:

he abuses all country-people: he abuses the English: he abuses the Irish he abuses the Scotch. Nor is it simply abuse; it is the language of Billingsgate, except that it is infinitely more rancorous than any thing which, we are willing to believe, he can have learnt in that school of natural civility. He seems to feel all the warmth of a private quarrel against whole nations; but against none so strongly as his own. Of poor John Bull his mildest expressions are that 'he is silent because he has nothing to say, and looks stupid because he is so :' that if he has a red face and round belly he thinks himself a great man:' that he has always been a surly, obstinate, meddlesome fellow' that he is but a dolt-beats his wife--quarrels with his neighbours-damns his servants, and gets drunk to kill the time.' This rival of Pericles, in further eulogy of his countrymen, proceeds to state that 'an Irishman who trusts to his principles, and a Scotchman who trusts to his impulses, are equally dangerous.' Of the Irish he is moreover pleased to discover that they are hypocrites in understanding-that there is something crude and discordant in all they do or say that they are a wild people-that they betray principles, unite fierceness with levity, have an undercurrent of selfishness and cunning-and that their blood, if not heated by passion, turns to poison." All this is venomous enough. No abuse, however, which is directed against whole classes of men is of much importance: if undeserved it is utterly impotent, and may well be utterly despised; but we shall be excused if stronger feelings have been roused by the foul and vulgar invective which is directed by such a thing as this against individuals who now rest in their graves, but who, in the bright career of their lives, were, perhaps, the chief sources of the glory which has been shed over our country in these latter times. Of Pitt it is said that he possessed 'few talents and fewer virtues;' that his reputation was owing to 'a negation (together with the common virtues) of the common vices of human nature, and by the complete negation of every other talent but an artful use of words and a certain dexterity of logical arrangement;' that he had no strong feelings, no distinct percep tions, no general principles, no comprehensive views of things, no moral habits of thinking, no system of action, no plan, no insight into human nature, no sympathy with the passions of men or apprehension of their real designs,' &c.—vol. ii. p. 164. Of Burke we have the following character:

This man, who was a half poet and a half philosopher, has done more mischief than perhaps any other person in the world. His understanding was not competent to the discovery of any truth, but it was sufficient to palliate a falsehood; his reasons, of little weight in themselves, thrown into the scale of power, were dreadful. Without genius to adorn the beautiful, he had the art to throw a dazzling veil over the

deformed and disgusting; and to strew the flowers of imagination over the rotten carcass of corruption, not to prevent, but to communicate the infection. His jealousy of Rousseau was one chief cause of his opposition to the French Revolution. The writings of the one had changed the institutions of a kingdom; while the speeches of the other, with the intrigues of his whole party, had changed nothing but the turnspit of the King's kitchen. He would have blotted out the broad pure light of Heaven, because it did not first shine in at the little Gothic windows of St. Stephen's Chapel. The genius of Rousseau had levelled the towers of the Bastile with the dust; our zealous reformist, who would rather be doing mischief than nothing, tried, therefore, to patch them up again, by calling that loathsome dungeon the King's castle, and by fulsome adulation of the virtues of a Court strumpet. This man,-but enough of him here.-pp. 82, 83,

note.

