The unhappy Count seems doomed, wherever he turns his steps, to meet with nothing but grievances. To say nothing of the English; blind men and buffaloes, processions of marriages, executions and burials, fish-dealers and fellahs, perpetually impeded his way 'among the infectious canals and ruined houses of Damietta': nor was the passage over the plain of Massoura calculated to raise his spirits for here, says he, the reflection crossed me that I was on the field where' fortune proved treacherous to French valour.' He soon rallies his spirits, however, and magnanimously declares that, after all, when he recollected the trophies of Buonaparte, and traced the career of the French armies in Egypt, under the shade of the palms which embellished the heritage of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies, he should have thought himself happy to have been one of the lowest ranks in the rear-guard.' It is not for us to dispute this point, nor to deny that our chivalrous traveller is better fitted for the situation of a corporal in Buonaparte's army than to preside over the arts and antiquities of the Royal Museum of Paris; but we cannot help thinking that he takes rather an ungracious manner of repaying the patronage of Louis XVIII. by such a declaration. At Cairo, as might have been anticipated, our adventurer observed Turks, Arabs, Copts, Armenians, Jews, asses, mules, camels, pilgrims returning from Mecca, and hungry dogs howling after them, and all jostling and crowding together. To escape from the press, I entered,' he says, 'almost all the mosques of the city with bended knees; and protected by my Mussulman costume, mumbled over the formula of the faith, with my beard in close contact with the sacred stone.' (p. 72.) There are so many little oversights in the Count's narrative, so many petty sacrifices of accuracy to effect, that he will, we are quite sure, excuse us for doubting, whether, at his devotions, or on any other occasion, he adopted the 'Mussulman costume.' At Cairo, as in London, nobody cares much about the costume of a stranger: in travelling up the Nile, indeed, a Turkish dress is extremely convenient to prevent troublesome curiosity; yet at Thebes we know that the Count wore no such dress; while his flowing beard, instead of being long enough to touch' la pierre sacrée,' had moulted; and ' his chin new reaped, Shewed like a stubble land at harvest home.' But his beard was not the only thing that did not follow him to Thebes; he appears to have left his recollection also somewhere on the road. La chaleur (he says) était déjà insupportable à Thèbes dans les premiers jours de Mars. Now we must remind him that he arrived at Luxor, a village on the site of ancient Thebes, on the 28th of January, and left it the first week in February; and conse quently quently could not have suffered from the insupportable heat there in the first days of March.' We do not know that the Count will thank us; but some of his fair countrywomen who have ' trembled at his desperate hardihood,' may perhaps feel relieved at being informed that at Thebes, (situated in about 26° of northern latitude,) where' he found the very pebbles burning hot,' the heat is moderate, and the weather perfectly delightful both in February and March. Again— 'On éprouve souvent pendant le jour, dès qu'on s'éloigne du Nil, une fièvre presque inconnue en Europe, celle de la soif. Cette souffrance cruelle est au-dessus de toute expression; elle a son sommeil, son délire; on rève douloureusement le souvenir des vallées les plus fraîches, des boissons glacées; et la mémoire devient le tourment le plus terrible de cette maladie Africaine.' (p. 94.) This African malady, in which on rève douloureusement,' is not, we suspect, confined to the banks of the Nile. Surely the Count cannot suppose that, after all the journies which have been made through every corner of Egypt, it is not perfectly well known, that from Cairo to Assouan, about six hundred miles, the habitable part of the valley of the Nile extends not farther from the river on either side than its waters can be conveyed for the purposes of irrigation; that it is so conveyed in canals; that there is scarcely a mile without a village; and that for these reasons the last solicitude that any traveller need to feel, is about a supply of water. It was not, however, the dread of a want of water which finally arrested the progress of the Count, and prevented him from treading the soil of Meroe, and of fifty other places, which he would have visited, and was the more desirous of visiting because unpolluted by the feet of any English traveller:-such an obstacle would have been nobly surmounted by that spirit of enterprize which had already carried him through so many other difficulties. No-it was a Gorgon, a chimæra more formidable than-but let him tell the dreadful tale in his own words: I had intended to visit Elephantine, Syene, Philæ, Ipsambul, and to penetrate as far as the island of Meroe, but there enters always more or less a spirit of adventure in these distant excursions; the desire of seeing places that are little known has a powerful tendency to support the fatigues and privations of a long voyage. If every body has been able to see that which we are in search of, disgust threatens us, and discouragement follows it very soon.'