "I go further. Blot out what you call the incredible and the improbable from real history; prune your ancient or modern records of every shoot and excrescence that strays beyond what you can easily believe or readily admit; what a miserable balance-sheet would the history of the world appear! what a paltry sum of insignificant items, when all the dignity of its agents, all that is dramatic in its transitions, or stirring and ennobling in its lessons, is struck out! I am not speaking of mere fables," continued the barrister; "of roaring, rampant prodigies, the 'quicquid Græcia mendax; nay, I will give you up Mount Athos and the fleet that sailed through it, though I believe Herodotus to be most shamefully slandered in this respect-but, in the name of authentic history, I ask, what is to become of the whole catalogue of daring adventurers, rank and file, From Macedonia's madman to the Swede; in a word, all the romance of history, which is the most credible part of it after all the Corinthian capitals that crown it, the immortal friezes that stand out in such exquisite relief from its surface? "And on the existing world, this most remorseless ostracism of incredible facts would be still more deadening in its effects than on the retrospective. You must have a new language. Every sentence must be decimated of its epithets; and as for the delightful gabble of the sex, when every adjective that glides from their lips is mulcted of its superlative, and every phrase implying intensity of feeling or thought is forbidden them-what a deathblow, I say, to that interesting gossip, which so well becomes them when they play the part of historians; those graceful tendrils of imagery and fancy, that twine round our hearts as we listen to their narrations! One sickens at the thought. "But I go still further. I assert that the region of fact, strict literal fact, is commensurate with that of romance. Their territories are SO curiously indented into each other that it is scarcely practicable to discriminate their exact boundaries. Examine the facts which constitute the daily questions that arise in courts of law. Facts that are enough to make you turn pale with astonishment, and to keep you so for the rest of your natural life, revolve there in a ceaseless circle; miracles are there solemnly attested beyond the reach of scepticism; the wildest anomalies are brought into juxta-position—the most jarring contradictions reconciled. A court of law is a stage, as it were, on which Fate herself is a mountebank, displaying all sorts of buffooneries to amuse, all sorts of juggling to perplex us;—a carnival of the strangest follies and the most incredible crimes. Are you conversant with that most amusing of all French books-the Causes Célèbres? It is a collection of adjudged cases in the old provincial courts of France, carried by appeal to the provincial parliaments, sifted, analyzed, debated by minds trained to doubt, magnifying hairs into stone-walls, turning over every thing, first on one side, then on the other, with the keen inquisition of a watchmaker examining the wheels of a chronometer. |