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often doomed to bleed at the shrine of relentless fanaticism, so often goaded by persecution to gratify the avarice or the caprice of princes."

From Avignon the traveller went to Bareges, Toulouse, Nismes, and Marseilles. In this last city, it is remarkable that Newcastle coal should be cheaper than coal carried landways, though only fifteen miles distant. A very honourable character is given of the Marseillois. A merchant will freely entrust his most important keys to the porter attached to his service. The theorist who, like Major Jardine, believes the human race are improved by erossing the breed, would indeed expect the Marseillois to be the best of the Frenchmen.

"Spondanus, Bouche, and Noquier, assert a curious fact, namely, that in 1596, shoals of dolphins infested the port and streets of Marseilles, crowded into the ships and galleys, some of which they sunk, devoured the bodies of mariners who fell into the water, and compelled the tradesmen to shut their shops. Recourse was had, but in vain, to various expedients of destruction. These bouncing guests made good their quarters during a complete month. length a deputation was sent to cardinal Aquaviva, then legate at Avignon. His eminence dispatched Bordini, bishop of Cavaillon, who, in virtue of his exorcising talents, commanded the invaders to retire, and they disappeared in a twinkling. "Manifesto segno," observes the pious Fantoni Castrucci," della potesta della chiesa Romana, ch'è la vera chiesa di Christo, dato

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Mr. Muirhead sailed from hence to Leghorn, and then proceeded to Pisa; circumstances of peculiar urgency then recalled him to his native country, and his narrative abruptly concludes. notice several Scotticisms in his stile, such as she caused write, caused bury, abstracted for stole; would for should, on the streets, &c. There is occasionally an affectation of language as well as of sententiousness, as when he says that Toulouse was designed Palladia, from the olive groves which environed it, when he speaks of huts adjected to eminences. These are trifling faults. The author is a man of observation and talents ; and we wish he may travel again, and travel more leisurely, and publish a fuller journal.

ART. XII. A Non-Military Journal; or, Observations made in Egypt, by an Officer upon the Staff of the British Army: describing the Country, its Inhabitan's, their Manners, and Customs. 4to. pp. 165, with Engravings.

THE author of this volume, or rather the writer of these letters, for they were penned with no serious consciousness of authorship, had prepared the materials for a History of the Campaign in Egypt; that design he laid aside upon learning that Colonel Anstruther had undertaken, at the instance of the ministry, to publish the transactions of that campaign, and has accordingly, now that Sir Robert Wilson has supplied the more serious part, given to the public the more amusing.

The letters begin with a description of the voyage up the Nile to Rosetta. Rosetta is described, as all writers except Savery describe it, beautiful without and wretched in its interior. The population at this time was comput ed at 16,000, of whom 250 are christians and 60 Jews. These people, and some

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few of the European Turks, speak a Lingua Franca, which the author truly observes, is at least a very accommodating language, if not a very pure one. The narrow streets are made to appear still narrower, by a seat or bench built out from the walls, upon which the inhabitants sit, smoke, and sleep. projecting windows are supported frequently upon granite or marble columns; the remains of a better age, and a better people, which these wretched Mahommedans have placed as often upon the capital as the base. The windows are latticed as in Spain. "The description of one room is of every room, surrounded by cushions raised about 8 inches from the floor upon a frame, and large pillars against which to lean, ranged along the wall. magnificence of the room consists in the

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The picture of this town is livelily given.

"Entire long strects, if paltry narrow lanes deserve to be so called, filled with little miserable shops, in which you see a disntal meagre-looking figure, if not blind of at least one eye, certainly with both sore and inflamed; rolled up in a blue shrowd, or rasher loose shirt, like our carter's frock, stretched at his length, sleeping, or else sitting cross-legged in the middle of his tenement, eating bread and garlic pounded in a mortar, with rancid oil; or garlic and horsebeans fried in this same sort of oil; or cucumbers and sallad, which they stuff in handsful down their throats; or water-melons, which they ravenously devour as if afraid the passer-by was going to snatch them away; or a dried fish, with mountains of rice, which they cram down with their fingers; and, when one imagines they are so full as to be unable to hold another grain, a guglet of water is applied to the mouth, nor taken from it until empty, although at least a quart shall have been its contents. I never saw people swallow so much at a draught: it is true they drink seldom, which is a fortunate thing, or God help the Nile!

"The shopman is at no trouble in handing you the thing you want, for, without moving from his seat, his hand reaches all corners of these shabby little holes, rather than shops, which are square places inclosed, about three feet from the ground, upon a bread wall or bank, which, projecting from the house, makes the passage through the shop-streets, already too narrow, so impracticable, that an European nose can't venture to force its way through the crowd, assailed on one side by strong smelling cheese and rancid oil, on the other by garlic, and the filth of the people them

selves."

