Chapter IV: Part 4

On arriving at Adrianople, where the sultan was at that time residing with his court, Lady Mary suddenly found herself in a new world, but extremely suited to her taste. Her principal companion was the French ambassadress, an agreeable woman, but extravagantly fond of parade, with whom she went about seeing such sights as the place afforded, which, every object in the city, except her husband, being new, were sufficiently numerous. The sultan, whom she saw for the first time going in solemn procession to the mosque, was a fine, handsome man of about forty, with full black eyes, and an expression of severity in his countenance. This prince, Achmet III., has been said, upon I know not what authority, to have afterward become enamoured of our fair traveller. The report, in all probability, was unfounded; but the reasons which have induced a contemporary biographer[3] to come to this conclusion are particularly various: independently of Turkish prejudices, which, according to his notion of things, would prevent an emperor from conceiving _any such idea_, it was not at all probable, he imagines, that a person possessing a Fatima with such “celestial charms” (as Lady Mary describes), and so many other angelic creatures, should have thought for a moment of an “English lady.” What prejudices the sagacious author alludes to, it is difficult to discover; it would not be those of religion, as the imperial harem, it is well known, is constantly replenished with Circassians and Georgians, Christians and Mohammedans, indiscriminately. This point, therefore, must remain doubtful. With respect to Fatima, whatever may have been her charms, she could have been no bar to the sultan’s admiration of Lady Mary, being the wife, not of the sultan, but of the kihaya. The other “angelical creatures” whose influence he rates so highly may very possibly have restrained the affections of their master from wandering beyond the walls of the seraglio; nevertheless, stranger things have happened than that a prince in the flower of his age, neglecting the legitimate objects of his attachment, should allow a greater scope to his desires than either religion or the common rules of decorum would warrant. The best reason for rejecting this piece of scandal is, not that Lady Mary was an “English woman,” and therefore, as M. Duparc would insinuate, too ugly to rival the slaves of the sultan, but that there is no good authority for admitting it.

Footnote 3:

M. Duparc, in the “Biographie Universelle.”

Leaving this point undetermined, however, for want of evidence, let us proceed to the costume of the “angelical creatures” of whom we have been speaking. But Lady Montague must here take the pen into her own hand; for, in describing the mysteries of the toilet, she possesses a felicitous, luxuriant eloquence, which it would be vain in any thing out of petticoats to endeavour to rival. “The first part of my dress (she had adopted the Turkish habit) is a pair of drawers, very full, that reach to my shoes, and conceal the legs more modestly than your petticoats. They are of a thin rose-coloured damask, brocaded with silver flowers. My shoes are of white kid leather, embroidered with gold. Over this hangs my smock, of a fine white silk gauze, edged with embroidery. This smock has wide sleeves, hanging half-way down the arm, and is closed at the neck with a diamond button; but the shape and colour of the bosom are very well to be distinguished through it. The antery is a waistcoat, made close to the shape, of white and gold damask, with very long sleeves falling back, and fringed with deep gold fringe, and should have diamond or pearl buttons. My caftan, of the same stuff with my drawers, is a robe exactly fitted to my shape, and reaching to my feet, with very long, straight falling sleeves. Over this is my girdle, of about four fingers broad, which all that can afford it have entirely of diamonds or other precious stones; those who will not be at that expense have it of exquisite embroidery or satin; but it must be fastened before with a clasp of diamonds. The curdee is a loose robe they throw off or put on according to the weather, being of a rich brocade (mine is green and gold), either lined with ermine or sables; the sleeves reach very little below the shoulders. The headdress is composed of a cap, called talpack, which is in winter of fine velvet, embroidered with pearl or diamonds, and in summer of a light shining silver stuff. This is fixed on one side of the head, hanging a little way down, with a gold tassel, and bound on, either with a circle of diamonds (as I have seen several), or a rich embroidered handkerchief. On the other side of the head the hair is laid flat; and here the ladies are at liberty to show their fancies, some putting flowers, others a plume of herons’ feathers, and, in short, what they please; but the most general fashion is a large bouquet of jewels, made like natural flowers; that is, the buds of pearl, the roses of different-coloured rubies, the jessamines of diamonds, the jonquils of topazes, &c., so well set and enamelled, ’tis hard to imagine any thing of that kind so beautiful. The hair hangs at its full length behind, divided into tresses braided with pearl or riband, which is always in great quantity. I never saw in my life so many fine heads of hair. In one lady’s I have counted a hundred and ten of the tresses, all natural.”

Our traveller, whose faith in the virtue of her sex was exceedingly slender, informs us, however, that these beautiful creatures were vehemently addicted to intrigue, which they were enabled to carry on much more securely than our Christian ladies, from their fashion of perpetually going abroad in masquerade, that is, thickly veiled, so that no man could know his own wife in the street. This, with the Jews’ shops, which were so many places of rendezvous, enabled the fair sinners almost invariably to avoid detection; and when discovered, a sack and a horse-pond, when the Bosphorus was not within a convenient distance, terminated the affair in a few minutes. Still the risk was comparatively small, and “you may easily imagine,” says Lady Mary—who seems to have thought that women are never virtuous except when kept within the pale of duty by the fear of imminent danger—“you may easily imagine the number of faithful wives very small in a country where they have nothing to fear from a lover’s indiscretion!” Had we met with so profligate an article of faith in the creed of a male traveller, we should have inferred that he had spent the greater part of his life in gambling-houses and their appendages; but since it is a lady—an ambassadress—an illustrious scion of a noble stock, who thus libels the posterity of Eve, we place our finger upon our lips, and keep our inferences to ourselves.

