THERE are few things, in the diversified department of our libraries, that passes under the title of "light reading," better than just such a brace of volumes as these; lively, intelligent, and picturesque; delightfully devoid of the thousandfold affectations of the professional travel-writer; putting the reader at once on a level with the author; inlaid with few fossils of geology, bristling with no economical statistics, subservient to no pre-determined theory, leaving even maps and plans to the imagination, conveying useful information in the agreeable way it was acquired by the active personal observations of an acute and vigilant mind. And as Captain Kennedy-though suffi. ciently scientific when occasion calls-is content without aspiring absolutely to play the Humboldt or the Murchison, so he has happily escaped the opposite extreme of the ultra-imaginative tribe, who people road-side inns with the creations of a mind too mighty for this common world, value their lives at a pin's fee, rejoice in the prospect of being probably murdered, so it be but by thieves of Araby, and are unable to sit their camel except in ecstasies of horror and of joy. Captain Kennedy has not gone abroad vowing and swearing that he will be original at whatever risk; with the resolve, deliberate and prepense, that he will see every thing in an aspect such as no previous traveller has ever caught and realized; he has not writen an "Eothen," for (we are bound to say) he does not appear to discover the slightest merit in attempting to sneer away the holiest associations of mankind; just because from their very force and appropriateness they are so universally felt and acknowledged, as not to suit the object of a describer who is determined to be startling and unprecedented, whatever it may cost. We do not find many traces of Mr. Kinglake's peculiar brilliancies in Captain Kennedy's soberer sketches; but we do not miss them ;-for, we honestly confess,

we deem such beauties (singular and exquisite as no doubt they frequently are) but dearly purchased, if we are to receive with them a revival of that blasé scepticism of the Byron school, which we thought and hoped had years ago yawned away its heartless and epicurean existence out of our literature.

A

The region over which Captain Kennedy and Lord Feilding travelled, has, nevertheless, its own associations of antique interest; neither is our author at all destitute of the faculty to evoke them at the fitting season. wild and stern history is that of Algiers ! The Roman (Cæsar himself has left his impress and name on Mauritania); the Vandal; the Saracen; the proud Almoravide; the fanatic children of Mohamedin, the Marabout; the shereefs of Hascen, and their fierce and sanguinary tetrarchy; the Spanish rule (they were the palmy days of the Peninsula's naval glorythe days of Gama, and Cabral, and Magellan, and Columbus himself); the terrible sway that followed it, of merciless Horuc Barbarossa, "the chosen of God;" the yet more savage tyranny of his brother tiger, Hayraddin, with his mighty Mole built in the blood and sweat of thirty thousand Christian slaves; and then the Armada-better meant, yet not better fated, than its successor on our own coasts some

seven and forty years after-of the great Catholic Emperor,-armed with papal bulls, and graced with lovely ladies, and pennoned with the emblazoned cross, that was to charm down the crescent of the Infidel; the storm and earthquake (it was even so a prophetic voice had predicted but a few days before, in the divan of Algiers) that covered the bay with the wrecks and the carcases of Christian seamen and Christian knights; the wild enterprise, under Charles's successor, of Juan Gascon, left to bleach in the winds upon his iron hook; the total independence at last (early in the seventeenth century) of Algiers, thenceforth the avowed

1846.

metropolis of piracy, with its ruthless corsairs on either side of Spain-from Malaga to Santa Maria-whose galleys and brigantines were the terror of every port in the Mediterranean, and startled even Venice in her Adriatic cove. And then we have France, for the first time signally on the scene, when her Du Quesne, the Frenchman's Nelson, taking vengeance on the public enemy of mankind, shadowed forth, as a Frenchman might, the doings of our own Exmouth. "Fired at the sound," we coolly jump some hundred and thirty or forty years of small history, and come with a bound upon that mighty day, when his magnificent Queen Charlotte took her ground within fifty yards of the Mole of Algiers, and the whole tremendous steep, sweating fire from every iron pore, vomited cannon balls for seven hours upon the undaunted Englishman and his crews, till (it's "a way we have" in our navy) one by one the batteries were sullenly silent, the exhausted volcano fell back within its blackened crater, and the smoke, that vaulted that gory bay with a darkness that might be felt, clearing slowly off, revealed the beaten Moor's destroyed fleet-frigate, and corvette, and gunboat, scattered and burned-and the haughty unbeliever's drooping flag humbled before the Mistress of the Seas. Nor yet is all over.