"Your ears are constantly assailed by the clinking of the bason and jar of the shirbett seller, who parades the streets to satisfy the drought of the passengers; honey and water, liquorice and water; in short, shirbett of all kinds (water sweetened) is his beverage.

Your eyes are next caught by the barber's shop, in which you see half-a-dozen bald heads enveloped in suds and lather, which, the barber, (with his customer's head and a lump of soap in hand) spreads over face, head, and neck, and, never minding eyes, nose, or mouth, scrubs away until one would imagine he had stifled the miserable but patient sufferer, whose neck is bent forward to hinder the water, poured from a large urn upon the top of his head, from running down his back; the expert shaver

then, most dexterously certainly, performs his operation in the reverse way to which we do, pushing the razor from, instead of drawing it to him, and concludes the ceremony by opening the spout of the waterurn, washing off all the soap, plucking the hairs from the ears and nose, and finally cutting and pairing the nails; and all this for three paras!

"Your nose is now attacked by the snuffmaker, who, with a mortar between his legs, and an immense heavy log of wood, sharply pointed, pounds and cuts the tobacco, at the great risk, I always think, of the fingers of his feet, with which he very dexterously holds the mortar."

The water-carriers are completely dressed in leather, and use goat-skins instead of barrels. In the coffee-houses, which are numerous, a story-teller usually amuses the company. The Scribes have their open-shops; they not only copy books, but make out petitions and write letters: a very useful people in a country where not one man in ten thousand can write or read.

But now for the description of one of the employments of the fair sex. You must know firing (I don't mean shooting) is a very scarce article, there being, in fact, no wood in the country but date-trees, which they convert into so many better uses, as I will hereafter tell you, that they don't cut it for fuel; the imported wood is of course very dear, and only to be gotten by the people in and about the towns, so that in truth the whole firing of the country, one may almost say, is produced by the happy composition and delicate feminine work of the lower class of women, who dance attendance upon the cattle, and not only carefully, but with avidity and delight, rumassent ce qui tombe," and with a melange of dust form a hard thick pancake, of which they make their fires: never was any thing so shock ingly disgusting as this is. From my window, which opened upon several court-yards full of oxen and buffaloes, I could not help seeing it; and curiosity (though not a woman) made me watch them; the creatures almost naked, nothing but a loose shift, and trowsers to the knees, all in rags; low in the filth; and, seriously speaking, seem to delight in it."

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The okells or caravanseras have each a sort of colonnade, where such travellers as are not able to pay for a room, are suffered to rest: a lesson, says the author, to countries that are reputedly so civilized. The plague of vermin seems still to have remained upon Egypt; the officers complain even more of the flies and mosquitos upon the march, than of the creepers and crawlers in the towns.

"The whole country is one continued flat, intersected with dykes and canals for the admission of water at the overflow of the Nile; the beds of some of these dykes are even higher than the level of the country: at a particular time they are cut, the land is thus covered with water, and manured by the fat and slimy mud it brings with it, that produces the uncommon abundance of grain which Egypt boasts.

"As a great portion of mud remains in the dykes, which would be filled up if they did not clear them, it is thrown out on each side, making immense banks, or laid in heaps, which, in course of time, form the artincial hills upon which all their villages are built, and thus secured from the water, while the surrounding country is inundated. "By describing one village you describe all; invariably built upon one of these hillocks; an assemblage of flat-roofed square mud-huts; few houses with upper stories or walls of brick; oval kennels of mud, without any window, and only a small hole, through which they creep, and were it not that a hollow is dug about two feet in the sand they would scarcely be able to stand upright in them. The Arab hut, like the "cobler's stall, serves for kitchen, parlour, and hall;" in truth answers every purpose, for they are beastly dirty.

"Almost every house has its pigeoncote erected upon the roof, in a curious form, and giving a very odd and picturesque appearance to the whole: a mosque or two, according to the size of the village, a number of ragged inhabitants, and a few date-trees, finish my description of the Arab village, which, at some little distance, wears the appearance of a fortification, and does in fact afford excellent cover to the guard which is regularly mounted every night by the inhabitants to protect them from the incursions of the Bedouin Arabs. There are three distinct styles of habitation; the best of brick, with latticed windows and upper rooms; the intermediate ones of mud, four walls forming a square with flat roof, and holes in the wall to serve as windows; the worst sort, oval hovels of the same material, mud. Outside of each village is a burial ground, which at first sight appears to consist of a number of the oval huts I have just described, but, upon a nearer approach, you find are tombs of brick, really well constructed; with infinite labour and pains bestowed upon them; they certainly Lake better care of their dead, than of their living."