- -'I no longer experienced a wish to ascend the Nile from the moment I observed an English family arrive at Thebes on their return from the Cataracts. Lord and Lady Belmour had visited a part of Nubia; they had travelled in the most splendid style; three or four large boats followed the one in which they sailed. Husbands, wives, children, chaplains, surgeons, nurses, cooks,-all babbling of Elphantine. From this moment the illusion vanished for me— there there was an end of the matter. I even set off from Thebes sooner than I had intended, finding it quite impossible to support the perpetual appearance among these venerable ruins of an English lady's-maid-une femme-de-chambre Anglaise en petit spencer couleur de rose!' filthy hags! Why do you shew me this? "Having no longer any desire to look at any thing, I departed that very night."*-p. 94. A smart English waiting-maid in a rose-colour spencer! Well might the gallant spirit that was so desirous of serving in the very rump of Buonaparte's army in Egypt be appalled.--We see him at this moment starting back in visible trepidation, and exclaiming to the unconscious damsel, 'Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear, If it were worth while to be serious upon so ridiculous a subject, we might ask the Count what, since the Anglophobia had such an effect on his delicate nerves, induced him to leave the purlieus of the Palais Royal? If he ever read at all, even the periodical journals of his own country, he must have known that every spot within his intended voyage had already been defiled, and rendered unworthy of his grand enterprize, by the presence of Englishmen, aye, and English women too. But here again we have what the lawyers call a lapse de facto: Count Forbin neither did nor could see Lord Belmore's family arrive at Thebes; for on the very day (the 13th of January) that his lordship reached Thebes, he was, by his own account, at Cairo. Two English servants, a lady's maid, two seamen belonging to his lordship's yacht, and an Arab procured at Esnè, composed the whole of Lord Belmore's suit; and two boats only made up his formidable fleet! That the Count should mistake blue for rose-colour, (after the example set him at home,) need not excite much surprize, especially when his situation is considered:that he has done so, we can take upon us to affrm-Et nos in Arcadia. We happen to know that this rose-coloured spencer, which had such important effects on the Count's destiny, and deprived France, and the world, of almost all that he would have seen,' is a pale blue pelisse, not much unlike the outer robe of a These ludicrous embarrassments of the poor Count have found a sympathizing English critic, who bewails the practice of suffering nursery-maids and boarding-school misses to tread on classic ground, and to disturb the antiquary in his profound researches; and in a high strain of mawkish affectation repines that so many of his countrymen should record their names in depositories of the effusions of travelling folly and egotism,' or in the police books of the continent.' · Turkish Turkish lady, and very well adapted to the purposes of oriental travelling. But misfortunes never come alone. To aggravate his distress in the fatal neighbourhood of Thebes, he discovered, on the leg of the colossal statue of Memnon, the name and London residence of an 'obscure English baronet,' close by the side of that of Cæsar; but not that of General Rapp,- because' (as the Count opportunely assures us)' a truly honest ambition is modest.'-Honesty and modesty associated with the name of Rapp!—But he is right— Rapp, as well as his master, employed his short leisure in Egypt in plundering and cutting the throats of the unoffending natives,-a matter far more to the taste of both than engraving their names on granite. The unpardonable egotism of Mr. Salt,' whom the Count, with his usual accuracy, designates as a person employed' to make discoveries for la Société des Antiquaires de Londres,' is the last of his tirades which we shall notice.