France is once more upon the scene, more permanently if not more gallantly than before; Bourmont and Duperre are in Sidi Ferruj; that same July had more "glorious days" than three; for after a sparkling campaign from the coast inward, the commander receives (with the hand that has dashed aside the father's tears for a gallant son slain, some days before, in the mellay), the Algerine flag of truce, among the ruins of the exploded "fort of the Emperor." Since then, who knows not of their courage and their difficulties, their valour and their vexations; the satisfactory working of that perpetual Al

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gerine safety-valve for high-pressure democracy at home; their marshals, their razzias, their smoked Arabs, and their Abd-el-Kader?

We have been historical enough in all conscience; and yet, we might shoot farther down the "dark postern of time long elapsed." To those who love to dwell for awhile among the visions of old mythological romance, to breathe the fresh morning air of the world's history,-thoughts that date long before any of these periods arise in connexion with this ancient land. The northern regions of Africa have been, in every age, the special home of the marvellous. Atlas itself the streams and valleys of Atlas-among which our tourist wandered,-with what 66 glamour and gramarye are they associated! The churlish Titan himself, and his seven daughters (now shining on us among the stars), and his Hesperian gardens far away in Fez, and his transmutation, when the stern eye of Medusa petrified the hardened old sinner into those hills of some ten or twelve thousand feet high, that belt Morocco, and stretch a younger progeny into Algier; and his thenceforth office to pillar the eternal heavens:*-The Atlantes-wheresoever those miserables dwelt-who wont to solemnly curse (so attests Herodotus) the blessed sun himself, for scorching them amid their withered fields; the vanished Island somewhere on those visionary coasts, that Plato spake of, and all the world has dreamed about ever since; the mystic Valley of Atlas, which though it open upon the sea, ocean dares not to enter, awed by the sacred presence that haunts the place, but rises in a crystal wall at the mouth of the gorge, an everlasting barricade of waterst (invisible, no doubt, to the dull eyes of modern unbelief); and so on, through a succession of magic and marvel, necromancing and sorcery, of all timefrom those dwarfish enchanters of the Libyan deserts, whom dear Herodotus describes (ii. 32), to the more modern

maugrabies of Eastern story, or to that fair Witch of Atlas, whom Percy Shelley saw in his dreams :

"A lovely lady garmented in light

From her own beauty; deep her eyes, as are Two openings of unfathomable night Seen through a tempest's cloven roof;"—

And no wonder, for

"Her mother was one of the Atlantides;

The all-beholding sun had ne'er beholden
In his wide voyage o'er continents and seas,
So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden
In the warm shadow of her loveliness ;-

He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden
The chamber of grey rock in which she lay;
She in that dream of joy dissolved away.
"Tis said she was first changed into a vapour,
And then into a cloud, such clouds as flit,
Like splendour-winged moths about a taper,
Round the red west when the sun dies in it;
And then into a meteor, such as caper

On hill-tops when the moon is in a fit; Then into one of those mysterious stars Which hide themselves between the Earth and Mars. "Ten times the mother of the Months had bent Her bow beside the folding star, and bidden With that bright step the billows to indent

The sea-deserted sand: like children chidden At her command they ever came and went:

Since in that cave a dewy splendour hidden Took shape and motion: with the living form Of this embodied power the cave grew warm."

But

And so the "lovely Lady" came to light; who forthwith proceeded to spread joy over the face of earth, to reconcile foes, make lovers happy, (after the least ceremonious fashion), extirpate priests and religions, and proclaim the universal regeneration of society. Such are the French-Revolution-doctrines, that, it appears, are popular among the most fashionable necromantic circles of Mauritania. whatever become of this philosophic graft, the stock itself the lovely demon lady—was appropriately enough placed among those enchanted wilds, where the imagination of all ages has fixed the head-quarters of the supernatural. The mysterious boundary of uninhabitable desert, in which all that the ancients knew of Africa was gradually lost, left room for every gloomy caprice of fancy; each sunny land from Egypt to the Atlantic, disappeared southward, in one huge, unknown, impenetrable wilderness, within, and beyond which, what wonders might not be conceived to lie! A land unpeopled of man seemed the proper haunt of demon and monster; and the savage and venomous animals that issued in countless multitudes from the bosom of the leonum arida nutrix-the sole visible representatives of the vast un

known barrenness-deepened and confirmed the impression of terror.