The funerals reminded the author of the same ceremony in Ireland. The interjection of joy, ululah, reminded him also of the Irish philaluh; and though this indicates sorrow, he asks if there be not an affinity between the words: the fact is, that these words, like howl, ululo, and show, are all imitative and ANN. REV. VOL. II.

derived from the same sound, the first which infants articulate.

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The strange custom of hatching their in ovens, is said to have dwindled the race, and perverted their instincts: few hens will sit to hatch-a treble price is demanded for one that will. There never was a country, says the author, better calculated to feed an army: buffalo beef, mutton, corn, rice, pulse, vegetables of various kind, all good and cheap; yet the bread with which the Poor Arabs must content themselves is little more than the husk of the corn and water. It is remarkable that the English seldom felt any want of water; they usually found it near the palms, at a depth of from four to seven feet. The French were ignorant of this, and were convinced that no water was to be procured between Alexandria and Aboukir.

A curious anecdote is related to exemplify the abject contempt in which Christians were held in Egypt before the French invasion.

"Mrs. Varsy, my hostess, told me a ridiculous circuinstance, which you shall have in her words: "When my son was at my breast, I used now and then to give him to an old Arab servant-maid to hold; the woman always seemed in agony whilst she had him in her arms. At last, upon asking her why she appeared to be in such distress, she told me, that to say true, she had been to consult with one of the Imans whether the water of a young christian child, at breast, was impure; and that his answer was-If the mother drinks wine it is decidedly impure, otherwise it is not so-Now, Ma'am, you know you do drink wine, and I am therefore kept in constant alarm lest the infant should misbehave, which always obliges me to change my cloaths, or to wash the part of them defiled."

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I confess," says the writer, "that were it not for political reasons, and lest their wandering spirits might have crept into the East, I could almost lament that the French, for the benefit of mankind, have not remained here; with the sea open to them, they might have brought about, after some time, such a change, that the country would have put on a new appearance, or more properly

should say, its old appearance; it is cer tainly to be made one of the finest countries in the world. I had rather the French should have the pleasure of making it so,

than it should be our lot, thousands would

fall in the attempt, and I doubt if success would be quite ensured."

We too regret that any interests, real or imaginary, of Great Britain should oppose the progress of civilization. F

But armies, such as armies are now, are wretched civilizers. They would, indeed, be needful in such a country as Egypt, to enforce the law; but woe to the country where they give the law! The French in Egypt were under no restraint of religion, for they were instructed, by the example of their leaders, to profess any religion as it suited them. They were equally destitute of all morals, and instead of introducing European decency among the conquered people, they themselves fell into the practice of vices most infamous in Europe. The miseries and crimes occasioned by the unhappy expedition of Bonaparte, are beyond calculation. We are told, by this officer, that the women who cohabited with the French soldiers, almost invariably destroyed, before birth, the creatures who would else have been the children of christians! A massacre of these unhappy women was expected to take place whenever the Europeans should quit the country. When the English took possession of Rosetta, the wives of four French officers, all of whom had children, were forsaken by their husbands, and turned into the streets, for the inhabitants feared the Turks would murder them if they suf

fered the wife of a Frenchman under their roofs !

When these letters were written Bon John was very naturally the favourite in Egypt. Some remarkable instances are quoted.

"Near Foua, a captain of the navy had straggled from his boat, was seized by some Arabs, who, from the similarity in his uniform, mistook him for a Frenchman, had

plundered and stripped, and were actually about to murder him, when one of them, more sagacious and humane than the rest, tore a button from his coat, suspended his

execution, ran to the bank of the Nile, an seeing an English boat, produced the button to the sailors, who acknowledged it by calling out Ingles; he instantly returned to his party with the information, who as quickly released their captive, restored to him his effects, and escorted him in safety to the boat.

"An Arab, who had lived at Aboukir before the arrival of the French, upon their taking possession of that place, quitted it, having first covered up most secretly a remarkably good well close to that village. He had constant intercourse with the French during the whole of their stay; but such was his inveteracy towards them that he never divulged the secret. The moment we reached Aboukir, he took Sir Sidney Smith to the spot, a few men soon opened it, and found a large well of the very best water."

Yet this officer believed, that as soon as the French were out of the country, the inhabitants would rejoice to see the Christians. follow them, because they are English

This volume has been ascribed to

Major Doyle: we have reason to be lieve that it is the work of an older officer, but as he has not thought proper to set his name to the title, it would be impertinent in us to announce it in a review. Some inaccuracies of language the reader will have observed in with the recurrence of certain slang our extracts-we were more displeased phrases, common among young men of fashion, who would do well to spare our language, and confine themselves to inventing alterations in our coats, waistcoats, pantaloons, and boots. These, however, are trifling faults. More liv. ing authors than one have acquired reputation by books of less observation, only because they were more serious, being dull.

