under the plea of reform, the hatred of order under the pretext of right, and the convulsion of society under the affectation of independence.

We affirm, in the most unequivocal manner, that, to be free, nations must be Protestant. The Popish religion is utterly incompatible with freedom in any nation. The slave of the altar is essentially the slave of the throne. We prove this by the fact, that no Popish country in the world has been able to preserve,

or even to have a conception of, the simplest principles of civil liberty. If we are told that France is free, the obvious reply is, that though France is the least Popish of Popish countries, it still has the Conscription; it is wholly under military government; it has no Habeas Corpus; and no journalist can discuss any subject without exposing himself to Government, by giving his name. Would this be called liberty in England?

EGOTISM is a shoal upon which literary travellers are particularly apt to damage their barks. Before us are two cases in point, although of different degree. Monsieur Gerard de Nerval, a Frenchman of letters, Mr F. A. Neale, an Englishman attached to the consular service, have each written a couple of volumes concerning Syria and adjacent lands, visited at about the same period. We need hardly say that there is little resemblance between the books. The numerous points of dissimilarity between the French and English characters are never more strikingly elicited than upon the road. Set the travellers to write down their experiences, and you have the palpable exposition of the diverting contrast. In two respects, however, Messrs Neale and Nerval resemble each other. Both are very amusing; each is more or less of an egotist. The Frenchman is the more, the Englishman the less. Mr Neale's egotism is artless and inoffensive. His book is a collection of notes made for the amusement of himself and friends, and which in course of years grew to considerable bulk. Long a resident and rambler in the country he writes about, he unites the advantages of an observant eye, an agreeable style, a happy discrimination of what is most likely to interest and prove novel to the public. His greatest fault is not

to have more carefully weeded his manuscript of trivial personal incidents, quite in place in a letter to a friend, but which have no claim to the honours of type. Forgive this defect, and there is little else to pardon in a book that gives us an excellent notion of the aspect and mode of life of a country with which, considering its proximity to Europe, and the all-important events in sacred and profane history that have occurred upon its soil, we can hardly say that our acquaintance is as intimate as it ought to be. Monsieur de Nerval is a gentleman of far different pretensions from Mr Neale, whose faults are the result of literary inexperience, not of conceit or affectation. There is more of malice prepense about the Frenchman's egotism. Quite as amusing as his English rival, he makes us laugh twice as much; but probably he would be the last man to suspect the chief motive of our mirth. Deeply sensible of the strong interest personally attaching to him, he keeps his most private feelings and proceedings constantly before the reader. Withdraw from his work all those passages in which Gerard de Nerval figures as the hero, and the corpulent octavos would shrink into pamphlets. As we read, fancy presents us with his portrait upon every page. It simpers at us out of a graceful vignette, or peeps through the fantastical wreaths of a

"Let us go to it.'

"Pardon me, I will accompany you thither, but I cannot remain there.'

"Why not?'

"Because it is an hotel that only charges forty piastres a-day; I cannot go to it.'

"But I find it quite good enough for

me.'

"You are unknown; I belong to the town; I am accustomed to attend English gentlemen; I must keep up my rank.'

"Nevertheles, I considered the price of this hotel tolerably high for a country where everything is about six times less dear than in France, and where a piastre, or five sous of our money, is a labourer's daily wage.

"There is a way of arranging matters,' said Abdallah. You shall go to Domergue's for two or three days, and I will visit you as a friend; during that time I will take a house for you in the town, and then there will be no obstacle to my remaining in your service.'

"On inquiry, I found that many Europeans take houses in Cairo if they propose remaining there any time, and, having ascertained this, I gave full

powers to Abdallah."

Whilst this most dignified of dragomans was house-hunting, M. de Nerval passed his time as well as he could at the despised French hotel, which he found very comfortable, and which is built round a square white-washed court, covered with a light trellis-work, overgrown with vines. In an upper gallery of this court, a French artist, talented and amiable, but very deaf, had established his easel and his daguerreotype, and there he studied and sketched the forms of the principal Egyptian races. He had no difficulty in obtaining models amongst the lower classes of the Cairo women, most of whom, however, were exceedingly punctilious in veiling their features, however much of their persons they might be induced to expose to the artist's gaze. The face is the last refuge of Oriental modesty. Besides the resource of the painter's society, M. de Nerval found a very fair table d'hôte at the hôtel Domergue, several AngloIndians to laugh at, a piano, and a