Pope, in a letter to her at Adrianople, accompanying the third volume of his translation of the Iliad, pretends, as a graceful piece of flattery, to imagine that because she had resided some few weeks on the banks of the Hebrus among Asiatic barbarians, and barbarized descendants of the Greeks, she could doubtless throw peculiar light upon various passages of Homer; and the lady, interpreting the joke seriously, replies, that there was not one instrument of music among the Greek or Roman statues which was not to be found in the hands of the Roumeliotes; that young shepherd lads still diverted themselves with making garlands for their favourite lambs; and that, in reality, she found “several little passages” in Homer explained, which she “did not before entirely comprehend the beauty of.”

During her stay at Adrianople she discovered something better, however, than Turkish illustrations of Homer, for it was here that she first observed the practice of inoculation for the small-pox, which she had the hardihood to try upon her own children, and was the first to introduce it into England. Among the Turks, who, in all probability, were not its inventors, it was termed _ingrafting_, and the whole economy of the thing, according to the invariable policy of barbarians, was intrusted to the management of old women. Upon the return of the embassy to England, a Mr. Maitland, the ambassador’s physician, endeavoured, under the patronage of Lady Montague, who ardently desired its extension, to introduce the practice in London; and in 1721, the public attention having been strongly directed to the subject, and the curiosity of professional men awakened, an experiment, sanctioned by the College of Physicians, and authorized by government, was made upon five condemned criminals. With four of these the trial perfectly succeeded, and the fifth, a woman, upon whom no effect was produced, afterward confessed that she had had the small-pox while an infant. The merit of this action of Lady Montague can scarcely be overrated, as, by exciting curiosity and inquiry, it seems unquestionably to have led the way to the discovery of vaccination, that great preservative of life and beauty, and produced at the time immense positive good.[4]

Footnote 4:

A writer in the Annual Register for 1762, thus calculates the amount
of the benefit conferred on the British public by Lady Montague:—“If
one person in _seven_ die of the small-pox in the natural way, and one
in _three hundred and twelve_ by inoculation, as proved at the
small-pox hospital, then, as 1,000,000 divided by seven, gives
142,857½, 1,000,000 divided by 312, gives 3,205 46-312. The lives
saved in 1,000,000 by inoculation must be 139,652 11-31. In Lord
Petre’s family, 18 individuals died of the small-pox in 27 years. The
present generation, who have enjoyed all the advantages of
inoculation, are adequate judges of the extremely fatal prevalence of
the original disease, and of their consequently great obligations to
Lady Mary Wortley Montague.”—Sir Richard Steele, in the Plain Dealer,
prefers the introduction of this practice to all “those wide
endowments and deep foundations of public charity which have made most
noise in the world.”

To return, however, to Adrianople: among the most remarkable things which our fair traveller beheld during her residence in the East was Fatima, the wife of the kihaya, or vizier’s lieutenant, a woman “so gloriously beautiful,” to borrow the expression of her panegyrist, that all lovely things appeared to dwindle into insignificance in her presence. The passage in which this lady is described, though in a certain point of view it may be liable to objection, is in every other respect the finest portion of Lady Mary’s travels; exhibiting a remarkable power of affording the imagination of the reader glimpses of corporeal beauties which language is never sufficiently rich and vivid to paint exactly, and betraying at the same time so enthusiastic and unreserved an admiration of another woman’s superior perfections, that we with difficulty recognise in these hurried, ingenuous overflowings of natural eloquence, the female Diogenes of 1740. The whole palace of the kihaya appeared at the moment a fairy creation. Two black eunuchs, meeting the traveller at the door, led her into the harem, between two rows of beautiful female slaves, with their profuse and finely-plaited hair hanging almost to their feet, and dressed in fine light damasks, brocaded with silver. She next passed through a magnificent pavilion, adorned with gilded sashes, now all thrown up to admit the air, and opening into a garden, where there grew a number of large trees, with jessamine and honey-suckles twisted round their trunks, and emitting an exquisite perfume. A fountain of scented water was falling at the lower end of the apartment into three or four basins of white marble, at the same time diffusing an agreeable odour and a refreshing coolness through the air. Over the ceiling the pencil had scattered flowers in gilded baskets. But all these things were forgotten on beholding Fatima. When Lady Mary entered she was sitting on a sofa raised three steps above the floor, and leaning on cushions of white embroidered satin. Two young girls, “lovely as angels,” sat at her feet clothed in the richest costume of the East, and sparkling with jewels. They were her daughters. The mother, however, was so transcendently beautiful, that, in the opinion of Lady Mary, neither these girls, nor any thing that ever was called lovely, either in England or Germany, were capable of exciting the least admiration near her. There is truth in the old saying, that beauty possesses a power which irresistibly subdues the soul. No one ever looked for the first time upon a beautiful form without experiencing a certain awe, or consciousness of being in the presence of a superior nature, which the pagans imagined people felt when some deity overawed them with its Shekinah. That an acquaintance with the intellectual or moral imperfections which too frequently attend on beauty very quickly dissipates this impression, we all know: but at the outset most persons feel like our traveller, who says, “I was so struck with admiration, that I could not for some time speak to her, being wholly taken up in gazing. That surprising harmony of features! that charming result of the whole! that exact proportion of body! that lovely bloom of complexion unsullied by art! the unutterable enchantment of her smile!—But her eyes!—large and black, with the soft languishment of the blue! every turn of her face discovering some new grace.”

