498 ART. VII.-1. Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie. Par VOLNEY. 2. Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, et de Jérusalem à Paris. Par CHATEAUBRIAND. 3. Voyage en Orient. Par ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE. 4. Reise in das Morgenland. SCHUBERT. 3 vols. Erlangen, 1840, bei T. J. Palm. 5. Letters from the East. By Lord LINDSAY. 6. Visit to the East. (No. XXV. of Englishman's Library.) By the Rev. H. FORMBY. London: Burns. 7. A Pastor's Memorial of the Holy Land. By the REV. G. FISK. 8. The Crescent and the Cross. By E. WARBURTON, Esq. 2 vols. London: Colburn. 1845. 9. Journey from Naples to Jerusalem. By D. BORRER, Esq. London: James Madden & Co. 1845. 10. Incidents of Travel. By L. STEPHENS. 11. Eothen. London: Ollivier. 1844. 12. Irby and Mangles' Travels in the Holy Land. London: Murray. 1844. 13. Letters of a German Countess. 3 vols. London: Colburn. 1845. 14. Egypt, Arabia, &c. By the Rev. H. P. MEASOR. 15. Visit to my Father-land. By RIDLEY H. HERSCHELL. London: Unwin. 1844. 16. Palm Leaves. By R. M. MILNES, Esq. London: Moxon. 17. Travels in the East. By Dr. OLIN. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1843. 18. The Holy City. By the Rev. GEORGE WILLIAMS. London: J. W. Parker. 1845. 19. Biblical Researches in Palestine. By Dr. ROBINSON. 3 vols. London: Murray. 1841. 20. The Greek Church. By the Rev. GEORGE WADDINGTON. 21. Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. London: C. Knight. 22. Selections from the Kuran. By ED. W. Lane. London: James Madden & Co. 23. Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope. 3 vols. London: Colburn. 1845. 24. Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara, &c. By the Rev. JOSEPH WOLFF, D.D., LL.D. 2 vols. Second Ed. London: J. W. Parker. 1845. 25. The Tiara and the Turban, &c.: the Dominions of the Pope and the Sultan. By S. S. HILL, Esq. 2 vols. London: Madden and Malcolm. 1845. THE above dense chaplet of authors, 'Doctorum præmia frontium,' considering the very limited portion of the globe to which they refer, their proximity to each other in point of time, and the suspicion, or rather probability, that they are but specimens of a wonderfully numerous class, affords a manifest indication that the region of Palestine is fast becoming a spot of very favourite resort. The grand tour,' which, in the days of the poet Pope, comprised Rome and Sicily as its Ultima Thule, has now greatly enlarged itself. It was once Roman, then in a while it conquered Greece, and having now been satiated with the spoils of heathen antiquity, it moves in quest of the sacred, and seeks to become Biblical, for a change. Nothing censorious or cynical is meant by the remark. The vast and wonderful works of God, which have made the sons of Zion, and the land of Judea, an object of note above all other lands, were done in so open a manner as to challenge the observation of the nations; and are, therefore, surely permissible subjects for the attention of those who profess to travel for the instruction and improvement to be gained by seeing and examining all that is to be seen and observed. There seems no imaginable reason why the travellers of any European country, should be reasonably interdicted from freely examining and reporting the present condition of the land where the marvellous deeds recorded in the Holy Scriptures were chiefly wrought. On the contrary, many very strong reasons concur to show how desirable it is, that the civilized nations of Europe should be in possession of the very fullest and most accurate information of the true condition of Palestine, which the journals and accounts of travellers can supply. The Sacred prophecy itself speaks of the stranger that shall come from a far country, who should marvel when he should see the plagues, and the sicknesses ' which the Lord hath laid upon the land. That it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth therein, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboim, which the Lord 'overthrew in His anger; and should say, Wherefore hath the 'Lord done this unto this land? what meaneth the heat of His 'great anger? Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers.'-(Deut. xxix. 22-25.) The providence of Almighty God has been pleased to exhibit to the nations of the earth, not merely Sodom and the other cities of the Plain, as a warning to them to beware of the like corrupt morals, and to make it known to the universe, that God will not permit His creation to debase and corrupt themselves with impunity; but He has chosen the very same land to make it the scene of another judgment equally significant,-intimating that He will no more suffer His creation to squander the noble gifts to which He is pleased, by His inscrutable election, to exalt them, than to debase their first creation. The same Palestine which witnessed the judgment upon Sodom and Gomorrah, has seen that upon Zion and Judea. The one, a punishment for debasing and corrupting the original work of creation; the other, a judgment for misusing and degrading the privileges of a special election vouchsafed to them. And, as such, its present aspect and condition not only justly challenges observation of every thoughtful traveller, but its examination may be hoped to open a vein of thought and meditation, as well as to supply a picture of living human nature that will far more richly repay the wayfarer, than any reward which the view of the hazy and distant peaks of the Alps, or the square partitioned plains of Lombardy, could possibly give. How far our authors afford an indication that Palestine is now, or is becoming, the object of sober and religious regard, remains to be seen when we come to dive more deeply into the specimens of their various modes of viewing, and commenting upon what there met their eye. We shall here express considerable distrust, at least, of a large proportion of them, unless they prove much superior to the multitude of idlers, who waste the flower of their days in flitting to and fro over the