enthusiasm in its highest excess. He had been, he said, a great profligate in his own country, but had been reclaimed by the preaching of the celebrated Madame Krudener, and soon after considered it his duty to go and preach the gospel in the lands from which it was first promulgated; in fine, to turn the Arabs and the Orientals in general to Christianity. He landed at Alexandria, and his money being exhausted, Mr. Lee, the consul, gave him a small supply. With this he found his way by sea to Acre, and then wandered up the country towards the mountains. He found no one who cared to listen to his addresses, or to show him hospitality; owing, perhaps, to two reasons, that his finances were low, and that he knew not a word of the language; but this of course he was quickly to acquire. But one fine afternoon he came to a grove of trees in some part of Lebanon, in one of which was a girl gathering fruit. She was either handsome, or her dress attracted his attention; and being very near-sighted, he stood at the foot of the tree, with his spectacles on, gazing intently upwards. The girl, who had never seen a pair of spectacles before, became alarmed, and cried out; when two young men, who were at work not far off, came up, and charged him with using magical arts on the girl, as they had observed his spectacles and fixed gaze. They beat him unmercifully, and plundered him of all the money he had left, and in this plight he found his way to the consul at Beirout. We persuaded him to quit his projects of evangelizing the natives, and turn his face homewards without delay; and being reinforced with a little cash, this young enthusiast set off next day; and we afterwards heard he had reached Alexandria, but whether he bent his course back to Switzerland, and finally relinquished his plans, we never learned.

:

The

This was a premature and unsuccessful attempt; but too much caution cannot be used in the efforts, now so general and admired, of reclaiming the people of the East from their errors and superstitions. The cunning and knavery of the Syrians will often prove an overmatch for the simplicity of the missionary; father T. in Jerusalem, is one proof of this, and there were two brothers of Mount Lebanon, clever and designing fellows both of them, who agreed to be baptized and become useful agents, on the promise of some hundred pounds, to be paid them by a wealthy and zealous supporter of the cause. noted Eusebius, bishop of Mount Lebanon, came to England about six years ago to set forth the dark and distressed state of the Syrian Christians he was chaperoned through many of the colleges at Oxford by one of the masters, and was made much of by some ministers, though mistrusted by others. His short stature, his red hair and beard, were any thing but prepossessing, but he interested the feelings and hopes of numbers by his affecting details of the desolation of his country, and finally set off with a capital printing-press for printing copies of the Testament, and about eight hundred pounds in money. When we were at Sidon, we found that this eastern dignitary was living in a style of excessive comfort, and to his heart's content, at a few hours distance. With this money, which was a fortune in the East, he has purchased a good house and garden; not one farthing had ever gone to renovate the condition of the Christians of the East, and the printingpress, or some fragments of it, were known to have found their way to Alexandria.

A Roman Count, Signor arrived at Beiront a few days before. He came all the way from Rome, for the sole object of seeing Balbec. At the age of seventy, and without any companion, the poor old man had need of all his enthusiasm to support him under the fatigues of the journey. He had landed first at Cyprus, where he was almost immediately seized with a fever, that confined him two months. As soon as he was recovered, he took passage for Beirout, and arrived in safety. His conversation was full of energy and fire, when speaking of the ruined temple he was about to visit, which he looked forward to with the same delight and hope as the pilgrim of the desert does to the holy dome of Mecca. He set out in a few days, but we left Beirout too early to know if his journey was prosperous or not, or whether any of the straggling detachments of soldiery had intercepted him.

My old acquaintance W. had less of the spirit of curiosity, who spent three weeks at Cairo, and never went to see the pyramids. But his enthusiasm and zeal were directed to a different object. He set out one morning from Beirout in a deluge of rain, contrary to our persuasion, to climb the heights of Lebanon, in order to try to make a good Christian of the Prince of the Druses. The latter, "all things to all men," received him with much civility, listened attentively to his impassioned discourse, and assented with looks of gravity and wisdom to the perfect truth of it. He drank coffee and smoked the chibouque with his guest, and ordered dinner to be prepared for him. W. left the palace with feelings little short of rapture at the success of his visit, and travelled over the rocky paths and defiles of the mountain for a long time, till he lost his way. It was an evening in January, and it quickly became dark, the rain fell in torrents, and the wind blew with extreme violence, when the guide perceived the light of a solitary cottage amidst the acclivities. Fatigued, and drenched to the skin, W. found a friendly reception from the owner, who was a Maronite, and who soon spread before him some coarse fare. Another traveller, who chanced to be a Greek monk, soon after arrived, and the trio assembled with great good will round a fire that burned cheerfully in the middle of the floor. It so happened, that the subject of religion, and the state of the churches in the East was introduced; it was throwing down the gauntlet. The Maronite maintained the superior purity of his own doctrines-the Greek treated him as little better than a schismatic-and W. forgetting in a moment his extreme fatigue and exhaustion, descanted with great earnestness on the unhappy errors in which they were both involved. The storm, that raged furiously without, interrupted them not, and hour fled away after hour, till the dawn of morning, ere they thought of retiring to rest; and he complained on his return, of the obstinacy and difficulty of conviction of his fellow travellers.

