great breadth to his breast. His face was one of the handsomest I had ever seen amongst my countrymen, his nose aquiline, his eyes large and sparkling, his teeth and mouth exquisite, and his beard the envy of all beholders. In short, as a specimen of the country be represented, none could have been better selected. When we had interchanged our greetings as true believers, he said to me, "Are you an Irani?" 666 Yes," said I," so please you." "Then why in looks an Osmanli ?" said he. "Praise be to Allah, that we have a king and a country of whom no one need be ashamed." "Yes," answered I," your ordonnances are truth) and I have become less than a dog, since I have put on the airs of a Turk. My days have been passed in bitterness, and my liver has melted into water, since I have entangled myself by a connexion with this hated people; and my only refuge is in God and you." "How is this?" said he: "speak. Has a child of Ispahan (for such you are by your accent) been taken in by a Turk? This is wonderful indeed! We travel all this way to make them feed upon our abomination, not to learn to eat theirs." I then related the whole of my adventures, from the beginning to the end. As I proceeded he seemed wonderfully interested. When I got to my marriage he became much amused, and roared with laughter at the settlements I had made on my wife. The account I gave of the entertainment, the respect with which I was treated, my magnificence and grandeur, afforded him great delight; and the more I descanted upon the deception which I had practised upon the cows of Turks, as he called them, the more interest he took in my narrative, which he constantly interrupted by his exclamations," Ay, well done, oh Ispahani!-Oh! thou bankrupt!-By Allah! you did well!-If I had been there, I could not have done better." 'But when I informed him of the manner in which I had been served by my envious countrymen, of the finishing scene in my own house, of the screams of my women, of the speeches of my wife's relations; and when I represented the very words, look, and attitude with which I made my exit, far from having produced the sympathy I expected, his mirth was excited to such a degree, that I thought the veins in his forehead would burst; and he actually rolled himself on his sofa in the convulsions of laughter. "But, may it please you to consider," said I, " oh my Aga! the situation in which I am now placed. Instead of the bed of roses upon which I slept, I have not even a pillow whereon to lay my head. As for the horses and velvet which I used to bestride, happy should I now be could I claim even an ass for my own. And when I call to mind the luxuries in which I revelled, my rich dresses, my splendid horses, my train of servants, my marble baths, my pipes, my coffee-cups; in short, what shall I say, my every thing a man could wish for, and now find myself a beggar; conceive the bitter recollections which prey upon me, and which excite any thing but laughter in my breast, whatever they may do in yours.” "But "But those Turks, those heavy buffaloes of Turks," roared he, still screaming with laughter; "praise be to Allah! I can see them now with their long beards, their great caps, and their empty heads, believ ing all that the sharp-witted madman of Persia chose to tell them, and they would have gone on believing, had they not been undeceived by a similar species of madman." "But what have I to do in the business?" said he to me. "I am neither your father nor your uncle, to interfere and make it up with your wife's relations; nor am I a cadi, or a mufti, who can judge the case between you.” "No," answered I; " but you are my refuge here, and the representative of God's vicegerent upon earth; and you can see justice done me, and not let a poor unfriended stranger be oppressed.” "But would you get back possession of your wife," said he, “and stand a chance of being murdered? Of what good would all your riches be, if the day after re-possessing them you were found dead in your bed? No, no; lend me your ear, and hearken to good council. Throw off your Turkish clothes, and be a Persian again; and when in your proper character, I will keep you in mind, and see what may be done for you. Your story has interested me, your wit and manner are agreeable; and believe me that many better things are to be done in the world than to smoke a long pipe all day, with no other object in life than to sleep upon a bed of roses, and to ride a fat horse. In the meanwhile, take up your quarters here; look upon yourself as one of my suite for the present, and whenever I wish to be merry you shall come and relate your story over again." —vol. iii. pp. 299–306. Mirza Firouz, however, is not the only sketch from Persian high life in these volumes. The monarch, the grand vizier, the chief executioner, the