We are far from intending to write a single word in answer to this loathsome trash; but we confess that these passages chiefly excited us to take the trouble of noticing the work. The author might have described washerwomen for ever; complimented himself unceasingly on his own chivalrous eloquence; prosed interminably about Chaucer; written, if possible, in a more affected, silly, confused, ungrammatical style, and believed, as he now be lieves, that he was surpassing Addison-we should not have meddled with him; but if the creature, in his endeavours to crawl into the light, must take his way over the tombs of illustrious men, disfiguring the records of their greatness with the slime and filth which mark his track, it is right to point him out that he may be flung back to the situation in which nature designed that he should grovel. We learn from the Preface that a few of these essays were written by Mr. Hunt, the editor of the Examiner newspaper. We really have not time to discriminate between the productions of the two gentlemen, or to mete out to each his due portion of praise :we beg that they will take the trouble to divide it themselves according to their respective claims. We can only mention here that Mr. Hunt sustains the part of the droll or merry fellow in the performance: it is he who entertains us with the account of his getting the night-mare by eating veal-pye, and who invents for that disorder the facetious name of Mnpvtglnau-auw-auww; who takes the trouble to inform us that he dislikes cats; to describe the skilful spat of the finger nails which he gives his newspaper,' and the mode in which he stirs his fire: it is he who devotes ten or twelve pages to the dissertation on 'washerwomen,' and who repeats, no doubt from faithful memory, the dialogues which pass between Betty and Molly, the maid-servants, when they are first called in the morning, and describes, from actual observation, (or, it may be, experience,) the 'conclusive digs in the side' with which Molly is accustomed to dispel the lingering slumbers of her bed-fellow.

L

ART. VII. Travels in various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, by Edward Daniel Clarke, LL. D. Part the SecondGreece, Egypt and the Holy Land. Sections Second and Third. To which is added a Supplement, respecting the Author's Journey from Constantinople to Vienna, containing his Account of the Gold Mines of Transylvania and Hungary. Vol. III. pp. 866. Vol. IV. pp. 769. London.

ON looking back to the time which has elapsed since the last of

these massive volumes was ushered into the world, we feel conscious that Dr. Clarke has had some apparent reason to accuse us of neglecting the progress of his labours; and it is, perhaps, to our protracted silence rather than to some harmless pleasantries in a recent Number, that we should impute the extreme indig nation which he is said to have expressed against us. It was, indeed, at first our purpose to defer the examination of the present volumes, till the appearance of his fifth and last should enable us to survey the whole in one connected retrospect. As Scandinavia, however, is a subject well worthy of a separate Article, we have been induced, on second thoughts, to delay no longer to attend our ingenious traveller through that which was, properly speaking, his concluding journey; the arrangement which began with Russia and placed Norway last in order, being of that poeti cal kind which delights to rush at once into the middle of a subject, and which introduces the beginning as a species of supplement to the catastrophe.

In their general character the volumes now before us so per fectly resemble those which preceded them, that we can find no reason either to correct or repeat the sentiments which we have formerly expressed, respecting Dr. Clarke's defects or merits. We have the same acuteness and the same precipitation, the same vivid colouring and the same slightness of design, the same powers of eloquence, and the same contempt of logic which alternately demanded our praise and censure. If he is not always so entertaining as when we last encountered him, it is the fault of the subject not of the author; and, if he is less inclined to visit his personal affronts and injuries on the aggregate of those nations with whom he has sojourned, it is chiefly, as we are led to suppose, because circumstances have more favoured his progress in Turkey than in Muscovy.

*

We left him, it will be recollected, at the conclusion of his second volume, returned from Jaffa to Captain Culverhouse's vessel, then lying in the road of Acre. On revisiting this latter town he found old Djezzar altered for the worse, both in health and spirits, even during the trifling space of time which had occurred since their former interview, and less anxious to conceal

from his guests than his subjects the symptoms of his gradual decay. A few months afterwards he died, displaying in the last acts of his power the same strange mixture of caprice and craft and cruelty which had through life distinguished him: bequeathing his govern ment to an ancient enemy who was then his captive in chains, and murdering several of the principal nobles of Syria out of pure goodwill to his successor, and to save him, as he said, the unpleasant necessity of commencing his reign with bloodshed.