Into the details of her dress, in the description of which Lady Mary employs warm colouring, it is not necessary to enter. Fatima, on her part, very quickly divined the taste and temperament of her guest, and after a little conversation, carried on through the medium of a Greek lady who accompanied the traveller, she made a sign to four of her beautiful slaves to entertain the stranger with music and dancing. Those who have read descriptions of the fandango of the Spanish ladies, the chironomia of antiquity, or the performances of the Hindoo dancing girls, or voluptuous _almé_ of Egypt, will perhaps be able to form a just conception of the dance with which the ladies of the harem amuse themselves and their female visiters. “This dance,” says Lady Montague, “was very different from what I had seen before. The tunes so soft!—the motions so languishing!—accompanied with pauses and dying eyes! half falling back, and then recovering themselves in so artful a manner.”

Before her departure from Adrianople, she went to visit the mosque of Sultan Selim I., and being in a Turkish dress was admitted without difficulty; though she supposes, no doubt rightly, that the doorkeepers understood well enough whom they had allowed to enter. The walls were inlaid with Japan china in the form of flowers, the marble pavement was covered with rich Persian carpets, and the whole body of the edifice free from those pews, forms, and chairs which encumber our churches, both Protestant and Catholic, and give the latter, during week-days, the appearance of a lumber-room. About two thousand lamps were suspended in various parts of the building, which, when lighted at night, must show off to great advantage the solemn splendour of the architecture.

The road to Constantinople carried them through the richest meadows, which, as it was then the month of May, were clothed with exceeding beauty, and so thickly sprinkled with flowers and aromatic herbs, that the wheels of the carriages, crushing them as they drove along, literally perfumed the air. At Kutchuk Tchekmedje, where they lodged in what had formerly been a monastery of dervishes, Lady Montague requested the owner, a country schoolmaster, to show her his own apartments, and was surprised, says she, to see him point to a tall cypress-tree in the garden, on the top of which was a place for a bed for himself, and a little lower one for his wife and two children, who slept there every night. I was so much diverted with the fancy, I resolved to examine his nest nearer; but, after going up fifty steps, I found I had still fifty to go up, and then I must climb from branch to branch with some hazard of my neck; I thought it, therefore, the best way to come down again. Navigators in the South Sea have found whole nations who, like this romantic Ottomite, lived perched upon trees, like eagles, descending only when in lack of prey or recreation.

The first objects which struck her on arriving at Constantinople were the cemeteries, which upon the whole seemed to occupy more ground than the city itself. These, however, with their tombs and chapels, have been so frequently described by modern travellers, that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them, curious as they are; though we may remark, in passing, that their fancy of sculpturing a rose on the monuments of unmarried women is a delicate allusion to the purity of the dead. In the month of June they were driven by the heat of the weather to the village of Belgrade, fourteen miles from Constantinople, on the shores of the Black Sea, one of the usual retreats of the European embassies. Here our fair traveller found an earthly representation of the Elysian Fields:

Devenere locos lætos, et amœna vireta
Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas.
Largior hic campos, æther et lumine vestit
Purpureo.

Their house, the site of which, nothing more remaining, is still visited by European travellers, stood in the middle of a grove chiefly of fruit-trees. The walks, carpeted with short soft grass, were shady and cool; and on all sides a perpetual verdure was maintained by numerous fountains of pure, beautiful water. From the house and various other points views were obtained of the Black Sea, with its picturesque verdant shores, while the fresh breezes which blew continually from that quarter sufficiently tempered the heat of summer. The charms of such scenes inspire gayety even in the oppressed. For here the Greeks, forgetting for a moment the yoke of the Ottomite, assembled in great numbers of both sexes every evening, to laugh and sing, and “dance away their time.”

From an absurd request which had been made to her by Lady Rich to purchase her a Greek slave, Lady Montague, having observed that the “Greeks were _subjects_, not _slaves_!” takes occasion to describe to her friend the various kinds of female slaves which were to be found in Turkey. And though brief, her account is not particularly incorrect. But she eagerly seizes upon this opportunity to disparage the relations of all former travellers, treating them collectively as a herd of low people, who had never enjoyed the advantage of conversing with barbarians of quality. She was therefore ignorant that Busbequius, Pietro della Valle, Chardin, and others had lived upon most familiar terms with Turks of the highest consideration in the empire; and that, excepting in what relates to the harem, from which their sex excluded them, they might have afforded her ladyship very important instruction upon several particulars of Turkish manners. Upon cosmetics her authority, of course, is paramount. Neither Della Valle nor Chardin ever daubed their faces with balm of Mecca, and consequently could not pretend to speak of its virtues with the same confidence as Lady Mary, who, as she confesses with indignation, was rendered, by the indiscreet application of it, a perfect monster for three days. Having been presented with a small quantity of the best sort, “I with great joy,” says she, “applied it to my face, expecting some wonderful effect to my advantage. The next morning the change indeed was wonderful; my face was swelled to a very extraordinary size, and all over as red as my Lady H——’s. It remained in this lamentable state three days, during which, you may be sure, I passed my time very ill. I believed it would never be otherwise; and to add to my mortification, Mr. Wortley reproached my indiscretion without ceasing. However, my face is since _in statu_ quo; nay, I am told by the ladies here that it is much mended by the operation, which I confess I cannot perceive in my looking-glass.”

