ORIENTAL AND OCCIDENTAL CHARACTER.

Whether the Roman idea, that climate affects character be true or not, the Orientals exhibit a character very unlike that of the Occidentals. With the one, impulse is the ruling power, and all others are subordinate to it; with the other, reason interposes to check the uprising passions, and to guard against the extremes of thought or deed. No Western writer would ever have thought of devising the inhuman course pursued by Schahriar, king of Persia, to maintain the honor of his harem, and perhaps no maiden of this hemisphere would have subjected herself to such imminent danger as did the beautiful and accomplished Scheherazade to deliver her sex from

the cruel revenge of a blood-thirsty prince. Both were acting from impulse rather than from reason, and in this at least they conformed to the general character of the Orientals. Capable of the most passionate love yet extremely revengeful, the Oriental is the kindest friend yet the bitterest enemy, the most extravagant in grief yet the most relentless in those things which produce it in others. Such a medley of contradictions and seeming paradoxes are interwoven in Eastern character, making it one of the greatest extremes.

Again, the Orientals are more mythical than the Occidentals. They have chimerical ideas of life. Their minds are shadowy and fanciful in their tendency. There is the home of the genii, the ghouls, and the houri. Their literature is burdened with mythical legends, which show that their minds, the foundation of all character, drift toward the fanciful and unreal. In the literary lore of the West, we find no such fabulous stories as that of Aladdin and his “wonderful lamp,” or of a Samandal, reigning over the empire of the ocean. Where else but in the literature of the Orientals could we hope to find the origin of such a story as the history of Beder presents? The most exciting incidents of fiction contained in Western authors appear tame in comparison.

The Western man, on the contrary,

looks upon life as a reality. He employs no imaginary genie to work miracles for him, but depends upon the strength of his muscle and the ingenuity of his brains for his support. Reason and intuition are the lights which he follows, and, guided by them, he grapples with life as with a real entity—a something that can be realized.