different states of Europe, 'gallerying it, Roming it, and Florencing it,' as Lord Byron aptly expresses himself. How surprising an emptiness of all sense-yes, even of mere liveliness and vivacity, not to mention profound and well considered reflection,—is that which characterises the tourist publications of the last ten years, those, at least, which have taken Europe for their subject. And if the current productions of the press be taken, as they may fairly be, for a favourable specimen of the general tone and condition of the whole body of Anglican nomades, it being certain that only the more ambitious and enterprising will find their way into print, how singularly strange an opinion must a sober stay-at-home person be forced to form of them! Is he very likely to think them much improved, since the days when the poet described the hero of foreign travel as one who Sauntered Europe round, And gathered every vice on Christian ground; His royal sense of operas, or the fair. * * Tried all hors-d'œuvres, all liqueurs defined; It might, therefore, be somewhat sanguine to hope too much from the late sudden influx of the erratic genius of Europe into the Holy Land. What must become of the eager expectation of the divine, the student, the man of letters, the lady of religious reading, on meeting with nothing but the would-be-wittiness of the author of Eothen,' or such unsparing trifling as that of the German Countess ? Of course, in a general way, any traveller who has a tolerably cheerful and pleasant temper, may safely expect to find a certain degree of sympathy for his mere personal adventures; he may select almost any given line of route he pleases, and fill up the various stations and intervals with an account of the fleas that tormented him in a caravansera, the bad dinner that he was obliged to eat at a certain place, and the good one that he met with soon after, to make up for it: the great heat of the sun in a particular valley, and how it blistered the skin on his cheeks; the great distress and inconvenience of his party for want of water, and how contented they were with the very bad water they at last found; the cleverness of some Bedouin, or other thief, who stole part of the baggage, and how they managed to supply the loss. All such mere personal incidents of journeying, if pleasantly and cheerfully told, interspersed with pretty descriptions of the scenery, of sunset, distant hills, occasional glimpses of the sea, seasoned, if possible, with specimens of the conversation and manners of the people of the country; these are quite sufficient to render a volume of foreign travel generally acceptable, and we see no reason to deter any author from thus amusing his readers, if he and they be so pleased. Yet we have a right to expect that Palestine should be spared this trifling. The awe that belongs to a land lying under a heavy curse and sentence of Divine wrath; the grandeur that belongs to one charged with the recollections of a past history so sacred, so sublime, ought to be a sufficient protection from the published accounts of mere pleasant good humoured travellers. Such triflers seem as if they went out of the way to proclaim that they had been passing blindfold through the land, and had lost the power to see the handwriting of the curse and wrath of God written upon the face of it. It were better, and more decent, that Palestine should be forgotten by the busy throng of Europe altogether, as it was during the two centuries past, than, when again revisited, it should be so only by a locust storm of unfeeling dilettantes, who, like the author of Eothen,' are inclined to refine their common-place smartness and jocularity by the dash of the profaneness which it acquires from a proximity to things held in universal veneration for their sanctity. 6 Palestine, and the hitherto inaccessible mountains of Moab and Edom, have been, in a very remarkable manner, thrown open to European search; for since Burckhardt first discovered the remains of Petra, the influx of persons of all nations who have come to visit them has been so considerable, that, if what we have heard said by an eye-witness be credible, the number of pencilled names on one or two of the chief monuments was so great, as to remind him more of the statues in the Tuileries, or the outer walls of an European Museum, than anything which he would have supposed possible to have been found in the midst of an Eastern solitude. Nor, again, does it appear at all probable that the routes now open to tourists in Syria are likely to be soon closed to them. The high road to British India has already done much to spread a knowledge of the power and wealth of the British nation, even among the Arab and Bedouin tribes, who are, in consequence, brought more or less in contact with Europeans, in their capacity of camel drivers, on the tract of desert between Cairo and Suez; and from whom the report of the wealthy strangers cannot fail to spread among their neighbours. If this be the case, we cannot but regret that so few of our authors have taken the pains to render their works specially useful to those whom they are so very likely to incite to follow their footsteps. They are, for the most part, but a daily transcript of the day's thoughts and movements, a little condensed and pruned, it is true, trimmed into a presentable form, and no doubt but that a great deal of the practical wisdom which can be learned no where, and in no other way, than in the very act and deed of conducting a journey in the East, is dispersed over their pages,— yet so dispersed, that a young tyro on his travels might as well resign himself quietly to the task of learning his wisdom from his own experience, as attempt to glean it from the pages of those who have preceeded him. This, we presume, comes to pass from the fact, that those who write books of travels, more especially gossiping books, such as are the chief part of those we are now commenting upon, do not sufficiently consider how many curious and adventurous spirits they are certain to stir up |