On the 6th of June, 1718, she left Constantinople with regret. And at this I do not wonder, for there was in her character a coarse sensual bent, closely approximating to the oriental cast of mind, which in a wild unpoliced capital, where, according to her own account, women live in a state of perpetual masquerade, might still more easily be yielded to even than in London. Of study and the sciences she had by this time grown tired. She regretted that her youth had been spent in the acquisition of knowledge. The Turks, who consumed their lives “in music, gardens, wine, and delicate eating,” appeared upon the whole much wiser than the English, who tormented their brains with some scheme of politics, I use her own words, or in studying some science to which they could never attain. “Considering what short-lived weak animals men are,” she adds, “is there any study so beneficial as the study of _present pleasure?_” And lest any one should mistake her after all, she subjoins, “but I allow you to laugh at me for my sensual declaration in saying that I had rather be a rich _effendi_ with all his ignorance, than Sir Isaac Newton with all his knowledge.” No doubt; and Lais, Cleopatra, or Ninon would have said the same thing.

Sailing down the Dardanelles, they cast anchor between the castles of Sestos and Abydos, where,

————In the month of cold December,
Leander, daring boy, was wont,—
What maid will not the tale remember?—
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!

Here she enjoyed a full view of Mount Ida,

Where Juno once caressed her amorous Jove,
And the world’s master lay subdued by love.

The quotation is Lady Montague’s. Descending a league farther down the Hellespont, she landed at the promontory of Sigeum, and climbed up to visit the barrow beneath which the heroic bones of Achilles repose. Experiencing no enthusiasm at the sight of these Homeric scenes, she was unquestionably right in not affecting what she did not feel; but who, save herself, could have viewed the plains of Troy, the Simois, and the Scamander without having any other ideas awakened in the mind than such as the adventure of Æschines’s companion and the lewd tale of Lafontaine had implanted there? However, to do her justice, though she gives her favourite ideas the precedence, she afterward observes, “there is some pleasure in seeing the valley where I imagined the famous duel of Menelaus and Paris had been fought, and where the greatest city in the world was situated.” Here, though she is mistaken about the magnitude of the city, there is some sign of the only feeling which ever ought to lead a traveller out of his way to behold such a scene; and she goes on to say, “I spent several hours here in as agreeable cogitations as ever Don Quixote had on Mount Montesinos;” in which cogitations let us be charitable enough to suppose that “the tale of Troy divine” was not forgotten.

From the Hellespont they sailed between the islands of the Archipelago, and passing by Sicily and Malta, where they landed, were driven by a storm into Porta Farina, on the coast of Africa, near Tunis, where they remained at the house of the British consul for some days. Being so near the ruins of Carthage, her curiosity to behold so remarkable a spot was not to be resisted; and accordingly she proceeded to the scene, through groves of date, olive, and fig-trees; but the most extraordinary objects she met with were the women of the country, who were so frightfully ugly that her delicate imagination immediately suggested to her the probability of some intermarriages having formerly taken place between their ancestors and the baboons of the country.

From Tunis they in a few days set sail for Genoa; whence after a little repose they proceeded across the Alps, and through France, to England, where they arrived on the 20th of October, 1718.

Shortly after her return she was induced by the solicitations of Pope, whom two years of reflection had not cured, to take up her residence at Twickenham. But the poet must very soon have discovered that, in comparison with the “rich _effendis_” and “three-tailed” pashas of the East, his poor little, ailing person, in spite of his grotto and his muse, had dwindled to nothing in the estimation of Lady Mary. Lord Hervey, who, though he wrote verses, had not been “blasted with poetic fire,” was considered, for reasons not given, more worthy of her ladyship’s friendship. However, these changes were not immediately apparent, and other affairs, which came still more home to her bosom than friendship, in the interim occupied her attention; among the rest the idea of realizing immense sums by embarking in the South Sea scheme. She likewise allowed the poet, whom the original had captivated so long, to employ the pencil of Sir Godfrey Kneller in copying her mature charms to adorn his hermitage. She was drawn in the meretricious taste of the times: and the physiognomy of the portrait answers exactly in expression to the idea which we form of Lady Mary from her writings; that is, it exhibits a mixture of intellectuality and voluptuousness, of calm, confident, commanding complacency, bordering a little on defiance or scorn. Pope received the finished picture with the delight of a lover, and immediately expressed his conception of it in the following lines:—

The playful smiles around the dimpled mouth,
That happy air of majesty and truth,
So would I draw (but oh! ’tis vain to try,
My narrow genius does the power deny),
The equal lustre of the heavenly mind,
Where every grace with every virtue’s joined,
Learning not vain, and wisdom not severe,
With greatness easy, and with wit sincere,
With just description show the soul divine,
And the whole princess in my work should shine.

The verses are insipid enough, like most compliments; but they express an opinion which circumstances very shortly afterward compelled him to change, when the princess became transformed into a modern “Sappho” and, thrown with Lord Fanny, Sporus, Atossa, and many others, into a group, was “damned” by satire to “everlasting fame.”

