The Sun.
London, England, 1855-09-25 00:00:00

LITERATUR E.

110 N. ROBERT CURZON.
Visits to the Monasteries of the Levant. By the
Hon. Robert Curzon, junior. Fourth edition.
1851. John Murray.
Armenia : A Year at Erzerouni and on the. Fron-
tiers of Russia, Turkey, and Persia. By the
Hon. Robert Curzon. 1854. John Murray.
A curious search after a jumble of ancient manu-
scripts, supposed to be stowed away in the antique
dwellings still occupied by the celebates of St.
Sabba, of Thebes, of Mount Athos, and of Meteora,
would, at the first blush, seem to give but small
promiQe through the narrative of its prosecution
of anything like even the most moderate entertain-
ment. Nevertheless, all the world knows that
this was literally and precisely the very enterprise
to which we have been indebted for one of the
mast charming books of travel ever offered to the
popular examination—the picturesque record of
the visits made some twenty years since by Mr.
Curzon to the " Monasteries of the Levant"—a
classic descriptive of Oriental adventure such as
the future student will not fail to treasure up de-
lightedly with Warburton's " Crescent and the
Cross," and Kinglake's " Eothen," with the poetic
reveries of Lamartine, and the eloquent medita-
tions of Chateaubriand. Immediately on its first
appearance, Curzon's Monasteries of the Levant
was felt to be a genuine book, and as such was
welcomed accordingly. Its refreshing vivacity, its
perfect good humour throughout, its keenness of
observation, its instant and subtile appreciation of
the ludicrous, its unaffected enthusiasm wherever
enthusiasm happened to be called for by heroic
associations, its homage for whatever deserved
homage, its respect for whatever spoke of the past,
and in doing so appealed to our nobler sympathies
(old books, old paintings, old churches, and, above
all and beyond all, old mouldy, worm-eaten manu-
script3)—all these peculiarly distinguishing quali-

tiesof.the work commanded for it at first-mlr in-
terest, and at last (when we had fairly entered into
the spirit of the narrative), our thorough and un-
stinted admiration. We abandoned ourselves,
after the introductory chapter, to a sense of com-
plete enjoyment while following our traveller in
the story told by him of his personal a.lventures.
It mattered nothing whether it conducted us
into Egypt or into Turkey, to the Natron
Lakes or to the islands of the Greek archipmlago.
The narrator was still the same, though the scene
visited and described might, in all essential respects,
be entirely different. The voice we listened to had
still for us the same charming influence, still in-
spirited by its frank hilarity, still delighted by its
evidence through every syllable of being the utter-
ance at once of the scholar and the gentleman, the
-voice in fact of the wandering child of civilisation.
Whoever has once read the book, remembers it,
reverts to it, recalls to mind now one, now another
of its incidents or its characters, the incidents re-
counted and the characters delineated with a pen
of such luminous observation. Who, for example,
that has once turned over those pages, can ever
forget that wonderul picture of the young monk
of Xeropotamo, a magnificent-looking man of thirty
or thirty-five, a study for Titian or Sebastian del
Piombo, who had never seen a woman, retained no
remembrance of his mother (having been conveyed
shortly after his birth in Rournelia to his perma-
nent dwelling place upon the Holy Mountain) who,
in fact, had no idea at all as to what sort of things
women were, or what they looked like—listening
open-eyed, and perhaps open-mouthed from under
the great cowl out of which streamed forth his
black hair and long beard, while the young English-
man assured him that women have uo resemblance
whatever to the stiff, hard, dry pictures of the
Penagia, the Holy Virgin, hanging up in every
Greek hurch as the accustomed altarpiece ? Who
again can ever lose the recollection of that garrul-
ous old Abbot of Caracalla who crammed down the
throat of the traveller those unwelcome hazel-nuts
of Athos and then spoilt his dinner of stayed fish,
and olives, and caviare, and salad, and papus
yaknesi, by allowing it all to cool upon the brass
tray of the sinni perched on the legs of the inverted
table, while he—my lord the agoumenos—was
very inopportunely one of his interminable
long stories ? One of some interest it happily
chances to be for once, about the Calabrian Monk
Barlaam, who about the year 1336 in his antagon-
ism to the systent of the ascetic quietists undertook
to reconcile the Eastern and Western Churches and
apparently all. but succeeded in establishing a per-
manent concord in Christendom. Have we not
also a vivid reminiscence of each one among our tra-
veller's laughable first-surprises, when he comes,
as it were breathlessly, every now and then, plump!
upon some eastern custom fraught to his western ob-
servation withmatter for wondering amazement? As
when he marvels from the window of his inn at Alex-
andria—much as Lever's JackMasingbred marvelled
from the lattice of his hostelry in the little Celtic bo-
rough of Oughterard —over the strange phenomenon
presented bya (to hi In) wholly unaccustomed specta-
cle. Watching with au eye of surprise the half-naked
men running about, each with something like a
dead pig under his arm, shouting out "Mother !
mother!" in a doleful voice—yet who turned out