* The specific crime laid to the charge of this gentleman is that of filling up the space round the lower part of the Sphinx, which, under his superintendence, had been opened by Caviglia; and not waiting for the arrival of our learned antiquary, that an active and vigorous investigation might have been entered upon, which could not fail to throw great light on the history of the arts in ancient days.' However well qualified the Director of Museums may be for assisting in such an investigation, he is completely ignorant of the nature of the undertaking. Had he thought proper to inquire, he would have learned that so difficult was it to keep out the sand, that the labours of the day were frequently frustrated by its falling in during the night, and that in a very few days it would have nearly acquired its former level. Before this took place, Mr. Salt caused accurate drawings to be made of the ground-plan, the temples, the paws, and the inscriptions upon them; (See our No. XXXVIII. p. 409. 416.) but having heard, on his return to Cairo, that the Arabs had, as usual, commenced the work of destruction, and that the women were breaking off fragments to wear as amulets or charms, he immediately dispatched, in concert with Caviglia, some workmen to * We understand that Count Forbin is again pricked forth in quest of adventures in 'countries far away.' He has outstript our advice on the present occasion; but we hope to be in time to advise him, ere his next appearance, to take the opinion of some discreet friend, as he was prudent enough to do on a former occasion at Parma, where he intended to print his Travels in Sicily.' This friend, having attentively perused his manuscript, conjured him by no means to commit his character with the literary world, as something of history, science, or antiquity, would be expected from a man of his rank and station: But,' continued he, your work is light and amusing enough, and you need only add a few pretty prints, and change the title to that of "a Sicilian Romance," and it will do very well as a book for the ladies:-and as a romance it was accordingly published; but we believe not much read even by the ladies.' cover cover up, without delay, what the winds would have accomplished in the course of a week. Having thus preserved this ancient monument, after an active and vigorous investigation,' it remains for the French consul to uncover it again; if his countrymen are not satisfied with the account of it which we have already given. The situation which Count Forbin fills ought to set him above those paltry feelings of jealousy which he every where discovers. He cannot possibly expect to gain any credit with the thinking part of mankind for his fretful calumnies against the English. We, however, are fully capable of defending ourselves; but we observe, in addition, an ungenerous and unmanly endeavour (for such we must think it) to depreciate the valuable labours of an unobtrusive foreigner, simply because he happens to be assisted by the British Consul. In this, indeed, the Count is not singular: others of his countrymen have manifested the same unworthy feeling, and one of their journalists, now before us, sobs out that it is quite painful to think that all the discoveries of Belzoni should go to the British Museum.' But detraction, it would appear, is not all that Mr. Belzoni has had to sustain from this irrational jealousy. M. Drovetti, French consul, has, as Count Forbin informs us, two agents at Thebes; the one a Mameluke named Yousef, originally a drummer in the French army; the other a Marseillese renegade of the name of Riffo, 'small in stature, bold, enterprizing, and choleric, beating the Arabs because they had neither time nor taste to understand the Provençal language.' These persons are more than suspected of being concerned in a plot against the life of Mr. Belzoni, who was recently fired at from behind a wall, while employed in his researches among the ruins of Carnac, where these two fellows were then known to be lurking. The affair has been brought before the Consular Court at Cairo, and we trust that M. Drovetti, for the sake of his own character, and that of his country, will not interfere with the judicial proceedings, nor attempt to shelter his agents from the punishment which awaits them. But Mr. Belzoni had committed an unpardonable offence. A French mineralogist of the name of Caillaud had accompanied some Arab soldiers sent by the Pasha of Egypt in search of emeralds among the mountains between the Nile and the Red Sea. On their return, this person gave out (as we learn from an intelligent correspondent in the Malta Gazette) that, in this expedition, he had discovered the ancient city of the Ptolemies, the celebrated Berenicè, the great emporium of Europe and the Indies, of which he gave a magnificent description. Mr. Belzoni, doubtful of the accuracy of the story, set out from Edfoo, with one of the former party, to visit the supposed Berenicè, where, instead of the ruins of 800 houses |