Lady Montague’s life, many years after her return from the East, was spent like that of most other ladies of fashion, who mingle a taste for literature and politics with gallantry. Her letters to her sister, who now, through the attainder and exile of her husband, Erskine Earl of Mar, resided abroad, abound with evidences that the pleasures which she had heretofore regarded as the _summum bonum_ soon palled the appetite; and that as the effervescence of animal spirits which, during her youth, had given a keen relish to life subsided, a metamorphosis, the reverse of that of the butterfly, took place, changing the gay fluttering summer insect into a grub. A cynical contempt of all things human succeeded. Into the grounds of her separation from her husband I shall not inquire. Ill health was at the time the cause assigned. The triumph of the political party to which she was opposed has since been absurdly put forward to account for it: but she had, no doubt, other reasons, much more powerful, for cutting herself off, during a period of twenty-two years, from all personal intercourse with her family.

Be this however as it may, in the month of July, 1739, she departed from England, and bade an eternal adieu to Mr. Montague and the greater number of her old friends. Her first place of residence on the Continent was Venice, from whence she made an excursion to Rome and Naples, and, returning to Brescia, took up her abode in one of the palaces of that city. She likewise visited the south of France and Switzerland. The summer months she usually spent at Louverre, on the lake of Isis, in the territories of Venice, where gardening, silk-worms, and books appear to have afforded her considerable amusement. In 1758 she removed to Venice, and, her husband dying in 1761, she was prevailed upon by her daughter, the Countess of Bute, to return to England. However, she survived Mr. Montague but a single year; for, whether the sudden transition to a northern climate was too violent a shock for her frame, or that a gradual decay had been going on, and was now naturally approaching its termination, she breathed her last on the 21st of August, 1762, in the seventy-third year of her age.

Her letters have been compared with those of Madame de Sevigné, but they do not at all resemble them. The latter have a calm, quiet interest, a sweetness, an ingenuous tenderness, a natural simplicity, which powerfully recommend them to us in those moments when we ourselves are calm or melancholy. Lady Montague’s have infinitely more nerve and vigour, excite a far deeper interest, but of an equivocal and painful cast, and while, in a certain sense, they amuse and gratify, inspire aversion for their writer. On the other hand, Madame de Sevigné is a person whom one would like to have known. She is garrulous, she frequently repeats herself; but it is maternal love which causes the error. In one word, we admire the talents of Lady Montague, but we love the character of Madame de Sevigné.

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RICHARD POCOCKE.

Born 1704—Died 1765.

THIS distinguished traveller was born at Southampton, in the year 1704. The scope of his education, which, besides those classical acquirements that usually constitute the learning of a gentleman, embraced an extensive knowledge of the principal oriental languages, admirably fitted him for travelling with advantage in the East. But previously to undertaking that longer and more important journey upon the history of which he was to rest all his hopes of fame, he resolved to visit some of the more remarkable countries of Europe; and accordingly, on the 30th of August, 1733, he departed from London, and proceeded by the usual route to Paris. The curiosities of this accessible country, France, of which we often remain in utter ignorance, because they are near, and may be easily visited, appeared highly worthy of attention to Pococke. He attentively examined the palaces and gardens of Versailles, St. Germain, and Fontainebleau; the remains of antiquity at Avignon, Nismes, and Arles; and the architectural and picturesque beauties of Montpellier, Toulon, and Marseilles.

From France he proceeded into Italy, by the way of Piedmont; and having traversed the territories of Genoa, Tuscany, the territories of the church, of Venice, and of Milan, he returned through Piedmont, Savoy, and France, and arrived in London on the 1st of July, 1734.

This tour only serving to increase his passion for travelling, he, on the 20th of May, 1736, set out from London on his long-projected journey into the East. He now directed his course through Flanders, Brabant, and Holland, into Germany, which he traversed in all directions, from the shores of the Baltic to Hungary and Illyria. He then passed into Italy, and proceeding to Leghorn, embarked at that port, on the 7th of September, 1737, for Alexandria in Egypt, where he arrived on the 29th of the same month.

It is a remark which I have frequently made during the composition of these Lives, that when an original-minded traveller directs his course through a well known but interesting country, we follow his track and peruse his observations with perhaps still greater pleasure than we should feel had he journeyed through an entirely new region. In the former case we in some measure consider ourselves competent to decide upon the accuracy of his descriptions and the justness of his views; while in the latter, delivered up wholly to his guidance, and having no other testimony to corroborate or oppose to his, we experience an involuntary timidity, and hesitate to believe, lest our confidence should lead us into error. Besides, in no country can the man of genius fail to find matter for original remark. No man can forestall him, because such a person discovers things literally invisible to others; though, when once pointed out, they immediately cease to be so. His acquirements, the peculiar frame of his mind, in one word, his individuality, is to him as an additional sense, which no other person does or can possess; and this circumstance, which is not one of the least fortunate in the intellectual economy, delivers us from all solicitude respecting that lack of materials for original composition about which grovelling and barren speculators have in all ages clamoured; while the consciousness of mental poverty has generated in their imaginations an apprehension that every one who approached them had a design upon their little pedler’s pack of ideas, and driven them into anxious and unhappy solitude, that, like so many spiders, they might preserve their flimsy originality from the rough collision of more robust minds.

