able. Still more frequently may this happen in public life. Mr Disraeli has, we should think, learnt from bitter experience the folly of giving expression to mere transient feelings either of anger or respect. He is a man of extremes; he knows no mediocrity of feeling; witness the inflated style of the soliloquies in his novels, which have drawn down upon him the unmitigated ire of his zealous biographer. With him a statesman's career is either "a system of petty larceny on a great scale," or it is "a precious possession of the House of Commons." This is a pity; but Mr Disraeli, unlike other statesmen, had not in early life the friendship of those who had trodden the thorny paths of English politics before him, to inculcate upon him the necessity of being habitually reserved and moderate in his expressions; and neither reserve nor moderation forms a part of his natural character. Too warm a nature, or too ardent a temperament are not discreditable, though they often bring pain and trouble along with them. We now come to the most hack neyed, and, we admit, the most painful portion of Mr Disraeli's life-his treatment of Sir Robert Peel. But these things belong to the past. Great blame, in the eyes of an impartial observer, may be attached to Peel for the course he then took, and great blame may also attach to Disraeli; much, on the other hand, may be said in palliation of the conduct of both. The one has long ago been forgiven by the great party which he irreparably injured; the other will, we firmly believe, prove himself, at no distant period, as firm and enlightened a Minister as he is now one of the most talented and accomplished statesmen that ever adorned with his eloquence, or controlled by his wisdom, the legislation of the British Parliament. We now conclude by urging the necessity there is for the reascendancy of the Conservative party. We are evidently on the verge of a momentous period. Are we to commit the guidance of our affairs to a Government whose conduct, as yet, has been one course of bungling-the result of dissension, of abortive speculations—the result of a misplaced self-confidence, and of unsuccessful negotiation-the result of an infatuated love of peace? We make, then, our appeal to the Protestants of England; are we any longer to truckle to the Pope of Rome -are we still to devote the public money to the support of Roman Catholic priests, and then call it "religious bigotry?" We make our appeal to the friends of Turkey amongst us: are we to have a Ministry in power who are divided in their opinions concerning the vitality of the country which we are desirous of protecting, and amongst whose supporters are men who deny our right to go to war at all? We make our appeal to the foes of Russia; shall we have a Premier who declares that "what is called the security of Europe" has nothing to fear from Russian aggression, and then says that he has nothing to retract or explain? Let us have a Ministry of able men, united amongst themselves, prepared to uphold our Protestant religion, agreed upon the vitality of Turkey, resolved to resist Russia, determined to secure a durable peace; and, above all, one that is strong in the confidence of the country, and supported by a united majority. Let us tear down the emblems of the most incapable and mischief-making Coalition that ever any country was cursed with, and proclaim over its fall the reascendancy of Con servative principles. Printed by William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh. STRONG and many are the claims made upon us by our mother Earth; the love of locality—the charm and attraction which some one homely landscape possesses to us, surpassing all stranger beauties, is a remarkable feature in the human heart. We who are not ethereal creatures, but of a mixed and diverse nature-we who, when we look our clearest towards the skies, must still have our standingground of earth secure-it is strange what relations of personal love we enter into with the scenes of this lower sphere. How we delight to build our recollections upon some basis of reality-a place, a country, a local habitation-how the events of life, as we look back upon them, have grown into the well-remembered background of the places where they fell upon us; -here is some sunny garden or summer lane, beatified and canonised for ever with the flood of a great joy; and here are dim and silent places, rooms always shadowed and dark to us, whatever they may be to others, where distress or death came once, and since then dwells for evermore. As little as we can deprive ourselves of the human frame, can we divest our individual history of its graceful garment of place and scene. Such a thing happened, we say; but memory is no bare chronicler of facts and events, and as we say the words, the time starts up before us, with all its silent witnesses;-leaves that were shed years ago, trees cut down and gone, yet they live in our thoughts with the joy or the sorrow of which they were silent attendants. We have caught and appropriated these bits of still life-they are a part of our history, and belong to us for ever. แ In some degree every mind must have its own private gallery of pictures, impossible to be revealed to the vision of another,-from the homely imagination which cherishes that one bit of sunshine on its walls, the house where I was born," the old childish paradise and ideal, rich with such flowers and verdure as can be found in no other place, to the stately and well-furnished recollection which can roam at will through all the brightest countries in the world; but wherever we go, we weave ourselves into the landscape, and make every milestone a historical monument in the chronicle of our life. And so it comes that natives of a country never expatriated from their home-soil, grow into a passionate veneration and love for their own land. The hills which are radiant for ever with their dreams of youththe rivers whose familiar voices have chimed into every sound of their Narrative of a Journey through Syria and Palestine in 1851 and 1852. By Lieut. VAN DE VELDE. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1854. VOL. LXXVI.