Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/34

4 (the pilgrimage to Mecca). "One can learn from that versatile poet-traveller, the excellent Théophile Gautier, why Richard Burton is an Arab in appearance; and account for that incurable restlessness that is unable to wreset from fortune a spot on earth wherein to repose when weary of wandering like the desert sands.

"'There is a reason,' says Gautier, who had studied the Andalusian and the Moor, 'for the fantasy of nature which causes an Arab to be born in Paris, or a Greek in Auvergne; the mysterious voice of blood which is silent for generations, or only utters a confused murmur, speaks at rare intervals a more intelligible language. In the general confusion race claims its own, and some forgotten ancestor asserts his rights. Who knows what alien drops are mingled with our blood? The great migrations from the table-lands of India, the descents of the Northern races, the Roman and Arab invasions, have all left their marks. Instincts which seem bizarre spring from these confused recollections, these hints of distant country. The vague desire of this primitive Fatherland moves such minds as retain the more vivid memories of the past. Hence the wild unrest that wakens in certain spirits the need of flight, such as the cranes and the swallows feel when kept in bondage—the impulses that make a man leave his luxurious life to bury himself in the Steppes, the Desert, the Pampas, the Sáhara. He goes to seek his brothers. It would be easy to point out the intellectual Fatherland of our greatest minds. Lamartine, De Musset, and De Vigny are English; Delacroix is an Anglo-Indian; Victor Hugo a Spaniard; Ingres belongs to the Italy of Florence and Romee.'

"Richard Burton has also some peculiarities which oblige one to suspect a drop of Oriental, perhaps gipsy, blood. By gipsy we must understand the pure Eastern."

My mother had a wild half-brother—Richard Baker, junior, a barrister-at-law, who refused a judgeship in Australia, and died a soap-boiler. To him she was madly attached, and delayed the signing of my grandfather's will as much as possible to the prejudice of her own babe. My grandfather Baker drove in his carriage to see Messrs. Dendy, his lawyers, with the object of signing the will, and dropped dead, on getting out of the carriage, of ossification of the heart; and, the document being unsigned, the property was divided. It would not be worth half a million of money.

When I was sent out to India as a cadet, in 1842, I ran down to see the old house for the last time, and started off in a sailing ship round the Cape for Bombay, in a frame of mind to lead any forlorn hope wherever it might be. Warren Hastings, Governor-General of India, under similar circumstances threw himself under a tree, and formed the fine resolution to come back and buy the old place; but he belonged to the eighteenth century. The nineteenth is far more cosmopolitan. I always acted upon the saying, Omne solum