The feeling which leads learned and scientific men one after another to Egypt is the same with that which, after long years of absence, induces us to visit the place of our birth. Philosophy, according to popular tradition, had its birthplace on the banks of the Nile—though those of the Ganges appear to possess a better claim to the honour; and it is to examine the material traces of early footsteps, urged by some obscure secret persuasion that momentous revelations respecting the history of man might be made, could we, if I may hazard the expression, re-animate the sacred language of the Egyptians, who, as Shelley phrases it,

Hung their mute thoughts on the mute walls around,

that traveller after traveller paces around the mysterious obelisks, columns, and sarcophagi of Karnac and Edfu. Countries which have never, so far as we know, been inhabited by any but savage tribes, however magnificent may be their scenery, however fertile their soil, can never, in the estimation of the philosophical traveller, possess equal attractions with India, Persia, Egypt, or Greece: they resemble so many theatrical scenes without actors; and after amusing the eye or the imagination for a brief space of time, excite a mortal _ennui_ which nothing can ward off. The world itself would be a dull panorama without man. It is only as the scene of his actions, passions, sufferings, glory, or shame, that its various regions possess any lasting interest for us. Where great men have lived or died, there are poetry, romance,—every thing that can excite the feelings or elevate the mind. “Gray Marathon,” Thermopylæ, Troy, Mantinea, Agincourt, Waterloo, are more sublime names than Mont Blanc or the Himalaya. On the former we are lifted up by the remembrance of human energy; the latter present themselves to us as prodigious masses of brute matter, sublime undoubtedly, but linked by no glorious associations with the triumphs or the fall of great or brave men.

The above remarks appeared necessary to explain why we are never weary of accompanying travellers through Egypt, Palestine, and the other celebrated lands which border the Mediterranean: I now proceed with the adventures and researches of Pococke. On arriving at Alexandria, a city which, when taken by the Arabs, contained four thousand palaces, as many baths, four hundred public places or squares, and forty thousand Jews who paid tribute, he immediately exerted himself to gratify his curiosity, and this so imprudently, that he led several soldiers into a breach of duty, in showing him the ruins of the ancient Pharos without permission, for which they were afterward punished. Several travellers have pretended that the coffin of Alexander the Great is still preserved in a Mohammedan mosque in this city, and we find Bruce, thirty years after Pococke, making very diligent inquiry among the inhabitants respecting it. It is certain that the remains of the Macedonian king were deposited in a golden coffin in the royal tombs of Alexandria; but in the age of Augustus his bones had already been transferred from their gorgeous lodgings to humbler ones of glass, in which they were brought forth from their narrow house for the inspection of the tyrant, who threw flowers and placed a golden crown upon the coffin. However, when we reflect that even in so peaceful a city as Caen, the remains of William the Conqueror could not be preserved a few hundred years from popular insult, it seems extremely improbable that those of Alexander should have been suffered to escape for two thousand years in a place which has experienced so many and such dreadful vicissitudes.

From Alexandria he proceeded to Rosetta, in company with the English consul; and on approaching within a few miles of the city, was surprised to find a tent pitched, and an excellent collation laid out for them in the desert, for which they were indebted to the politeness of the French merchants, several of whom came out more than a league to meet them. Horses, likewise, were sent for their use by the Turkish governor of the city, whose opinions respecting the natural fitness of asses to be the coursers of Franks seem to have been quite heterodox. To add to the compliment, servants were sent whose business it was to run along by the side of the equestrian travellers; and in this unusual style they entered Rosetta.

It was now the latter end of October, and Egypt, which goes annually through as many changes as a butterfly, was already beginning to put on its winter dress, in which alone, according to the opinion of connoisseurs, it should be contemplated by the admirers of the beautiful. Its landscapes, it is well known, are very peculiar. There are no glaciers, toppling crags, or mountain torrents; but there are gardens filled with palm, orange, and almond trees; fields of young rice more green than the emerald; villages perched on little eminences, and flanked by date groves; diminutive lakes with reeds on greensward enamelled with flowers around their margin; and to crown all, one of the mightiest rivers in the world rolling along its broad waters through scenes of sunshine and plenty, and through ruins of such prodigious magnificence, that they seem rather to be the remains of a former world than the works of that race of pigmy stature which now inhabits it. A large portion of the rich fields in the vicinity of Rosetta belongs to Mecca; and the inhabitants have a tradition that a member of the prophet’s family resided on a neighbouring spot, where a mosque was afterward erected, to which, should the Holy City ever be wrested from the faithful, all devout persons would go on pilgrimage.

Locke, in combating the doctrine of innate ideas, and in order to show that modesty, as well as all the other virtues, is an acquired habit, cites from Baumgarten a description of the nudity and immoral practices of the Mohammedan saints of Egypt, which in that country were not merely tolerated, but vehemently approved of. Two of these naked saints Pococke himself saw in the city of Rosetta. The one, he observes, was a good-humoured old man; the other a youth of eighteen; and as the latter walked along the streets the people kissed his hands. He was moreover informed that on Fridays, when the women are accustomed to visit the cemeteries, these holy men usually sat at the entrance, when the visiters not only kissed their hands, but carried their religious veneration so far as to practise the same ceremony with which the ancients adored their Phallic divinity, and the modern Hindoos pay their reverence to the Lingam. Something of this kind our traveller says he witnessed at Cairo, but that the sight was too common to command the least attention.