after all to be only the poor sakis or water-carriers,
bearing their skins of the divine element and call-
ing " ! moyah !" (water ! water !) to the
thirsty bystanders. How exquisitely and with
what a photographic pencil he sketches them all off,
one by one, those variegated figures in the wonder-
ful panorama. The Bedouin -Arab of the wild de-
sert, one of thoselimber children of the wilderness,
thin, gaunt, and dirty, looking as if he could climb,
and run, and leap over anything, crowned with
the graceful birnoose, and robed with the ma-
jestic abba, glittering in eye, lissome in step, per-
fectly free from any restraint, and altogether un•
embarrassed by conventional manners ! " I had
never pictuied t 3 myself," says Mr. Curzon, " that
anything so like a wild beast could exist in the
human form "—adding, comically enough, "Au
English gentleman in a round hat, and a tight
neck bandkerchiti, and boots, with white kid gloves
and a little cane in his hand, was a style of mum so
utterly and entirely unlike a Bedouin Arab, that
I could hardly conceive the possibility- of their
being only different species of the same sort of ani
inal. A reflection calling to mind the astonish-
ment expressed by Elliot Warburton when (wend-
ing his way homewards again from the east,
coming back once more to the boundary line be-
tween the lands of the Cross and of the Crescent),
he came once more iu sight of the shaven chins of
civilised life—mean and degraded, he tells us, they
seemed in his eyes, habituated so long to the flow
of the ample beard furnished by nature as the in-
signia of perfected manhood Other denizens of
the far-off countries bordering upon the Levant,
Mr. Curzon delineates no less skilfully than the
nomadic Bedouin—pourtraying them by a few
master-touches in a miniature outline of marvellous
verisimilitude ! The kawass, or armed bodyguard,
in his whity-brown frock coat, and carrying in his
hand a thick cane as his badge of office, a sort of
dingy policeman transformed into an extempora-
neous retainer ! The chaoush, or hired officer of a
similar description, bearing a comical silver-headed
staff or wand of office, and stalking upon the scene,
a melodramatic representation of a Brummagen
Chamberlain ! With these the yassakji, or for-
bidder, carrying a stick without a knob, and look-
ing in all respects like a dirty kawass, the dimmer
copy of a dim original ! And then that all-essen-
tial personage—the cicerone, interpreter, drago-
man, Oriental-Figazo-Factotum! Describing whom
out author tells us plainly that the servant is
master and the master servant, so far as the
eccentric relationship existing between the tra-
veller and the dragoman can in any way be ac-
curately defined with anything like a scrupulous
regard to minute truthfulness. " The newly-
arrived European," says he, " eats and drinks
whatever his dragoman chooses to give him ; sees
through his dragoman's eyes ; hears through his
ears; and, although he thinks himself master, is,
in fact, only a part of the p toperty of this eastern
servant, to be used by him as he thinks fit, and
turned to the best account like any other real or
personal estate." What imparts a peculiar charm
to Mr. Curzon's narrative is the circumstance that
ho speaks of everything precisely as it appeared to
him when he sa,v it. Just as Mr. Dickens told us
in his " Pictures from Italy," that Rome looked
to him when he first got sight of it, for all
the world, exactly the very counterpart—of—
London 1 Or as Albert Smith in a some-
what kindred spirit realised Constantinople
to Cockney imagination by likening Galata
to Wapping, and observing that Scutari was to
Stamboul itself precisely what Birkenhead is to
Liverpool I So also, in like manner, the Hon.
Robert Curzon—satisfied no doubt with the wis-
dom of the prinCiple inducing us to call a spade a
spade—declares as he slowly advances up the cur-
rent of the Father of Rivers, that the Nile, as it
rolled by him in eddies and whirlpools of smooth
muddy water, bore to him, in its colour, a close
resemblance to a sea of mutto i broth ! Weltering
along in their old-fashioned and painted Nile-
boat, our toyageur and his companions get into a
pickle—(don't we all recollect it, and grin as we
do so, tickled back into risibility by the mere force
of the recollection D—crashing down upon a little
vessel of the kind called a djerma, sinking it, but
saving its passengers. Have we not a grotesque
memory of " our rein, or captain," returning to
the roof of his cabin after the catastrophe, and
lighting his pipe and smoking away steadily in
spite of the mishap, while the victims of it are
swearing, and vociferating, and shouting all man-
ner of invectives ! And of (three hours after-
wards) the local authorities arriving in the persons
of two old villagers, in long blue shirts and dirty