-NO. CCCCLXVII. R lamentation and their joy-the roads that echo to their daily footsteps, and all the silent accessories upon which, as on so many props and pillars, their thoughts for years are hung-the very sight of which recall a hundred fleeting fancies-the very name of which spreads pictures lovelier than reality before closed eyes-the "kindly" country, which seems to respond with a voice borrowed from our own past thoughts to the thoughts of to-day, suggesting ancient comforts, ancient blessings, silently speaking hope from experience, solace present from solace past, lays claims upon us, the most intimate of our confidants, the nearest to our bosom; and Nature lavish in her demands upon our sympathyperpetually calling upon us to weep with her and to rejoice with her-makes liberal recompense, and softens around us with a visible embrace our mother country, our sympathetic and consolatory home. And scarcely less are we moved by localities sacred to the heroes of our race-storied ground, peopled with names and persons historic in the national annals, or consecrated to other lives than ours. It is natural for us to seek those spots with eager interest, to believe ourselves brought nearer to the great Spirit whose habitation made them famous, and to linger with visionary satisfaction, looking at things which he must have looked at, realising his life where he led it. Pilgrimages many grow out of this natural sentiment. The cottage of Shakespeare-the palace of Scott-the " warm study of deals," where the Scottish Reformer belaboured Satan-and the dark-browed rooms where hapless Mary accomplished her fate. From these shrines we come no wiser-not a whit better acquainted with the saint of each notwithstanding we stand in the same space, we look upon the same walls, we have over us the hallowed roof, and the instinctive superstition is satisfied with this limited result of our faith. But places sacred to one nation are indifferent to another-one class of men exult over a monument, which to their neighbours is but a block of stone. Yet there is one holy place where all the nations of the earth come together to worship-one country rich with a perpetual attraction. The soil thrills to the consecrating touch of love and grief; the ages of the past dwell in it as in a sanctuary. Making no account of the wandering handful of wild Asiatics who surround him, the traveller there seeks not scenes of to-day, but cities of the dead. The place has a solemn array of lofty inhabitants, undying fathers of the soil; generation after generation, conquerors, defenders, devotees, have come and gone and departed. But we do not search this country for traces of the Saracen or the Crusader; passing beyond them as modern visitors, a more ancient race claims the universal awe. It is not the city of Godfrey of Bouillon, but of David of Bethlehem, which shines on yonder cluster of hills; and these are not the knightly names of romance which sanctify the tombs. The brave Crusaders claim memories in other countries, but they have no memory here where their blood watered the sacred soil. Turk and Christian, creatures of to-day, stand on the same platform as we do,-beyond the earliest of them are the true monuments and memories of this country "Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which eighteen hundred years ago were nailed For our redemption to the bitter cross." The story begins and ends in this great figure appearing visibly before our eyes, and we bow our head to acknowledge Jerusalem, the universal centre of pilgrimage-Judea, Galilee, the Holy Land. A land which, if it could be possible to sweep it altogether out of earthly knowledge, would still live in the pages of one wonderful Book, and to the readers of that Book be of all countries the most familiar and well known. Many an untutored peasant, who knows no more of the road to our own capital than the half-mile of dusty highway under his own eyes, knows of the way to Bethany, signalised by many wonders-knows of the road to Gaza which is desertknows of that road to Damascus where the traveller was solemnly arrested on his way; and is better aware of the wayside grave where her heart-stricken husband buried Rachel, "sweet Syrian shepherdess," and of Absalom's tomb which he built to preserve his name, than of where the royal ashes lie in our own land. Many a humble scholar, untaught in other history, is learned in the ancient wars of Israel, and apprehends Moab, and Edom, and Assyria with a stronger sense of reality than he can apprehend the Russian hordes embattled against ourselves; and sees Pi-ha-hiroth shut in with its mountains, Egypt behind and the sea before, as no description, however vivid, will ever make him see the marshes of the Danube, though he have a son or a brother militant on that disastrous shore to-day. Strong security has God taken for the universal remembrance of that beloved country, blessed by His own Divine preference: while there is a Bible, there must be a Judea; the landscape in all its glorious tints is associated for ever with the wonderful artist's name; and neither its wretched population nor its heathen rulers, nor all its melancholy meanness and desolation, existing now, can make Christendom forget that this discrowned city is the city over which fell the tears of the Lord. We have no Crusaders in these days; all that remains of our ancient chivalry finds holier work at home than that impossible redemption of the Holy Land, which God reserves for His own time, and His own hands; nor do we need to depend on the vagabond saint of antique times, the hero of scallop-shell and pilgrim-staff, for our knowledge of Palestine. Neither travellers nor reports are wanting, and we are by no means afflicted with monotony of tone or sameness of aspect in the revelations of our modern pilgrimages. The weary man of fashion who loiters over Palestine in search of a new sensation-the curt and business-like Divine who goes thither professionally on a mission of verification and proof-the wandering litterateur who has a book to make-the accomplished savant and man of science, follow each other in rapid succession. Dreamy speculation-decisions of bold rapidity, made at a glance-accurate topography, slow and careful-each do their devoir in making known to us this country of universal interest. Nor does even the lighter portraiture of fiction shrink from the Holy Land, though here our novelist is a statesman, as much beyond the