Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/110

 Thermopylæ, Troy, Mantinea, Agincourt, Waterloo, are more sublime names than Mont Blanc or the Himalaya. On the former we are lifted up by the remembrance of human energy; the latter present themselves to us as prodigious masses of brute matter, sublime undoubtedly, but linked by no glorious associations with the triumphs or the fall of great or brave men.

The above remarks appeared necessary to explain why we are never weary of accompanying travellers through Egypt, Palestine, and the other celebrated lands which border the Mediterranean: I now proceed with the adventures and researches of Pococke. On arriving at Alexandria, a city which, when taken by the Arabs, contained four thousand palaces, as many baths, four hundred public places or squares, and forty thousand Jews who paid tribute, he immediately exerted himself to gratify his curiosity, and this so imprudently, that he led several soldiers into a breach of duty, in showing him the ruins of the ancient Pharos without permission, for which they were afterward punished. Several travellers have pretended that the coffin of Alexander the Great is still preserved in a Mohammedan mosque in this city, and we find Bruce, thirty years after Pococke, making very diligent inquiry among the inhabitants respecting it. It is certain that the remains of the Macedonian king were deposited in a golden coffin in the royal tombs of Alexandria; but in the age of Augustus his bones had already been transferred from their gorgeous lodgings to humbler ones of glass, in which they were brought forth from their narrow house for the inspection of the tyrant, who threw flowers and placed a golden crown upon the coffin. However, when we reflect that even in so peaceful a city as Caen, the remains of William the Conqueror could not be preserved a few hundred years from popular insult, it seems extremely improbable that those of Alexander should have been