The observations made by Dr. Clarke, during this second survey of Acre, were not, to all appearance, very numerous or important. He visited the Bazar, which is well stocked with eastern commodities, of which cotton, coarse muslins, and excellent tobacco are the most distinguished. He learned the modern name of the river Belus, (Kardane,) but without examining those sands which, since the days of Pliny, have been a valuable article in the different glass-houses of the Mediterranean; and witnessed the manufacture of what is called Morocco leather, without learning the particular ingredient of that beautiful scarlet dye which our western tanners. vainly strive to imitate. Those who have been dependent on the winds and waves and the inclinations of other people, or who have hastily walked through a town while a boat's-crew were waiting for them on a sultry beach, however they may lament this imperfect information, can justly neither blame it nor wonder at it. All that Dr. Clarke was able to add to his previously acquired knowledge. was the peculiar construction of the tobacco-pipes in use at Acre, in which the smoke is cooled, in its passage to the mouth, by swathing the tube with rollers of wet silk or linen. This invention is simpler and more portable than the usual plan, which produces the same effect by a vase of water. But we cannot assent to the superiority which Dr. Clarke assigns to it as less injurious to health than the other. He tells us, indeed, when speaking of the latter instrument, that the whole of the smoke, instead of being drawn into the mouth, is thereby inhaled upon the lungs.' But how it should reach the lungs without being drawn into the mouth he does not inform us. The fact is, that the custom of swallowing the smoke, to which all the eastern nations are much addicted, is as possible and not more necessary or unavoidable with the one than the other style of Hooka. It is only possible with the mild tobacco of the Levant, and where its smoke has been cooled in its passage: but the pipe of Acre and the pipe of the Arabs must produce essentially the same effects both on the sensations and the constitution.

The remains of Gothic architecture in Acre occasion a pretty amart diatribe on the ignorance of those antiquaries who assign its invention to England or Normandy, as well as a theory of his own,

VOL. XVII. NO. XXXIII.

21

concerning the time at which this elegant novelty was brought into the west of Europe.

On the former of these questions we are not inclined to break a lance with him. Even if we ourselves professed the obnoxious doctrine, we should be unwilling to take the argument out of the hands of Dr. J. Milner, who was quite as usefully and as innocently employed, while occupied with such discussions, as with those political polemics which have since engrossed his pen. In truth, however, Dr. Clarke is, we believe, correct in asserting that the essential peculiarities of Gothic architecture may be found in many buildings of the East, anterior to their appearance in any western edifice. But we greatly doubt whether the arguments on which he relies to defend his position are such as would much perplex that learned antiquary to whom we have alluded.-They are, 1st, that Gothic arches are found in Acre which must have been built before the expulsion of the Christians in the year 1290. 2dly, that foreigners or the pupils of foreigners were employed in England for all edifices of this kind down to the time of Henry VIII. 3dly, that all the Latin nations while they were in possession of Acre were too rude to have built the church in question. Now a writer who speaks of Dr. Milner's lamentable ignorance,' might as well have first inquired into the dates of the principal cathedrals in our own country; in which case he would have found that, before the expul sion of the Christians from Acre, the churches of Lincoln, Salisbury, Litchfield, and old St. Paul's, were almost or altogether finished, as well as the north transept of York and its glorious Chapterhouse. These specimens of Gothic so far excel in beauty and dimensions the scale of the remains at Acre, that it is quite absurd to say that the masons which reared them might not also have reared the cathedral of St. Andrew. And it is equally unsupported by fact, and in itself equally improbable, that these edifices were any of them, (with the exception of Lincoln,) raised by foreigners, as it is to suppose that England, whose sovereigns possessed some of the fairest districts of continental Europe, whose intercourse with Rome (the seat of all the art and learning of the period) was more intimate and regular than that of most other European states, and whose specimens of Gothic architecture excel in number, size, and purity, any others in the known world, should be without workmen of her own to raise those buildings for which she was, in every age, remarkable. As for the general inferiority of the Franks to the Saracens, this notion, however popular, is entirely subverted by the contemporary chronicles of both parties; inasmuch as neither William of Tyre nor the Cadi Bohadin admit or assert any such disparity. The truth is, that the revival of the arts among the northern conquerors of the western empire, is generally placed