royal physician, and the court poet, are all before us in their appropriate costume of character. Indeed, the transactions at the Persian court, which Hajji is made to relate, and particularly the whole account of the English embassy, are among the most entertaining passages in the book, and could have been composed only from the observation of one who enjoyed frequent access to the palace of the Shah. There are two descriptions especially (vol. ii. pp. 67, 75), in the ceremonial of the monarch's visit to the doctor, so amusing that we really regret we cannot give them a place; the share of the court poet in the joyous occasion; and the dinner of the Shah, whose bill of fare will make an alderman's mouth water, and oblige the Almanach des Gourmands to hide its diminished head. But we must take our leave of the Shah, of his poet, and of Hajji Baba himself. Our opinion of the latter may be sufficiently collected from what we have said; and we may sum it up by declaring that, whether as barber, water-carrier, smokeseller or dervish; the servant of the court physician, the lieutenant of the chief-executioner, or the disciple of the mollahs; the secretary of the ambassador, the agent of the vizier, or the deputy of the Shah himself, he is the most agreeable companion through Persian manners and life with whom it has hitherto been our good fortune to journey.. ་་ ་་ ART. X. The Naval Dry Rot, &c. &c. &c. (The title would fill a page.) By John Burridge. 12mo. pp. 136. 1824, WE really were vain enough to flatter ourselves that we had succeeded in putting down the clamour raised by a set of interested projectors, on account of that Lernæan pest to which has been given, it is not easy to tell why, the name of Dry-rot; but it would seem, from the constant succession of practitioners and projectors in this line, that we had only scotch'd the snake, not killed it,' and that for every head cut off, a pair at least spring forth, Vulneribus fœcunda suis erat illa: nec ullum De centum numero caput est impune recisum, We shall be able to show, however, that the powers of this many-headed monster afford no cause for alarm; and that not even the accession of force which the fraternity has received to their corps, in no less a personage than the Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen, will be able to renovate them. This gentleman, who fearlessly grasps at every thing within his reach, about two years ago took by the hand a dry-rot doctor of the name of Good, (a ship-builder, we believe, of Bridport,) who had endeavoured to prevail on the Commissioners of the Navy to give him the sum of £5000 for an infallible nostrum which he affirmed he had discovered for the cure of the dry-rot, The Commissioners, it appears, were too much in the habit of receiving similar overtures to be lightly cajoled by the assurances of Mr. Good, and rejected his modest proposal; upon which, he immediately changed his ground, and accused them of having brought upon the British Navy little less than total ruin, by the practice of injecting coal-tar into the interstices of ships' bottoms; adding that he would not only pledge himself to prove, to the conviction of every impartial man, that not a single ship of war, so treated with this inflammable substance, could sustain an engagement in a hot climate without inevitable destruction by explosion!-but, that this mineral tar was so decidedly hostile to the metallic fastenings, as totally to corrode and destroy both the iron and copper; and, worst of all, was highly injurious to the health of the crew. It might have been sufficient to answer these assertions, by ob serving serving that vegetable tar is well known to be infinitely more inflammable than mineral tar; that for centuries all the parts of plank and timbers of ships, whose surfaces are brought into contact, have been payed over with the former; that the Albion of 74 guns was saturated with a mixture of this tar and oil, (thus rendered still more inflammable,) prior to the battle of Algiers, in which she was prominently engaged and shot through and through, without blowing up, or evincing the smallest tendency to inflammation of any kind :-that in ships of war, whether injected with vegetable or mineral tar, stoves have been placed in various parts, and the temperature raised to 90°, and even 100°, without producing, or even creating the slightest alarm of ignition;--that it is well ascertained by experiment that coal-tar possesses the quality of preserving, instead of corroding, copper and iron; and that the metallic pumps by which it has for years past been injected, and the buckets which held it, were never found to have suffered the slightest degree of corrosion; that so far from its being considered injurious, it is used to cover iron cables and other iron