Having seen the principal curiosities of this city, and visited the Greek patriarch, who entertained him with a pipe, a spoonful of sweet syrup, and coffee, he set out on the 4th of November for Cairo, sailing in a large kanja up the Nile. Besides the constantly shifting scenes presented by the shores of the river, which were of themselves sufficient to render the voyage a pleasant one, the passengers were amused by Arab story-tellers, and representations of rude farces, in which the sailors themselves were the performers. The lakes of natron, a little of which dissolved in vinegar is, according to Hasselquist, a sovereign remedy for the toothache, Pococke did not visit; but he was informed by some of the passengers that their environs abounded with wild boars. On the 11th of November they arrived at Cairo. This city, during his stay in Egypt, may be regarded as his home, from which his excursions radiated in various directions. Though the principal object of Pococke’s travels, perhaps, was the examination of antiquities, and the illustration of ancient geography, he very wisely extended his researches to the modern condition of the country, and the manners of its actual inhabitants. He visited the convents of dervishes and monks, the cells of hermits, the cemeteries of Turks, Jews, and Christians, and observed with care the character and costume of every class of the population, from the sovereign bey to the houseless courtesan, who, like Tamar in the Bible, sat by the wayside to inveigle passengers. His remarks upon ancient Memphis,—the site of which, as I have already observed in the life of Shaw, he fixed at Metraheny,—and on the pyramids, are still, notwithstanding all that has been since written, highly worthy of attention. He was not, like Hasselquist, deterred from ascending to their summit by the heat of the stones or by tempestuous winds; he measured their dimensions; descended into the well; and speculated on their use and origin.

Shortly after his visit to the pyramids, he set out on an excursion to the district of Faioum, and the Birket el Keroun, or Lake Mœris, with the governor of the province, who happened to be just then returning home from Cairo. His companion was a middle-aged Mussulman, of a lively, cheerful temper, who made no scruple of associating with a Frank, or even of eating with him, and drinking _liqueurs_, which are not prohibited in the Koran, not having been invented when it was written. It could not, however, be said that they fared too luxuriously on the way; their meals, like those of Forster and his Ghilān Seid, consisted for the most part of bread, cheese, and onions. After this frugal supper, they reposed at night in a grove of palm-trees.

Having traversed a succession of small desert plains, sprinkled with Egyptian flints, they entered a valley bounded on both sides by hills, composed entirely of oyster-shells, which rest on a bed of reddish clay. Of these shells the uppermost remain in their original state, while those which lie deeper, or are scattered over the plain, are petrified. On arriving at Tamish, the most northern village of the district, the kasheff, or governor, was met by several Arabs, who, observing him to be accompanied by a stranger, immediately began to exhibit their skill in horsemanship, and in the management of the lance. Here the quality of their fare improved. The onions were replaced by pilaus, roast lamb, fowl, soup, and sherbets; and in the morning they had for breakfast bread and butter, poached eggs, honey, cheese, and olives. Faioum, in fact, should be the land of good living. It is the Arsinoitic Nome of the ancients, which, in Strabo’s opinion, was the finest spot in all Egypt; and although it no longer, perhaps, deserves this character, it still produces corn, wine, olives, vegetables,—in one word, whatever they choose to sow or plant will thrive. The olive, which requires cultivation in the gardens of Alexandria, grows spontaneously in this district. The grapes, too, are of a superior quality, and so sweet that a thick syrup made from them serves the Mohammedans instead of sugar. But Pococke soon found that even wine was not an unknown blessing in the Arsinoitic Nome; for, at a supper to which he invited the traveller, the honest kasheff got a little tipsy, threw off his gravity, and behaved as frivolously, says Pococke, as a European.

It was in this canton, according to the ancients, that the Labyrinth of the Twelve Kings was situated, and Pococke, perhaps erroneously, imagined himself to have examined its ruins, from which he proceeded to the shores of Lake Mœris. This lake, the Egyptian priests informed Herodotus, was the creation of art; but observing its extraordinary dimensions, it being no less than fifty miles in length by about ten in breadth, our traveller supposes that the art consisted in the inventing of the tale, and causing it to be believed, which in boldness and ingenuity fell very little short of the actually scooping out of that prodigious basin. But credulity often goes by the side of skepticism. Having rejected as a fable the artificial origin of the lake, Pococke supposes himself to have discovered in an extravagant tradition now current among the Arabs, the basis of the ancient mythus of the Elysian Fields, and the Infernal Ferryman. The common people, he observes, make frequent mention of Charon, and describe him as a king who might have loaded two hundred camels with the keys of his treasury! From this he infers that the fable of Charon took its rise on this spot, and that the person known under this name was the officer intrusted with the keys of the Labyrinth and its three thousand apartments, who, when the corpse of any prince or chief came thither to be interred, made inquiries concerning the actions of his life, and, according as they were good or bad, granted or refused the honours of the tomb. But as the Lake Acherusia, or Acheron, was in the neighbourhood of Memphis, according to Diodorus, he supposes that the same ceremonies were practised at both places, though originating here. Guigniant, a contemporary French writer, supposes that the ruins discovered by Pococke were not those of the Labyrinth, which, in fact, have only recently been found and described by his countrymen Bertre and Jomard.

The original destination of the Labyrinth has not yet been satisfactorily explained: some learned men suppose it to have been a kind of senate-house, where the representatives of the various nomes assembled for political deliberation; others regard it as a real Pantheon, consecrated to the worship of all the gods of Egypt; while a third class insist that, to whatever other uses it may have been applied, its principal object was to afford an asylum to the mummies of the kings who erected it.

