manfully struggles on with the message that is within him. Learning he has
none, or next to none. His chief objects of knowledge are floating stories
and traditions largely picked up from hearsay, and his over-wrought mind is
his only teacher. The literary compositions to which he had ever listened
were the half-cultured, yet often wildly powerful rhapsodies of early Arabian
minstrels, akin to Ossian rather than to anything else within our knowledge.
What wonder then that his Koran took a form which to our colder temperaments
sounds strange, unbalanced, and fantastic?

Yet the Moslems themselves consider the book the finest that ever appeared
among men. They find no incongruity in the style. To them the matter is all
true and the manner all perfect. Their eastern temperament responds readily
to the crude, strong, and wild appeal which its cadences make to them, and
the jingling rhyme in which the sentences of a discourse generally end adds
to the charm of the whole. The Koran, even if viewed from the point of view
of style alone, was to them from the first nothing less than a miracle, as
great a miracle as ever was wrought.

But to return to our own view of the case. Our difficulty in appreciating the
style of the Koran even moderately is, of course, increased if, instead of
the original, we have a translation before us. But one is happy to be able to
say that Rodwell's rendering is one of the best that have as yet been
produced. It seems to a great extent to carry with it the atmosphere in which
Muhammed lived, and its sentences are imbued with the flavour of the East.
The quasi-verse form, with its unfettered and irregular rhythmic flow of the
lines, which has in suitable cases been adopted, helps to bring out much of
the wild charm of the Arabic. Not the least among its recommendations is,
perhaps, that it is scholarly without being pedantic that is to say, that it
aims at correctness without sacrificing the right effect of the whole to
over-insistence on small details.