The snow still rested on the interior summits of Lebanon; around which the air was extremely cold, and the habitations few. "The forests, the cedar trees, the glory of Lebanon," as scripture speaks of them, have, in a great measure, disappeared, to make way for innumerable plantations of vines. No mountain in or around Palestine, retains its ancient beauty so much as Carmel; two or three villages, and some scattered cottages, are found on it; its groves are few, but luxuriant; it is no place for crags and precipices, or "rocks of the

wild goats," but its surface is covered with a rich and constant verdure. In one of our visits to it, we had wandered for the whole day, and arrived late and fatigued at a cottage, that promised the rudest fare and lodging. But we were agreeably disappointed when the dirty floor of the naked apartment was covered with a small but handsome carpet and cushions, and a repast, consisting of delicious honey and clouted cream, as used in the west of England, was set before us, with coffee and the pipe, and the whole was seasoned with the kindest welcome. This was a convincing proof, that all was not barren in the land of promise, and that the traveller's step is not repulsed from its inhospitable doors.

[The present letter concludes the series of these very interesting articles upon Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine, the author being on the point of publishing them in a volume, together with an additional series containing his journey into Greece.]

TO THE FRENCH SKELETON.

THOU link connecting death and man-
Thou object standing scarce a span
Beyond the grave's domain,

Who raised thee up? Tell us thy story,
Thou spectre-thou memento mori—
Thou dead come back again!

Hast thou from charnel dungeons crept,
Where having long in mildews slept
With festering bones surrounded,
With sinews left and sunken eyes,-
Galvanic spells made thee arise,

And thus the world confounded?

Art thou a Goule,* that having come,
Coarse epicure! nigh some fresh tomb
To gorge upon decay,

While too intent upon thy meal,
Suffer'd the body-thieves to steal
Thy sapless bones away.

Perhaps thou art from Surgeons' Hall,
Where Everard Home, by chemic call,
First made thee move, and go
From thy glass-case, and walk abroad
'Mongst fleshy men, who think it odd
Thou 'rt fled the realms below.

Mayhap thou art the compound thing
That Frankenstein by studying

In alchemy created;

And though death's image to the view,
Like the unlucky wandering Jew,
To die art never fated.

Be what thou may'st, no tongue can say
Sins of the flesh o'er thee have sway,

From these thou art Scot-free;

And thou must be most pure in mind,
Since even thy enemies, I find,

Thy very heart may see

* In the legendary lore of the East a race of beings who visit grave-yards to feed

on the dead—a species of resurrection-man.

THE HUNTING ALDERMAN.

"Now let us sing long live the king,
And Gilpin long live he;

And when he next doth ride abroad
May I be there to see."

JOHN GILPIN. "WHO has e'er been at Paris must needs know the Grêve," says Prior's song, and it is almost equally impossible for any one to have been in the neighbourhood of Taunton, at least if he have any venatorial blood in his veins, without knowing the worthy Squire Tasborough, the staunchest Nimrod left to us since Colonel Thornton, of sporting celebrity, was unfortunate enough to be in at his own death. "Fifty guineas to five," cried the Squire to a party of hunting companions, who were giving no respite to the magnums of claret at his own table, 66 fifty guineas to ten, that the Alderman won't turn out with us next Friday." "Done !" cried old Major Cunningham.-" And five hundred guineas to fifty," roared the Squire," that he won't be in at the death." "Done to that too," replied the Major; "I always take the long odds." It was a bet, and regularly entered in their pocketbooks by the respective parties.

I am not at liberty to give any other clue to the Alderman in question, than by stating, that he purchased an estate about two years ago in Somersetshire, which will probably be a sufficient guide to my civic readers, and that as he was hardly ever known to have been on horseback in his life, the invitation to the hunt had been sent to him as a mere frolic, although it had produced the very serious bets I have recorded. Other wagers arose out of these, ut mos est venatoribus, and as considerable interest had been excited by their ridiculous nature, I resolved to be in the field, and witness their termination. The day appointed for the hunt was one of those misty, dewy, drizzling mornings of October which seems to be an anticipation of the succeeding month, and to leave you in doubt whether it will settle into a confirmed rain, or sparkle up into a fresh, buoyant, invigorating day. Euston Common, the place of rendezvous, runs into a thicket of oaks and underwood, sloping down with an easy descent to Thorley Bottom. Through this copse a line winds and emerges into the lower common, where Squire Tasborough with his huntsmen, hounds, and merry men all, the greater part of them in scarlet coats and black velvet caps, were assembled, the former already triumphing over the Major, in the anticipated certainty of winning his wager; "What!" he exclaimed, "do you think old square-toes would turn out with a mist falling, and run the risk of damping his drab gaiters? No, no, Major,-you 're done this time, depend upon it-eased of your ten guineas-I wish it had been a thousand."

66

66

"Tasborough," said the Major, quietly putting his glass to his eye, your sight is better than mine, what do you make that bird to be, hovering along the copse ?" Hang me if I can tell," replied the Squire ; flies like a wounded crow-can't see for the mist." The object in question was no other than the Alderman's hat tied down with a pocket handkerchief, and popping occasionally above the hedge as he jogged down the lane, at the extremity of which he presented himself mounted on a grey poney, and followed by his servant on a coachhorse, bearing a large umbrella. A general shout, in which the