Non nostrum tantas componere lites.

However this may be, it seems extremely probable that the idea of the Elysian Fields did actually originate in Egypt, and migrate thence into Greece. Those delicious habitations of the dead, as Creuzer observes after Diodorus, which are spoken of by the Greeks, really existed on the banks of a lake called Acheron, situated in the environs of Memphis, and surrounded by beautiful meadows and cool lakes, and forests of lotus and reeds. These were the waters which were yet to be traversed by the dead who had passed the river, and who were journeying to their sepulchral grottoes in the kingdom of Osiris or Pluto, the Ὅρμος ἀγαθῶν, “haven of the good, the pious, the virtuous,” to which none were admitted whose lives were incapable of sustaining the strictest scrutiny. The heaven of the Egyptians, contrary to what might have been expected, was a place of more complete happiness and enjoyment than that of the Greeks. The very word Elysium, according to Jablonski, signified glory and splendour; but before they could arrive at this region of joy, all human souls were condemned to pass through a circle of transmigrations, greater or less, according to their deeds.

To return, however, to Pococke: From Faioum he returned by Dashone and Saccara to Cairo, from whence he set sail on the 6th of December for Upper Egypt. Having visited various important ruins by the way, he arrived on the 9th of January, 1738, at Dendera, where he found the ruins of the ancient edifices filled with ashes, and the remains of more modern buildings. In fact, the Arabs had perched their miserable little cabins upon the very summit of the temple of Athor-Aphrodite, or the Egyptian Venus, in order to enjoy a cooler air in summer.

From hence he continued to ascend the stream, visited the ruins of Thebes, Elephantina, Philæ, and the Cataracts; whence he returned to Cairo, where he arrived on the 27th of February. It was now his intention to visit Mount Sinai, but finding upon inquiry that the monks of that mountain were then at open war with the neighbouring Arabs, he deferred the excursion, and proceeded down the eastern branch of the Nile to Damietta, where he embarked for the Holy Land.

Pococke arrived at Jaffa on the 14th of March, where, having delivered up his money, according to custom, to the monks, lest he should be robbed by the Arabs, he immediately departed by way of Rama for Jerusalem. The country, at this time, was in a state of great confusion. Feuds of the most desperate kind existed among the numerous Arab clans encamped in this part of Palestine; and from whatever tribe the traveller might take a guide, he necessarily exposed himself during the journey to the hostility of every other horde. However, since the danger was inevitable, and, perhaps, after his tame and secure movements in Egypt, somewhat necessary to give a greater poignancy to his pleasures, he put himself under the guidance of a respectable Arab horseman, followed by a servant on foot, and departed on his way. The Arab, who shared the risk, went a little out of the direct road to the place where his tribe was encamped; and not being subject to that jealousy which induces the Turk to keep his wife from the sight of strangers, he introduced the traveller into his harem, and allowed him to sit down by the fire with his wife and some other women.

It being now evening, the women, having regaled him with bread and coffee, showed him a carpet, on which they desired him to take a little rest. He expected they were to set out in an hour or two in order to reach Jerusalem before day; but lay down, and, falling asleep, remained in that comfortable position until long after sunrise next morning. The Arab now went out and left him in the harem, when the women, who are all the world over generous and hospitable, exerted themselves to entertain and regale him with fresh cakes, butter, and coffee. The mistress of the tent never quitted him for a moment, and while he remained here he was in safety, for the precincts of the harem are sacred in the East. At length the Arab himself returned, and promising him that they should depart in the evening, threw a striped mantle over his shoulders, and went out to walk with him in the fields. Contrary to his expectations, the Arab actually set out with him as soon as it was dark, and carefully avoiding all villages, camps, and inhabited places, in every one of which he anticipated danger, he arrived safely with him at Jerusalem two hours before day.

During his stay in this holy city Pococke visited and examined every remarkable spot within its precincts and environs, and his researches threw considerable light on numerous points of sacred topography. He likewise made an excursion to Jericho and Jordan, and on his return from this journey descended along the banks of the brook Kidron to the Dead Sea. From the number of decayed trees and shrubs which he saw in the water, he conjectured that this lake had recently overflowed its ancient shores, and encroached upon the land. The country in these districts was formerly liable to volcanic eruptions; abounds in warm springs of a powerful odour, and in wells of bitumen, which ooze out of the rocks, and is carried into the sea by the river. It having been asserted by Pliny and others that animals and other heavy bodies floated involuntarily in the water of this sea, Pococke undressed, and made the experiment; and, strange to say, so powerful was the effect of prejudice upon his mind, that he fancied he could not sink in it, and says that when he attempted to dive his legs remained in the air, and having once got the upper hand of his head, gave him considerable trouble to reduce them to their natural subordinate position. However, though he was persuaded, he says, that the result would have been still more striking, his faith in Pliny was not sufficiently powerful to induce him to make the experiment in deep water; which was fortunate, for as, apparently, he could not swim, his travels, had he done so, would have terminated there. On coming out of the sea he found his face covered with a crust of salt, which, he observed, was likewise the case with the pebbles on the shore. The pillar of salt into which Lot’s wife was changed was a little farther south, and therefore he did not see it; but he was assured by the Jews, who seem to have tasted it, that the salt of this pillar is very unwholesome. On this point, however, Pococke merely remarks that he will leave it to the reader to think as he pleases upon the subject.