All that lay beyond that broad belt of sand was a mystery in those days. Yet we to whom, with all our advantages, so immense a portion of Africa still remains utterly unknown, have not much right to speak with superciliousness of the conjectures of the old geographers about it. We have, indeed, circled the whole vast sea-board of Africa-we have cut into the rich and juicy rind a little way all round; but even here, are we quite certain that we moderns have been the

first to do so? There is hardly any more interesting question than this in all the controversies of classical criticism. It would certainly seem that the ancients never generally approached any correct idea of the vast extent to which Africa reaches towards the south. Homer's Oceanic River encircling the whole earth, was specially regarded as the further limit of Ethiopia. Yet what a glimpse is that which the old chronicler of Caria gives us, when he relates (Herod. iv. 42) that

Necho, King of Egypt, sent certain Phoenicians in ships, with orders to pass by the Columns of Hercules, into the sea which lies to the north of Africa, and then to return to Egypt. These Phoenicians thereupon set sail from the Red Sea, and entered into the Southern Ocean. On the approach of autumn they landed in Africa, and planted some grain in the quarter to which they had come; when this was ripe, and they had cut it down, they put to sea again. Having spent two years in this way, they in the third passed the Columns of Hercules, and returned to Egypt. Their relation may obtain credit from others, but to me it seems incredible; for they affirmed that as they sailed around the coast of Africa, they had the sun on their right hand." It is to Herodotus's constant and invaluable accuracy, as a witness of what he heard (however to himself dubious or incredible), that we owe the irresistible confirmation which the last clause contains of the fact, that these navigators must have passed the line. Herodotus himself (not to speak of his perfect honesty) could never have invented a notion utterly foreign to all his own conceptions of the figure of the earth; nor is there any reason to suppose the idea to

have originated in any theories hazarded on the subject by any school of astronomers at that early date. Long after, in Strabo, we have the very interesting, but unfortunately incomplete account of the enterprises of Eudoxus, to circumnavigate Africa, whose success Mela records, but overloads the narrative with a pile of fabulous wonders that sadly sinks its credit. Rennell thinks that Hanno's celebrated Periplus extended as far as Sierra Leone. But the interior was still a mystery unrevealed. There are those who maintain that the waters of the Joliba, and the palaces of Timbuctoo itself, were reached centuries before our era (see Larcher on the singular story in Herodotus, ii. 32); but whatever may have been the nature or the success of individual enterprises, it is certain no impression was made upon the current and popular belief, which bounding Africa by the ocean, or uniting it with India (" Garamantes et Indos"), in either case cut it short, and confined it to the northern tropic. And so central Africa remained shrouded in its desert mystery, as it still remains, amid all the light that has illumined its maritime geography, and though indefatigable Britain has contrived to plant permanently her people and her government beyond its Hottentots and Bechuanas.

But it is the destiny of civilization to advance; it is essentially progressiveessentially aggressive; and this, too, in a perpetually accelerated ratio. Civilization not only grows in the surface it covers, but it grows in the intensity of its restless impatience to

cover more.

It tends to multiply population, and it tends to multiply human desires (in the constant discovery of new and varied objects for them); and both are tendencies that demand room; that involve-the one, the need of colonization-the other, the spread of commerce; and that, in the superior mental energy they evoke and exercise, tend to absorb and annihilate all the inferior growths of the human species, all such races and governments as are unable to keep pace with them. We see it continually. The primitive races melt away, like the retreating

snow of early spring, before the intellect and activity of the civilized European. Intellect preys on matter, and assimilates or destroys it. Great local

suffering must attend such a process; but it is through such " suffering" humanity is "made perfect," and attains its destiny. These painful transformations are the conditions of its progress; the partial billows are crushed or beaten back, but the great tidewave advances.

And so as one instance among many —we cannot but agree perfectly with our candid and unprejudiced author (i. 18) that whatever may be thought of the details of French occupancy in Algeria, the establishment of a Christian and civilized power in North Africa is the germ of a great general blessing. It is strange enough to reflect on the totally different lot that has befallen the opposite sides of the Mediterranean, through almost the entire period of modern history; partly, indeed, from natural causes, but principally, of course, through the ruinous influence of the Turkish, and the other antecedent Mahometan despotisms. For after all, almost the whole southern side is a land of magnificent capabilities. "In all probability," wrote J. Baptiste Say, at a period when he could not have anticipated the African enterprises of his countrymen," the time is not very distant when the European states, awake at length to their real interests, will renounce the costly right of colonial dominion, and aim at the independent colonization of those tropical regions nearest to Europe, or of some parts of Africa. The vast cultivation of what are called colonial products that would ensue, could not fail to supply Europe in the greatest abundance, and probably at most moderate prices." And he adds, in a note-" The vast means at the disposal of Napoleon might have been successfully directed to this grand object, and then he would have left the reputation of having contributed to civilize, enrich, and people the world, and not of having been its scourge and destroyer. When the Barbary shore shall be lined with peaceful, industrious, and polished inhabitants, the Mediterranean will be an immense lake fur