range of ordinary novelists, as the locality of that last brilliant romance which it has pleased him "to leave half told," differs from the English village or Scottish glen of common story-telling. To follow Disraeli and Warburton is no easy task, neither is it quite holiday work to go over the ground after Robinson and De Saulcy. Lieut. C.. W. N. Van de Velde, the latest traveller of this storied soil, is neither a born poet, nor an accomplished bookmaker, nor a great divine; but whosoever receives his book into their household, receives a social visitor, distinct and tangible-a real man. It is impossible not to clothe the historian with an imagined person-not to see him sitting down to his extempore writingtable compounding his letters-not to form a good guess of the measures of his paces, of perhaps now and then a little puff of Dutch impatience, curiously wrought into a large amount of phlegm. From his first offset he comes clearly out from among the shadows-we are at no loss to keep the thread of personal identity, and are never dubious, in picture number two, about the hero of picture number one. A most recognisable and characteristic personage, we yet stand in no dread of our pilgrim. He makes nothing of his cockle-hat and staff, or his sandal shoon. Instead of calling to his reverent disciples to follow, he offers his arm to any good neighbour who will make the tour with him. You may help to set up the Aneroid, or level the telescope, if you will, but you cannot doubt for a moment that Lieut. Van de Velde takes the angle of yonder nameless villages as a conscientious duty, and when he makes his survey of a bare hillside or Arab desert, does it with the full-hearted and devout conviction that this is his highest capability of serving God; for you ascertain immediately that this is not an expedition of the pleasure-seeker, or a pilgrimage of the devotee. Surveying Palestine is the work of the travellerhis special end and object—and he sets about it simply as his vocation, an enterprise which gives consistence and necessity to all his travel. One disadvantage of this accurate survey, as indeed of all scientific expeditions, is the bare chronicle of unknown villages, a confusion of barren names, and brief descriptions which take the life out of many pages of this narrative. Lieut. Van de Velde has a very pretty talent for making pictures in words, but to make a map in words is one of the driest and least profitable operations of literature. Toil after him as we may, it is impossible to keep in mind this long course which finds no track, and leaves none a mere piece of elaborate geography, with only the point, here and there, of a hospitable sheikh, or a hastily-sketched interior, to reward us for the toilsome interval of road. This, however, is not a fault peculiar to M. Van de Velde, but belongs alike to all the more serious explorers of Palestine, to whom every fallen stone has, or ought to have, its separate history. And notwithstanding this, which, indeed, is a necessary feature of the conscientious and painstaking mind visible in these pages, there is much of the picturesque in the travels of Lieut. Van de Velde. If his sketches are as graphic and clear as his descriptions, it is very much to be regretted that they are not added to this work, for we have nowhere seen more rapid and vivid landscapes with so little pretension on the part of the artist. We speak much of the poetic merit of transferring one's own mind and individuality into the scenery described, and it is a poetic necessitynevertheless, once in a way, remembering that the real poet who can do this is not a very common tourist, it is a refreshment to have the landscape without the traveller-the hills and the valleys as they lie, without Mr Brown in the corner taking their likeness. In these volumes our honest traveller offers to your view what he saw, sometimes in an honest fervour of admiration; but you cannot fail to be aware that his eye is on the landscape as he draws it, and not upon the central figure I which overshadows the scene. From first to last, indeed, Lieut. Van de Velde never sees his own shadow between himself and the sunshine, never is oppressed by his own claims to be looked at-in fact, is not troubled whether you look at him at all, but demands of you, most distinctly, to look at his picture, and claims from you an interest in it equal to his own. With strong religious feelings, and a mind deeply leavened with Gospel truths, and the Gospel history of which this soil is redolent, our pilgrim_travels onward, not without perturbations, yet full of confidence in the special protection of God, and everywhere, a single-hearted Christian, seeks his own "edification," and to promote the edification of others. We have said that his is not the pilgrimage of a devotee, yet it is undeniable that though too orthodox to expect any miraculous influence from these holy places, he yet looks for "impressions," for a more vivid realisation of those great events to which our faith looks back, and a brighter apprehension of the Divine teachings which were first delivered in this favoured land. Here is an instance of one profane interruption of his devout meditations; he is seated by Jacob's well: "I placed myself in the same position, and could well figure to myself the woman with her pitcher on her head coming down out of the valley. He who knows all things, and whose free sovereign love has chosen His own to eternal life from the foundation of the world He beheld her, the poor sinner, for whose preservation He had come down from heaven. He saw her as she came along under the olive trees, long before she was aware of His being there. And when she saw Him, she hesitated, perhaps whether she should approach Him, perceiving that he was a Jew. But what should she be afraid of, she the lost, who had lost all, for whom there seemed to be nothing but despair? Therefore she came on, and "Thus was I musing with myself, as I sat alone at the side of the well, and had just begun to read the fourth chapter of John, when I was suddenly roused by the blustering voice of a gigantic Arab, him, and addressed me thus, with all the who had come up without my observing characteristic repulsiveness and loathsomeness of the Arabs : "Marhhabah chawadja! baksheesh, baksheesh!' |