desperately cheated, is rather amusing. There is no fixed price for anything. The natives of Egypt seem to think that an "Hawaga" can make money rise out of the earth at command. Accordingly, they come to the conclusion that it is their right and their duty to strive to profit as much as possible by this fancied profusion, whenever it is in their power so to do. When, therefore, you ask the price of an article, they mention one outrageously beyond its proper value. You proceed, in return, to offer something under twothirds of the sum named. The ven dor indignantly says, La!" (No!) but soon comes down a peg. You advance to meet him with a higher offer he again refuses. : You mount your donkey and go away. He calls after you-" Hoat!" (take it!). He has accepted your offer, which if it amounts to a sum only slightly above its real selling value, he does rather sulkily. Some vendors would rather not sell a thing to you at double its value than abate from the price which they think an "Hawaga" ought to give them. At a stall where a liberal price, offered for an article by yourself, has been refused with apparent contempt, some native of your "suite" will afterwards succeed in purchasing the same thing for a much lower amount. Throughout the bazaars are to be seen such wares as the following: at one stall, gold embroidered tablecovers and smoking caps; swords, and guns, and daggers, richly embossed, in another; burnouses, Bedouin caps and kofeirs, in a third. Further on, in a separate court, is the Turkey-rug bazaar. A Turkey-rug is, to many an Oriental, the bed which, when he rises from it, he takes up and walks" away with. Aron ton crabbaton sou, "take up thy bed;" might be otherwise rendered "take up thy carpet." The writer of this journal, not affect ing to be a Greek scholar, can only repeat like a parrot the words her classical friends have imparted to her; and if there is no relationship between Crabbat-on" and " carpet," she can only say that the likeness is a striking one. A little way from the rug bazaar is a khan or caravanserai, another court, surrounded by tiny rooms. Here the merchants put up when they arrive from a distance. There are no beds found in the caravanserai. The aforesaid rug is laid upon the floor by its proprietor; and there he sleeps as best he may, seldom without a multitude of troublesome little companions. The high temperature of those climes is most favourable to insect life. The streets of Cairo are wretched. The best of them would disgrace the precincts of St. Giles's. There is, however, one creditable feature to be met at every turn-the fountains, which, for the most part, are handsome ornaments to the city, as well as useful ones. The Moslem has a droll prejudice respecting holy places. He thinks it an impiety to repair them when they are falling into decay. Hence many a fine mosque (and they abound in the city) has its beauty marred by a crumbling minaret. The doorways of the private houses are handsomely carved; and the latticed bay windows overhead undoubtedly give a picturesque aspect to the street. But beyond this, the artistic taste of Egyptian street decorators does not excel. Ever and anon, the rudely-painted front of some humble dwelling indicates that the inhabitants thereof have made the pilgrimmage to Mecca. Such delineations of the wonders which they have seen on the way! A steamboat - a captain" with an enormous telescope under his arm-elephants, antelopes, and other strange animals. Objects such as these are recognisable by the sagacious and discerning tourist, although the artists do not invariably write over them, "This is a 66 ship," and so forth,-which, indeed, they should do, for the modern Egyptians are sadly fallen off from the skill of the ancients, who, beautifully as they delineated every object which one traveller admires in the tombs of Beni Hassan or of Thebes, yet modestly wrote over each its name, lest the spectator should experience any difficulty in deciding as to what they strove to imitate. We do not wish to run the risk of wearying our readers with any further detailed description of Cairo and its environs. For the accounts of the rest of the sights of the capital of Egypt-are they not written in the books and the chronicles of Eliot Warburton and Harriet Martineau? Of course our party went to the Petrified Forest, which turned out not to be a forest at all, but only the scattered remains of one, turned into hard stone-a marvellous lusus natura; for the desert, for a considerable space, is strewn with what seem to be rotten blocks and splinters of wood. One after another, you handle these pieces, and are astounded to find them as hard as adamant. You seek out some fragment which looks still more tinder-like than the rest, and seems to be crumbling into dust. Take it up: it is like iron: it is not even of the consistency of sandstone. It has become suddenly petrified as it lay a-mouldering. Then, again, they went to see the obelisk, in the midst of an orangegrove at Heliopolis-the "On" of Scripture history-where the fatherin-law of Joseph was priest. And in a neighbouring olive-garden they saw the huge trunk of an ancient tree, under which the Holy Family was said to have rested during the flight into Egypt. true or not, the tree is one of immense age; and the traveller cannot but feel a thrill as he stands beneath the now scanty shadow of the branches which are said once to have sheltered the holiest Being who ever walked on earth-the Example and the Saviour of the world. (To be continued.) Be the tradition LIVES OF THE LORD CHANCELLORS OF IRELAND. TO THE RIGHT HON. HENRY GRATTAN. fortune. I so acted, as to be fully entitled to perfect reciprocity of good faith; and to consider the performance of the personal part of the compact as a matter, not of favour, but of right, which I might receive like the payment of any common debt, without being crushed by the