he might almost as well have remained at Marseilles. Impatient to commence a more Oriental mode of life, he allowed Abdallah to conduct him to various houses that were to let. House-rent is almost nominal in Cairo. He found that he might have a palace for about three pounds a-year. Abdallah showed him several such stately mansions many stories high, with marble-paved halls and cooling fountains, with galleries and staircases as in Genoese and Venetian palaces, with courts surrounded by columns, and gardens shaded by rare trees. An army of slaves and servants was all that was needed to make them fitting residences for a prince. The engagement of such a retinue not entering into M. de Nerval's calculations, he was glad to take a much smaller house, with glazed windows, (there was not a pane of glass in any of the palaces,) which had recently been occupied by an Englishman. Hiring a house in Cairo is rather a complicated operation. An act was drawn up in Arabic, and paid for; presents were made to the Sheik of the quarter, to the lawyer, and to the chief of the nearest guard-house; the scribes and servants had also to be fee'd. When M. de Nerval had complied with all these forms, the Sheik handed him the key. This was a piece of wood "like a baker's tally, at one end of which five or six nails were driven in as if at random; but there was no random in the matter: this strange key is introduced into a hole in the door, the nails correspond with little holes, invisible from without, pass through them, and raise a wooden bolt." In possession of the key, the next thing to be done was to furnish the house. Little money and less time sufficed to accomplish this. Some cotton and cloth were bought at a bazaar, and converted, in a few hours, into divan cushions, which served mattresses at night. A basketmaker put together a sort of bedframe of palm twigs; a little round table, some cups and pipes-and the house was furnished and fit to receive the best company in Cairo. M. de Nerval's first visitor was an officious

as

Jew, a breeder of silk-worms, who established himself on one of the divans, took coffee and a pipe, and undertook to prove that his host had been swindled by Abdallah and the merchant at the bazaar, and had paid twice too much for everything he had bought. The Jew was followed by the Sheik, who came early the next morning and waited in the opposite coffee-house till M. de Nerval was up. He was a venerable old man with a white beard, and was attended by his secretary and negro pipe-bearer. When he was installed upon a divan, and supplied with the inevitable pipe and coffee, he informed M. de Nerval, through the medium of Abdallah, that he had brought him back the money he had paid for the house. It was an intimation that he was not approved of as a tenant. Greatly astonished, the Frenchman asked the reason. "His morality was suspicious," was the reply; "he had no wife or female slave." This was quite contrary to the custom of the country. He must supply the deficiency or quit the premises. His neighbours, who were better provided, would be uneasy at the proximity of a bachelor resident. In short, he had the option given him to marry or move. For the latter he had no fancy, when he had just furnished a house that suited him well; he was averse to matrimony, and his European scruples opposed the purchase of a female slave. Doubting the Sheik's right to compel him to decamp or conjugate, he requested the functionary to take patience for a few days whilst he consulted his friends, to do which he at once sallied forth. We need hardly inform the discerning reader that this dilemma is the peg upon which the ingenious and facetious Frenchman contrives to hang a whole volume. On his way to seek advice from his countryman the painter, he falls in with a Turk, whose acquaintance he had made on board the steamboat, confides his difficulty to him, and the conversation that ensues fills a chapter. Then, whilst rambling about with the deaf artist, he gets into an adventure with two veiled ladies, whom he follows home, and who prove to be

a

Frenchwomen, wife and sister-inlaw of a renegade French officer. But the most practical information he obtained on the knotty point of acquiring a harem was from Yusef, the Jew silk-grower, who came daily to take a pipe on his divan and improve himself in the French language. From him he ascertained that there are four ways of contracting marriage at Cairo. The first and least binding is with a Cophtic woman before a Turkish santon; a union that, in fact, amounts exactly to nothing, the contracting parties being both Christians, and the officiating priest Mahometan. Then there is the marriage before Cophtic priest, which admits of divorce on payment of a small sum in compensation; a third sort is binding so long as the husband remains in the country; whilst the fourth (celebrated both at the Cophtic church and Franciscan convent) gives the wife a right to follow him, and is a bonâ fide and permanent uniontoo permanent for M. de Nerval's taste; who, considering the other three modes as merely so many recognised forms of concubinage, ended by purchasing, for twentyfive pounds sterling, a yellow slave of Malay or Javanese origin, with a sun tatooed upon her breast and forehead, and a lance-head upon her chin, and who had a hole through her left nostril, intended to receive a nose-ring. Having made this precious acquisition, he found she had pretensions to be treated as a cadine, (lady,) and esteemed it quite below her dignity to attend to domestic matters; and, in short, the unlucky Frenchman's ill-advised acquiescence in Eastern customs brought upon him a host of troubles and annoyances, of which he makes the most for the benefit of his readers. The whole account of the author's Egyptian proceedings reads more like a fantastical tale, invented at leisure, than a narrative of actual events; but in a note at the end of his work he protests that all he has written down really occurred. He had reckoned on making a considerable stay at Cairo; but notwithstanding the extraordinary cheapness of that city, he soon found his purse getting very low, as a consequence of

