Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/491

Rh flights of fancy, and quaintly exaggerated in his parts of speech; but they must have read him very superficially, or in some translation of their own, who overhear not, amid his fantasies, a still sad music of humanity, an earnestness, a sober sadness, a yearning sympathy with Richter's trinity, the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

The Howadji of the Nile Notes appeared next, and in continuation, as the "Wanderer in Syria." He tells us that, of the Eastern tours without number, of learned and poetic men, with which he is acquainted, the most, either despairing of imparting the true Oriental flavour to their works (thinking, perhaps, that Eastern enthusiasm must needs exhale in the record, as the Neapolitans declare that the Lachrymæ Christi can have the genuine flavour only in the very Vesuvian vineyard where it grows)—or hugging some forlorn hope that the reader's imagination will warm the dry bones of detail into life—do in effect write their books as bailiffs take an inventory of attached furniture:—"Item. One great pyramid, four hundred and ninety-eight feet high.—Item. One tomb in a rock, with two bushels of mummy dust.—Item. Two hundred and fifty miles over a desert.—Item. One grotto at Bethlehem, and contents,—to wit: ten golden lamps, twelve silver ditto, twenty yards of tapestry, and a marble pavement." Let no student of statistics, therefore,—let no auctioneer's catalogue-loving soul,—let no consulting actuary, addicted to tables and figures,—let no political economist, no census-taking censor, no sturdy prosaist, look for a kindred spirit in this Howadji, or for mémoires pour servir, serviceable memorabilia, in his picturesque pages. His avowed object is, not to state a fact, but to impart an impression. His creed is that the Arabian Nights and Hafiz are more valuable for their practical communication of the spirit and splendour of Oriental life, than all the books of Eastern travel ever written. And he affirms the existence of an abiding charm in those books of travel only, which are faithful records of individual experience, under the condition, always, that the individual has something characteristic and dramatic in his organisation—heroic in adventure, or of graceful and accurate cultivation—with a nature en rapport with the nature of the land he visits.

From Cairo to Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem to Damascus, the Wanderer meanders (not maunders) on, in his "brilliant, picturesque, humorous, and poetic" manner. The people he discusses are, some of them, the same as those known in "Nile Notes"—though they "come out" with less power, and with fewer salient points. A new, and markworthy, acquaintance we form in the instance of MacWhirter. And who is MacWhirter? A bailie from the Salt-market? or a bagman from a Paisley house? or a writer from Charlotte-square? or a laird from the wilds of Ross? or a red-whiskered half-pay of the Scots' Greys? Nay; MacWhirter is our Howadji's "ship of the desert," poetically speaking; or, in plain prose, his camel;—the great, scrawny, sandy, bald back of whose head, and his general rusty toughness and clumsiness, insensibly begot for him in his rider's mind this Carlylish appellative. An immense and formidable brute was MacWhirter—held in semi-contempt, semi-