2.

Alas

And what is that!

They come and slide and pass

Before my pen can tell thee what.

The posts of life are swift, which having run Their seven short stages o'er, their short-liv'd task is done.

“I had an old grand-uncle," says Burns," with whom my mother lived awhile in her girlish years. The good man was long blind ere he died, during which time his highest enjoyment was to sit down and cry, while my mother would sing the simple old song of the Life and Age of Man."

It is certain that this old song was in Burns' mind when he composed to the same cadence those well-known stanzas of which the burthen is that " man was made to mourn." But the old blind man's tears were tears of piety, not of regret; it was his greatest enjoyment thus to listen and to weep; and his heart the while was not so much in the past, as his hopes were in the future. They were patient hopes; he knew in Whom he believed, and was awaiting his deli

verance in God's good time. Sunt homines qui cum patientiâ moriuntur; sunt autem quidam perfecti qui cum patientiâ vivunt.* Burns may perhaps have been conscious in his better hours (and he had many such,) that he had inherited the feeling (if not the sober piety,) which is so touchingly exemplified in this family anecdote ;—that it was the main ingredient in the athanasia of his own incomparable effusions; and that without it he never could have been the moral, and therefore never the truly great poet that he eminently is.

ST. AUGUSTIN.

INTERCHAPTER IX.

AN ILLUSTRATION FOR THE ASSISTANCE OF THE COMMENTATORS DRAWN FROM THE HISTORY OF THE KORAN. REMARKS WHICH ARE NOT INTENDED FOR MUSSELMEN, AND WHICH THE MISSIONARIES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN ARE ADVISED NOT TO TRANS

LATE.

You will excuse me if I do not strictly confine myself to narration, but now and then intersperse such reflections as may offer while I am writing. JOHN NEWTON.

BUT the most illustrious exemplification of the difficulty with the Doctorean or Dovean commentators will experience in settling the chronology of these chapters, is to be found in the history of the Koran.

Mahommedan Doctors are agreed that the first part or parcel of their sacred book which was revealed to the Prophet, consisted of what now stands as the first five verses of the ninetysixth chapter; and that the chapter which ought

to be the last of the whole hundred and fourteen, because it was the last which Mahommed delivered, is placed as the ninth in order.

The manner in which the book was originally produced and afterwards put together explains how this happened.

Whenever the Impostor found it convenient to issue a portion, one of his disciples wrote it, from his dictation, either upon palm-leaves or parchment, and these were put promiscuously into a chest. After his death Abubeker collected them into a volume, but with so little regard to any principle of order or connection, that the only rule which he is supposed to have followed was that of placing the longest chapters first.

Upon this M. Savary remarks, ce bouleversement dans un ouvrage qui est un recueil de préceptes donnés dans différens temps et dont les premiers sont souvent abrogés par les suivans, y a jetté la plus grand confusion. On ne doit donc y chercher ni ordre ni suite. And yet one of the chapters opens with the assertion that "a judicious order reigns in this book," according to Savary's version, which here follows those com

mentators who prefer this among the five interpretations which the words may bear.

Abubeker no doubt was of opinion that it was impossible to put the book together in any way that could detract from its value and its use. If he were, as there is every reason to think, a true believer, he would infer that the same divine power which revealed it piece-meal would preside over the arrangement, and that the earthly copy would thus miraculously be made a faithful transcript of the eternal and uncreated original.

If, on the other hand, he had been as audacious a knave as his son-in-law, the false prophet himself, he would have come with equal certainty to the same conclusion by a different process: for he would have known that if the separate portions, when they were taken out of the chest, had been shuffled and dealt like a pack of cards, they would have been just as well assorted as it was possible to assort them.

A north-country dame in days of old economy, when the tailor worked for women as well as men, delivered one of her nether garments to a