the extravagance and caprices of the yellow woman, of his disorderly mode of housekeeping, and of the inexactness and roguery of most of those with whom he had any dealings. So he was obliged to shorten his term of residence, lest he should find himself without sufficient funds to reach Syria, which was his next destination. Having resolved on departure, he offered her liberty to the slave, whose name was Zeynab, if she chose to remain at Cairo. This proposal, instead of being gratefully received, excited the indignation of the cadine. What was she to do with her liberty? She requested him to sell her again to Abd-el-Kerim, the wealthy slavedealer from whom he had bought her. But although he had not scrupled to buy her, he could not make up his mind to take money for human flesh and blood, and began to philosophise on the strange state of a country where slaves would not accept their freedom. Meanwhile Zeynab wept at the prospect of starvation, for she could do nothing to earn her bread, and was too proud to take service. The European, by aping the Turkish manner of life, had got himself into a perfect labyrinth of embarrassments. He had changed his dress and his diet, and had taken the first step towards the formation of a harem; but he would not change his religion, nor could he divest himself of certain civilised ideas, incompatible with the conditions of his new existence. He found all the inconveniences of his ambiguous manner of life, and evidently, although he does not care to confess it, wished he had abstained from his social experiments, and had followed the example of the sobersided English, whom he laughs at for their constancy to roast-beef, porter, and potatoes, and whom he ludicrously sketches wandering about Cairo on donkeys, with long legs nearly touching the ground, with green veils fastened to their white hats, and blue spectacles protecting their eyes, with India-rubber overcoats, long sticks to keep off suspicious Arabs, and a groom and a dragoman on their right hand and on their left. The die was cast, however; he was too compassionate to leave the goldcoloured incubus to her fate; and the upshot was, that she was allowed to

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follow him to Syria, causing him, upon the way, almost as many annoyances as she had occasioned him at Cairo. The voyage was accomplished on board of a Levantine vessel, the Santa Barbara, commanded by a Greek named Nicholas. This was a one-masted craft, with a black, collier-like hull, a long yard, and a single triangular sail, manned by Turks, and laden with rice. The deck was encumbered with boxes of poultry-provisions for the voyage. The little den known as the captain's cabin, for the use of which M. de Nerval had bargained, was infested with enormous red beetles, so that he was glad to resign his claim, and to establish himself in the longboat. This was suspended before the mast, and, with the help of cotton cushions and sail-cloth awning, it was converted into a very tolerable refuge, so long as the weather continued fine. young Armenian scribe, who composed verses, and was in quest of employment, and to whom M. de Nerval had given a passage in his boat down the Nile, had also embarked in the Santa Barbara, and supplied the place of Abdallah as an interpreter. Captain Nicholas, an easy-going, hospitable, lubberly mariner, who had been half a pirate in the time of the Greek war, invited his passenger to partake of his pillau and Cyprus wine, and confided to him all his affairs. The indolent Greek passed his time in strumming one invariable tune on an old guitar, and in playing at chess with the pilot; his nautical talents were anything but brilliant, and his compass was out of order, so that it was hardly to be wondered at that, on the third day of the voyage, when they should have sighted Syria, Syria was nowhere to be seen. There was little or no wind; now and then a puff of air filled the sail, but soon died away, and the canvass flapped idly against the mast. Captain Nicholas troubled not his head about the matter: he had his chessmen and his guitar; they sufficed to occupy his attention. The Armenian was not quite so tranquil, and that evening he communicated to his French acquaintance the cause of his uneasiness. Although but three days from port, they were running short of