The Sun.
London, England, 1865-02-10 00:00:00

LITERATURE,

A Journey Due East. By Christopher Cooke. One
Vol., pp. 278. Hall, Smart, and Allen.

It is not the first time, through this intelligent and
entertaining volume, that we make Mr. Cooke's ac-
quaintance. He is already known to us by his odd
little shilling pamphlet, intituled " Astrology in a
Nutshell," purporting to be descriptive of occult
phenomena—previously to that-by his half-crown
volume, " A Plea for Urania"—and, latest of all these
earlier publications of his, by a four shilling book
recounting to us with really surprising frankness his
own astral experiences during an interval of 14 years,
a sort of autobiographic record of what he defined,
(we might almost conjecture with a double significance
in the phrase) " Curiosities of Occult Literature."
Lastly, he comes before us, here, with a goodly six-
and-sixpenny volume of Foreign Travel, in which
astral experiences, occult literature, and astrological
proclivities are but very occasionally, and always,
then, it should be said, quite casually and unobtru-
sively indicated ! A volume, this is, descriptive of
Oriental journeyings, hither and thither, along tracks
already made familiar to English readers by their
having been trodden successively by Alexander
Kinglake, in his " Eothen," by Robert Cur-
zon, in his " Monasteries of the Levant,"
and by Eliot Warburton in his " Crescent and the
Cross." In this one circumstance of his having been
preceded, within the remembrance of the present
generation, by those three celebrated writers of
three celebrated books, now, in their way, part and
parcel of our national literature, lies the seeming
disadvantage with which Mr. Cooke claims the at-
tention of English readers on presenting to them this
his Journal of a Five Months' Trip to Lower Egypt,
Palestine, and Turkey. Yet, upon an examination of
his book, it can hardly be said that he has reason
to fear any invidious comparisons whatever, and
just simply for this reason—that neither in his
manner nor yet in his matter, as a narrator of
oriental travel, does he for an instant lay himself
open to one—that is to any comparison at all
with one or the other of his three most illus-
trious predecessors. "A Journey Due East,"
as it is here recounted by Mr. Cooke in this
very readable and amusing, nay, we may
even say, this occasionally instructive little
volume—is nothing more nor less than the
unaffected record of what was seen and
heard and thought during travels of some five
months' duration altogether, by an observant and
intelligent Englishman upon the occasion of his first
visit to localities as profoundly interesting to any
educated traveller as Alexandria and Cairo, Jaffa
and Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, Tyre and
Sidon, Damascus and Baalbec, Constantinople and
Athens, Naples and Rome, and so homewards,
through Padua and Venice, by Dresden and Berlin,
to Hamburgh, and thence by steam on to Gravesend.
If we have not here, for example, the brilliant
rhetoric of Eothen, we have at none least of its
heartless cynicism or of its sardonic profanity. Our
author treads lightly, with a sense that it is
holy ground over which he is moving, so soon as his
foot is planted upon the soil of Palestine. Be at
any rate indulges himself and outrages his readers
with no insolent flippancy, while he passes with a
reverent air of veneration, instead of with a diabolical
sneer, through the hallowed haunts, rendered—less
than two thousand years ago—Holy Land, in very
truth, as ever since then in name, by having been
glorified by the footprints and sanctified by
the blood of the Saviour of the human
race. A cultivator of the obsolete science—
or, as it is nowadays called, the pseudo-
science—of Astrology, has long come to be looked
upon as kind of a credulous pariah in the realms
of philosophy—what though " the wisest and
brightest" of mankind was himself, in his time, a
believer in that science, or pseudo-science if you will,
of Astrology ! Yet, astrologer though the author
of this " Journey Due East" assumes to be—as a
traveller in Holy Land, he contrasts as favourably
with such an irreverent writer as Mr. Kinglake,
let us say, as any man who has ever visited
Palestine and then written an account of his
journeyings, to and fro, there, afterwards. The
unaffectedness of the work we have already
spoken of--and it is such, let us say, that of itself
alone it would be sufficient to impart to the book
under review a charm of its own, almost influencing
the reader's mind at moments with a kind of fasci-
nation. At the very outset, in his modest but
rthoroughly manly Preface, Mr. Cooke warns his
reader frankly— "I do not pretend to be a scholar,
and still less a divine or an artist." In despite
of which he cannot for the life of him,
apparently, help letting the reader recog-
nise very plainly, whenever the opportunity
chances to present itself, that—artist though he is
not, he has an eye for beauty—divine though he is
not, he has a capacity for veneration, such as many a
divine might envy—that, scholar though he pretends
not to be, his chapters are sprinkled here
and there, nevertheless, with unmistakeable
evidences of scholarship ! The volume, alto-
gether, interesting as it is in its capacity as a narra-
tive, is also, in its waytoo, really and practically use-
ful, as a guide-book. Even those among the intending
Voyagers Due East who, before setting out on their
journey to Palestine al the regions thereabout,
wisely provided beforehand with those incomparable
guide-books, bound in red—almost everywhere, in
Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, known to be
the Travelling Englishman's Vade mecum, his
MintßAY—even we say the possessors already of a
"Murray" would do well, as it seems to us, in a
mere business point of view, before set ting out
on their " Journey Due East" like Mr. Cooke, by
dropping into the valise a copy of Mr. Cooke's jour-
nal of his Oriental wanderings. " Omne tulit
punctum," sang the epicurean but sagacious Horace,
" qui miscuit utile dulci," adding—" Lectorem de-
lectando pariterque monendo." -Unconsciously, it
may be, our author has been heartened on to the
composition of this little volume of his, by an innate
sense in his own mind of the fitness of things, in
just such a blending of the useful and the
delightful—heartened on, we may be quite cer-
tain, however, by no such vainglorious incentive
as that derived by some authors of less modesty
than that by which Mr. Cooke is, as we have already
shown, so amiably characterised—the incentive de-
rivable from the. Horatian hint that follows :

