west of Spain and Portugal, though these vast countries had been subdued by so many several expeditions of these northern people, at such diverse times and under so different appellations; and it seems to have been invented or instituted by the sages of the Goths, as a government of freemen, which was the spirit or character of the north-west nations, distinguishing them from those of the south and the east, and gave the name of the Francs among them.

I need say nothing of this constitution, which is so well known in our island, and was anciently the same with ours in France and Spain, as well as Germany and Sweden, where it still continues, consisting of a king or a prince, who is sovereign both in peace and war; of an assembly of barons, (as they were originally called) whom he uses as his council; and another of the commons, who are representative of all that are possessed of free lands, whom the prince assembles and consults with, upon the occasions or affairs of the greatest and common concern to the nation. I am apt to think that the possession of land was the original right of election, or representative among the commons, and that cities and boroughs were entitled to it, as they were possessed of certain tracts of land, that belonged or were annexed to them; and so it is still in Friezland, the seat from whence our Gothic or Saxon ancestors came into these islands: for the ancient seat of the Gothic kingdom was of small or no trade ; nor England in their time: their humours and lives were turned wholly to arms; and, long after the Norman conquest, all the trade of England was driven by Jews, Lombards, or Milaners; so as the

right of boroughs seems not to have risen from regards of trade, but of land; and were places where so many freemen inhabited together, and had such a proportion of land belonging to them. However it be, this constitution has been celebrated, as framed with great wisdom and equity, and as the truest and justest temper that has been ever found out between dominion and liberty; and it seems to be a strain of what Heraclitus said was the only skill or knowledge of any value in the politics, which was the secret of governing all by all.

This seems to have been intended by these Gothic constitutions, and by the election and representation of all that possessed lands: for, since a country is composed of the land it contains, they esteemed a nation to be so, of such as were the possessors of it; and what prince soever can hit of this great secret, needs know no more, for his own safety and happiness, and that of the people he governs for no state or government can ever be much troubled or endangered by any private factions, which is grounded upon the general consent and satisfaction of the subjects, unless it be wholly subdued by the force of armies; and then the standing armies have the place of subjects, and the government depends upon the contented or discontented humours of the soldiers in general, which has more sudden and fatal consequences upon the revolutions of state, than those of subjects in unarmed governments. So the Roman, Egyptian, and Turkish empires appear to have always turned upon the arbitrary wills and wild humours of the Prætorian bands, the Mamalucs, and the Janizaries : and so I pass from the Scythian conquests, and Go

thic constitutions, to those of the Arabians or Mahometans, in the world.

SECTION V.

THE last survey I proposed of the four outlying (or, if the learned so please to call them, barbarous) empires, was that of the Arabians, which was indeed of a very different nature from all the rest, being built upon foundations wholly enthusiastic, and thereby very unaccountable to common reason, and in many points contrary even to human nature; yet few others have made greater conquests or more sudden growths, than this Arabian or Saracen empire; but having been of later date, and the course of it engaged in perpetual wars with the Christian princes, either of the East or West, of the Greek or the Latin churches, both the original and progress of it have been easily observed, and are most vulgarly known, having been the subject of many modern writers, and several well-digested histories or relations; and therefore I shall give but a very summary account of both.

About the year 600, or near it, lived Mahomet, a man of mean parentage and condition; illiterate, but of great spirit and subtle wit, like those of the climate or country where he was born or bred, which was that part of Arabia called the Happy, esteemed the loveliest and sweetest region of the world, and like those blessed seats so finely painted by the poet :

Quas neque concutiunt venti, neque nubila nimbis
Adspergunt, neque nix acri concreta pruinâ

VOL. I.

1

Cana cadens violat, semperque innubilus æther
Contegit, et late diffuso lumine ridet.

He was servant to a rich merchant of this country, and after his master's death, having married his widow, came to be possessed of great wealth, and of a numerous family. Among others, he had entertained in it a Sergian monk, or at least called by that name, whose vicious and libertine dispositions of life had made him leave his enclosure and profession; but otherwise a man of great learning. Mahomet was subject to fits of an epilepsy, or falling-sickness; and, either by the customs of that climate, or the necessity of that disease, very temperate and abstaining from wine, but in the rest voluptuous and dissolute. He was ashamed of his disease, and, to disguise it from his wife and family, pretended his fits were trances into which he was cast at certain times by God Almighty, and in them instructed in his will, and his true worship and laws, by which he would be served; and that he was commanded to publish them to the world, to teach them, and see them obeyed.

About this age all the Christian provinces of the East were overrun with Arianism, which, however refined or disguised by its learned professors and advocates, either denied or undermined the divinity of Christ, and allowed only his prophetical office. The countries of Arabia and Egypt were filled with great numbers of the scattered Jews, who, upon the last destruction of their country in Adrian's time, had fled into these provinces to avoid the ruin and even extinction which was threatening their nation by that emperor, who,

after all the desolations he made in Judea, transported what he could of their remaining numbers iuto Spain. The rest of Arabia and Egypt was inhabited by Gentiles, who had little sense left of their decayed and derided idolatry, and had turned their thoughts and lives to luxury and pleasure, and to the desires and acquisition of riches, in order to those ends. Mahomet, to humour and comply with these three sorts of men, and by the assistance of the monk, his only confident, framed a scheme of religion, he thought likely to take in, or at least not to shock, the common opinions and dispositions of them all, and yet most agreeable to his own temper and designs.

He professed one God, creator of the world, and who governed all things in it: that God had in ancient times sent Moses, his first and great prophet, to give his laws to mankind, but that they were neither received by the Gentiles, nor obeyed by the Jews themselves, to whom he was more peculiarly sent that this was the occasion of the misfortunes and captivities that so often befell them that in the latter ages, he had sent Christ, who was the second prophet, and greater than Moses, to preach his laws and observation of them in greater purity, but to do it with gentleness, patience, and humility, which had found no better reception or success among men than Moses had done that for this reason God had now sent his last and greatest prophet, Mahomet, to publish his laws and commands with more power; to subdue those to them by force and violence who should not willingly receive them; and for this end, to establish a kingdom upon earth that should propa