The Sun.
London, England, 1852-06-28 00:00:00

LONDON, MONDAY

S N,

rent, adding namely, "not unlikely, in a country
where they worshipped crocodiles end were anxion3
to consult their tesie3." Equally extravagant is his
grave and almost orandiose a Hmion to the steamboat
cn the same venerable stream, apostrophizing it as an
unhappy River, which, having, like Ixion, in its worm
youth loved the gorgeous islands of Ethiopia, roust
now" expiate its raptures en the wheel !" Sauntering
through the steeeto of Cairo, how huinoroueln he
mentions the encenfricities of the lean and mangy
dogs, !continually running between your legs, which
afford a tempting passage'in this petticoated place."
Delightfullest of all however is his most amus-
ing particularity as to the still greater eccen-
tricities of the hens of Egypt; which " seem
'to :cenahler that they have discharged every duty
to stociety in. 'producing a. mere egg," caring little
or nothing After the operation " whether their off-
spring becomes a fritter or a fawl, an omelette or a
game cock !" The naked fellow enteusted with the
office of hatching the chickens wholesale, by means o'i
gigantic ovens, i 3 ludicrously detcnbed es ever nod
ever turning- the
.eggs " with most hen Fink( anxiety."
A happy ph;se not: unfrequently proves sufficient in
.that'Vinid delineso:ons 'of Warburton. Ho describes
the mud-coloured buildings and terraced rode of
Alexandria as " variad with fat mosques and
lean, minarets." Ho calloiv pes the black slaves, as th'y
ere reality, " rnagpied with white napkins
round their head cud loins." Gibraltar starts
before tie. from the second page of the second chapter,
with a distinctness marvelloas almost as the vi.
sible, with curtain, and ravelin, and rampart—with
" zigzag lines from shore to suntrait, looking like con-
ductors for the defendera' electric fire to flash along"
—in the complexity of its stern and impregnable for-
tifications. Musing again over that Nile, which
he manifestly reverenced in spite of all the grizzly
story, of the yirgin's blood and the grizzlier appetite
of the crocodiles, Warburton in his fourth chapter
allows his mind to run riot in exaggeration over the
auppoSition that Egypt is an exotic land, borne down
from the torrid remoteness of Abyssinia towards the
theres of the sublime and history-glorified Mediter-
ranean. His fantastic meditations are thus closed,
" Those quiet plains have tumbled down the cataracts ;
those demure gardens have flirted with the Isle of
Flowers five hundred miles away; those very pyra-
mids have - floated down the waves of the Nile;
to , speak Chemically, that river is a solution
of Ethiopies richest regions, - and that vast
country is merely a precipitate"—a companion sketch
for that -grotesque portraiture of Holland by the
incomparable author of " Hudibras," depicting it
as a region distinguished by the fishy peculiarities of
the amphibious! In a kindred mood of facetiousness,
our traveller, pausing in the midst of the petrified
forests of the Wilderness, comments upon the fact of
their.invariably appearing in places the most arid and
shelterless, by observing that they "must have had a
hard time of it," being "exposed, like Niobe, to all
the arrows of Apollo." As wittily does he pronounce
judgment elsewhere upon the summary vengeance
wreaked by the jealous husbands among the Egyp-
tians—remarking that their only "gentlemen of the
long robe" are eunuchs, " and the knife and the Nile
the only damages." Abounding as the chapters do
with these tokens of an innocent and irradiating mer-
riment, they lure the attention onwards, as by an it-
resiatible fascinatian, through all the varieties
of Asiatic life, sometimes enlivened by perilous
adventures and sometimes by romantic vicissitudes.
Throughout the whole of this charming narrative
of oriental enterprise, moreover, what is especially
noticeable, and to us, as coming from an insular
wanderer over Christendom, absolute matter for
astonishment, is the fact that, not once, by a syllable
or aninnuendo, does Warburton become for one in-
stant dogmatical. In this particular he appears to be
little else than a miracle among travellers. Dog-
matism, indeed, would seem to have had but little
kindred with that ingenuous and equable tempera-
ment, Besides--there was genial intelligence as
well as eclectic taste lurking under that subtle and
comprehensive sensibility : and as La Bruy ere says
in one of his searching
apophthegms, " C'est 13 pro- !
fonde ignorance quo inspire le ton dogmatique:' Gifted
by Nature therefore with the very qualities calculated
to win regard from the observant, it
was not sur-
prising to find that his first work almost immediately
attracted the attention of the public to the name of
Warburton. People liked the freshness of his gentle
and unaffected enthusiasm. They were
pleased with
the frankness of a character which revealed only the
most generous sentiments and the most elevated
aspirations. They exulted in the opportunity of be-
holding those famous regions where the feet of the
holy race had moved down the trail of immemorial
generations, toiling in Egypt, roving
in Syria, and
conquering in Palestine—those regions consecrated,
one might almost believe, to everlasting immortality
in the annals of the Prophets—and which no other
modern writer has ever depicted with a pencil at once
so reverent and so picturesque. The vividness ef
his descriptions, in fact, is only surpassed by the
felicity of the variable tone in which he celebrated