ART. XIII. Travels in Turkey, Asia-Minor, Syria, and across the Desert into Egypt, during the Years 1799, 1800, and 1801. By WILLIAM WITTMAN, M. D. of the Royal Artillery, c. pp. 612.

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pahicd the army of the grand vizier in its route through Turkey, Syria, and Egypt, during the late memorable campaign, he was certainly in a situation peculiarly advantage. ous for observing the mariners, customs, and habits of the Turkish nation, not only with the Grand Vizier himself, but with the principal personages of the Ottoman empire.

In the course of his travels, he saw many things which, to him at least, were uncommon; and he was in the habit (partly to relieve his mind from the irksomeness of

his situation, and partly in the hope of gratifying his particular friends) to note down whatever appeared worthy of remark. On communicating these notes to those for whom they were originally intended, it was their wish to see them in print, as containing matter which, according to their partial opinion, was calculated to interest a still wider circle. Such a task, when he commenced his journal, he did not expect he should have to encounter; and this statement, in every respect consonant to truth, he trusts will shield him from the severity of criticism, which is most properly directed against such publications as are, from the first, intended to challenge the approbation of the public."

Dr. Wittman's situation was indeed, as he boasts, peculiarly advantageous; and if it shall appear, that in his new matter there is little information, and in his old matter no improvement, the fault is his own; and a fault it is deserving the utmost severity of criticism, which, begging leave to correct the author, we must affirm, is most properly directed against such publications as are, from the first, intended to pick the pockets of the public.

That such was the intention with which this quarto volume was published, we suspected, upon seeing that many of the prints are copied, from what originals it would be difficult to say, as they have been copied so often, but probably from Sir Paul Rycaut. The hand of a modern artist is easily discoverable in the few figures which are actually from modern drawings, such as the two Arnaut soldiers, and the Arab groom. There is internal evidence of this fraud, sufficient to satisfy those who may not have the means of comparison to detect it. The figure of the Capitan Pacha would be familiar to many of those officers who would probably be the first perusers of Dr. Wittman's travels: a portrait of one of his predecessors therefore is given. The costume worn by the Dervises is of a light quaker colour, says the author, and a competent idea of it will be formed from plate IV, in which one of their superiors is faithfully represented." In the print this quaker-coloured dress is green.

Nor is it merely in publishing old prints as originals, that Dr. Wittman and his bookseller have displayed their vamping abilities: matter a century old is to be palmed upon the public in the same manner, and honest old half-acrown octavos pilfered to eke out the

pages of a modern two guinea and a half quarto. We shall proceed regularly through the travels of this gentleman; we shall expose his ignorance, his want of observation and of informa tion; we shall detect his plagiarisms, and endeavour to glean some information from his five hundred pages.

Dr. Wittman went by sea to Constantinople: never did man display more poverty of imagination, more beggarliness of language, more meagreness of mind, than this writer has manifested in his descriptions of the finest scenery in the world. We had a distant view Mount Etna and Strombolo, than which nothing could be more awful and grand. The Lipari islands added to the effect of this fine scene," p. 3.-"The city, harbour, and environs of Constantinople, presented a magnificent spectacle, new in every respect to our eyes, both as to the architecture of the principal edifices, and the construction of the city itself; but which was on the whole extremely fine and picturesque," p. 5.-" I walked to the vicinity of the mosque of Santa Sophia, which is certainly a very massive building, but which, considered in an architectural point of view, is, in my opinion, very inferior to our St Paul's. With the exception of the dome, and of the four minarets which are detached, there is nothing very singular or striking in the pile,' p. 34. So much for Dr. Wittman's descriptive powers, and his feeling of what is aweful in nature, or majestic in art. The only visual object which he has had fancy enough to represent is, that," the minarets bear a strong resemblance in their form to a tall candle, having an extinguisher at its top."

The barracks of the English detachment were at Levant Chifflick, about seven miles from Buyukdere, where the officers resided; "a very agreeable dish called yourt, of which the natives are very fond, is made here and brought in with the dessert. It is prepared by allowing a certain portion of milk to become sour, and throwing into new milk as much of this acidulated fluid as will curdle it in a slight degree. It is then eaten with sugar; is very palatable, and mixed with strawberries, becomes a good substitute for cream." Dr. Wittman has noticed another dainty of the Turk. ish dairy, which we hope will find its way into many a family cookery book. Large shallow vessels having been filled

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