Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/137

 occasions) a letter to the Shaykh Beshyr, desiring him to pay marked attention to me. The Shaykh was highly flattered with the distinction shown him.”

The recollection of the Pasha’s civility and the Shaykh Beshyr’s letter recalled her thoughts to what she had proposed to do at the beginning of the evening, which was to write an answer to Sir Gore Ouseley, and to thank the Oriental Translation Fund Society for their present. This was done in a letter from which the following are extracts:—

Forgotten by the world, I cannot feel otherwise than much flattered by the mark of attention which it has pleased the society of learned men to honour me with. I must therefore beg leave, in expressing my gratitude, to return them my sincere thanks. You must not suppose that I am the least of an Arabic scholar, for I can neither read nor write one word of that language, and am (without affectation) a great dunce upon some subjects. Having lived part of my life with the greatest philosophers and politicians of the age, I have been able to make this observation, that all of them, however they may dispute and ingeniously reason upon abstruse subjects,