their associations. Insomuch was this remarkable in
the earliest of the literary productions of Warburton,
that from his lips " twice told tales" were found to
be scarcely less acceptable than they have actually
proved to be on the opposite shores of the Atlantic,
when revivified by the voice of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
What, for example, could be more enthralling than
Eliot Warburton's account (ch. iv.) of the battle
of the Nile ?=--a victory, for two reasons, unsurpassed
in the annals of maritime warfare, being fought at
midnight and; at anchor. And yet how many had
been the records of that memorable action already
penned and already familiar, from the elaborate elu-
cidation' of Jaines to the terse and 'inspiring pane-
gyric of Southey ? " 'Tis an old story now, that
battle of the Nile," said Warburtor, " but a brave
old story can never die of age ;" and thereupon he re-
counted! once 'mare the incidents of the conflict
froda its. commencement to its conclusion, from the
silent bearing down of Nelson's fleet upon the armament
of his antagoniSts to tbe capture of the last vessel, the
Tonnant, when "slowly and reluctantly, like an ex-
piring
banner hope, her pale flag fluttered down from her
py
spars, and the next that floated there was the
in his secondhand narrations that our author was
of old England !" It was not, however, only
moat eminently successful. The enumeration of his
own movements was the principal and the happiest
theme of his inspiration. Here it was that he re-
vealed his originality as a depictor of the coast sce-
nery of ;the Levent and the fertility of Egypt, and
the sterility of
Nubia, and the sacred topography of
Syria, and the mingled squalor and luxury of Con-
stantinople, and the sapphire waves and emerald
islands; of the Greek archipmlago. Patriotic though
his temperament waa, he had still all the comprehen-
sive sympathies of the cosmopolite. Insular as some
of hie notions
unquestionably were, the majority of
them were characterized by a largeness that embraced
the whole cycle of humanity and were restricted to
neither hemisphere. Domestic as were those affections
which prompted him in a subsequent production ("Da-
rien," vol. u., p. 54.) to declare in an effusion of ten-
derness that the sacred word of Home " applies to
hearts not hearths," he possessed withal a love of the
true and the beautiful, such as rendered him familiar
with regions the most remote and with habits the
most outlandish. An agreeable testimony of this is
afforded by the incidents accompanying his arrival at
Beyrout, and his reluctant resignation to quarantine
when living fora fortnight in a little cottage apart
from the; lazaretto. This cottage-prison he describes
as situated in a grove or orchard of mulberries. Here,
froth' the rooftop looking over the Syrian landscape
in one direction, and, in another over the billows of
the Mediterranean, he tends a " little gallipot
garden," whose every weedy plant he declares to
have contained a Picciola, or watches with an emo-
tion sonievahat nobler than that of idle curiosity
the movements of the little family in the lower
portion of the premises, a family of bumble Maro-
nites. How charmingly be avows at last " I sympa-
thised with the changes of weather that affected the
operations of the silkworms; I grieved fur the illness
of the little child; I took as much interest in the at-
tentions ;paid by the young Syrian swains to Katarin
and Dudu as they did themselves; and a baking or a
.washing day appeared. to me full of itnportance: ' his
warm and kindly disposition kindling into attachment
for, beings who must have regarded him comparatively
ahno-st withindifference. And such was Warburton !
Ey,erywhere- " at home"—in the Nile boat or in the
totilbs of thelPyramids, under the cedars of Lebanon
or among the olives of the holy mount near Jerusalem.
EVeryWhere looking into the visages of those he met,
the Jew, the Copt, the Arab, the Nubian, the Turk,
the Greek, or the Egyptian, not as into the face of
analien, but as into the face of a fellow-creature.
Hence he adapted himself so readily to the customs
of !those sunny and voluptuous climates—wearing
the tarboosh or the turban, and the girdling shawl,
breathing aromatic tobaccoes through the fumes of
thEi chibouque or the nargilly, riding that docile
Arabian from which he parted at lest as from " a
tried old friend," and bivouacing under the canvas
of this tent, or under the branches of some umbra-
geous sycauaore, as readily as though he were either
a :disciple of Islam or a descendant of Ishmael!
The very title of the production in which these rovings
were recounted was an incentive to its perusal, being
at 'once as poetical as it was indisputably epigram-
matic. It constituted a tribute to the genius of
symbolism—that mysterious element common to the
atmosphere, of Paganism and of Christianity. It
celebrated not merely the Crescent by
which Byzantium seems to have commemo-
rated the greutnees of Diana of the Ephe-
, sians, bun 'that more sublime and more awful
' emblem, the_Cross, the emblem which appears to have
been prophetically worshipped by Heathendom in an-
ticipation of the Divine Sacrifice. In inscribing the
latter effigy, so to speak, upon the frontispiece of his
undertaking, Warburton had not forgotten the bewil-
dering circumstance of its antiquity as aat mbol of
idOlatrous as well as of inspired religion. He asso-
ciated the name of his volumes with that wonderful