"Hie meret tera Tiber Sosiis ; hie et mare transit,

Et longum noto scriptore prorogat cevum."
Without flattering the writer of this really useful
and often singularly entertaining volume by hinting
the faintest application to him or to his work of
words like those—words but once or twice
realised in a whole generation—we may insist, we
do insist that he has at any rate so far realised the
words preceding them, for inasmuch as he has here in
this pleasant little volume contrived to mingle the
utile and the duke so very adroitly.

LIFEBOAT SERVICES.—DUNDEE, Feb. B.—rhave
to report (says Mr. J. Hunter, jun.), that about 9
o'clock this morning the lighthouse keeper at Briddon Ness
(mouth of the Tay) observed a vessel riding heavily at
anchor between No. 1 and 2 buoys, and quite close to the
broken water, with a flag of distress flying. The light-
keeper immediately fired the signal guns, which were heard
at Broughty Ferry. The crew of the National Institution's
lifeboat The Mary Hartley immediately mustered, launched
the boat, and pulled across to Ferry-Port-on-Craig, where
she was taken in tow by the steam tug Rob Roy. Hav-
ing proceeded down the river to about the position
indicated, they discovered the Dutch galliot Anga,
Meyer, master, from Norway to Newburgh, in a highly
dangerous position. The tug cast off the lifeboat at No. 2
buoy, and steamed up to the vessel. Two or three minutes
brought the lifeboat alongside, when nine of the crew
boarded the Anga, and, assisted by four fishermen, suc-
ceeded in slipping the anchor and getting the vessel under
charge of .the steam tug, which towed her in safety to
Ferry-Port-on-Craigßoadstead, which she reached toward •
mid-day. Great praise is due to the lifeboat crew for so
promptly turning out and launching the boat, which was
proceeding down the river in tow of the steamer within 35
minutes after the report of the gun was heard.
A WIDOW'S GIFT.—Mr. Deshler, treasurer of the
Sherman testimonial fund, in a note to the Ohio State
Journal, says the first contribution (after General Grant's)
was made by a widow lady, who, as she presented her 25
dollars, remarked that, "as a friend and neighbour, she
was present at the birth of Tecumseh Sherman, and put
upon him his first clothes."—New Yorkpaper.
A Buzz.—A learned coroner in a neighbouring
county the other day, being asked how he accounted for
the great mortality this year, exclaimed, " I cannot tell.
There are people dying this year that never died before."—
Limerick Chronicle.