work as an excellent anti-corrosive-that no complaint (with one single exception*) had been made of its causing sickness in the officers and ships' companies;-that the Owen Glendower, after being coated and injected with unprepared and unmixed coal-tar, was immediately after sent to a warm climate, and that her commander, the Honourable Captain Spencer, observed it never caused a head-ache to that ship's company.' So much indeed was the contrary the case with respect to her, that the Comptroller of the Navy stated in the House of Commons, that although she was perhaps more completely saturated with coaltar than any other vessel in the service, yet out of a complement of 264 men, living in a hot climate, in a constant atmosphere of tar, only two men had died in the course of two years and a half,' To all which might be added that the men in the dock-yards, specially employed in the management and injection of coal-tar, were known to have suffered nothing whatever in their health. Whether Mr. Joseph Hume and his friend Constantine Jennings, the patrons of this Mr. Good, were aware of these facts, we do not pretend to know; but Mr. Hume, relying, as it would seem, on the accuracy of this person's assertions, ventured to affirm that from the component parts of tar, it must be injurious to the iron and copper fastenings, as well as to the health of the men; and that it rendered the side of a ship so inflammable that on the snapping of a pistol it would catch like wild-fire.' That such language might not go forth to the world unrefuted, the Navy Board invited Messrs. Humie and Jennings, together with their protégé, the projector, to make what experiments they might, in their united wisdom, judge proper, on board his Majesty's ship Russell, then on the stocks, in presence of several officers and scientific men. The result of this exhibition, to use the comp troller's words, was a complete conviction in the minds of all present, that a more gross and scandalous imposition was never attempted to be put upon the public.' Mr. Hume, indeed, admitted this in his place in the House of Commons, and declared, that every person present at the experiment, even the son of the projector, left the dock-yard perfectly satisfied that they had been imposed upon. Having asserted,' adds Mr. Hume, 'that there was great danger of ignition in an atmosphere saturated with coal-tar, he was allowed to fire a pistol, where the interstices of the ship's timbers were completely saturated with tar, and to introduce a lighted candle into a barrel so saturated' -in fact,' he continued, the whole of his experiments completely failed.' And Mr. Constantine Jennings, not satisfied with admitting that he felt ashamed in being the dupe of this projector, honestly sent his recantation to one of the public journals. If one did not know, from daily experience, how very common it is for those who are not extraordinarily gifted with that sound discretion which Solomon has recommended, but let their opinion loose on all subjects, (whether understood or not,) and forget to-day what they said yesterday, we should certainly feel some surprise that Mr. Hume, having so recently been misled by one dry-rot doctor, should, with unabated credulity, throw himself into the arms of another; of one too, whose vulgarity and stupidity glare conspicuously in every line of the most worthless compilation that ever came before us; and which, as the Comptroller of the Navy (a shrewder critic than ourselves) observed, ⚫ contains as many false assertions and bold misrepresentations, as there are pages.' Mr. Hume, however, thinks, (says, at least) that it is of considerable importance,' and that the state of the navy, which its author asserts to be irretrievably ruined by dry-rot and coal-tar, is a fit subject for Parliamentary Inquiry. If, as we presume, he has read this precious composition, we can only say that * The Technical Repository,' for April, 1822: in which he says, The whole of the spectators were invited on board the Russell, on the stocks, a new ship that had been injected with the coal-tar; and Mr. Good was provided with the means of setting fire to the ship, both by gunpowder and flame. It need hardly be added, that his attempts to do so were entirely vain and fruitless; in fact he could not set the ship on fire by any fair or ordinary means.' He adds, what is greatly to his credit, Having had a violent prejudice against the plans adopted by the Navy Board, from the invidious reports of persons who, either ignorantly or wilfully, misrepresented the process and results, I am only now doing an act of justice in giving publicity to this statement of facts, whereby I relieve my own mind, and pay a just tribute to the merit I was before, from a false and mistaken zeal, too ready to have opposed.' he |