humiliating sensation that I must have felt, if my debtor, by such payment, could become my patron or benefactor. Upon the basis of this compact, which was always publicly known, and adopted by Lord Fitzwilliam, in 1795, Mr. G. Ponsonby was then nominated to the office of Attorney-General, I to the place of Solicitor-General. The completion of that arrangement was prevented by the change of Irish Administration; the compact itself continued, and with increased force (if by the continued fidelity of observance, compact can be susceptible of accessional obligation) till the late change in 1806; it was again acted upon by the parties to it. On that occasion, I was the only interested member of that party that remained in Ireland I did not write to any of my friends then in London; not to Lord Ponsonby; not even to you. I knew your zeal for my interest; I knew the friendship and purity of Lord Ponsonby-I was sensible of the warm protection of Mr. Fox, to which I had no claim, save what might be suggested to a noble and generous spirit, like this, by my conduct as a public man; I knew, also, the protection my interests would have found in Lord Moira, Lord Erskine, or Lord Howick, had such protection been necessary. I felt no solicitude for myself; I remained at home; the event justified my confidence; Mr. G. Ponsonby accepted the seals; a proof, of itself, that I must have been appointed to the next attainable situation. That next situation could be no other than the office of Attorney-General; it was the only place in the power of the new Administration to vacate; from its official rank in the Government, it was the natural passage to that place on the King's Bench, to which, as next in professional advancement, I had a right to succeed. But on this fact I was not left to conjecture. I was apprised by letter from you, and also Mr. G. Ponsonby, that my interests had been taken care of; Mr. G. Ponsonby communicated the same to a relation of mine, then in London; directing him to inform me that my place as Attorneygeneral was fixed, and that my coming over would be but unnecessary trouble. "The Duke of Bedford soon after arrived in Ireland, and Mr. G. Ponsonby, as Chancellor, became an Irish Minister. At our first meeting, he assured me, somewhat in the style of his previous letter, that my friends had not been unmindful of me, and that I would find everything perfectly to my satisfaction. In a few days, however, I learned that the Duke of Bedford had sent for Mr. Plunket, the then AttorneyGeneral, and assured him that he was not to be removed. It soon appeared that the report was true. To me the fact was incomprehensible; Mr. G. Ponsonby left it in all its darkness; for when we met, which was only by accident, he was silent upon the subject. I soon received a letter from Lord Ponsonby, then confined in London by that sickness which was soon to terminate his valuable life; it was conceived in such terms as might be expected from the friendship and honour of the writer. He expressed indignation at the delay which had taken place in effecting that arrangement which he had considered as con clusively settled; desiring most anxiously to have it explained. This letter I showed to Mr. G. Ponsonby, but without receiving any explanation whatsover. I wrote to Lord Ponsonby such an answer as he had a right to expect from the affection of a man to whom he had endeared himself by so persevering a fidelity, and by the uninterrupted friendship of so many years; such facts as I knew, I stated; but I had no explanation to give. It would be affectation in me to say, that under these circumstances, I was perfectly at ease. I might despise the triumph of my enemies, I could not be insensible to such coldness from a friend. I had, however, one great consolation; deserted, as I could not but think myself, I had every reason to be proud of the perfect faith and friendship which you and Lord Ponsonby had manifested towards me; and to feel that the disappointment which I prepared myself to meet, could be no more imputed to you than prevented by you. "After a lapse of some weeks I waited upon the Duke of Bedford, by his Grace's desire; he apprised me that I was to be Master of the Rolls as soon as the necessary arrangements were effected. You may easily judge of my feelings on this communication; but it was the first time I had ever seen the Duke of Bedford; I had no shadow of claim upon his Grace; he was not the person to whom I could complain, that I was humbled or illtreated; I barely said that "I was grateful to his Grace for the courtesy of the communication ;" and retired with an almost decided purpose to decline the appointment. This substitution I considered a direct departure from the compact with Mr. G. Ponsonby, and accompanied by the aggravation of withholding that consultation and explanation, without which, and without my own express consent, I ought not to have been so disposed of. As to the place itself, it was the last I should have chosen; it imposed upon me a change of all my habits of life; it forced my mind into a new course of thinking, and into new modes of labour, and that, increased labour; it removed me from that intellectual exercise which custom and temper had rendered easy and pleasant; it excluded me from the enjoyment of the honest gratification of an official share of an Administration which I then thought would have consisted principally, if not altogether, of the tried friends of Ireland. When the party with which I had acted so fairly, had, after so long a proscription, come at last to their natural place, I did not expect to have been stuck into a window, a spectator of the procession. From the station which I then held at the Bar, to accept the neutralised situation of the Rolls, appeared to me a descent, and not an elevation:-It had no allurement of wealth, for diminished as my income had been by the most remorseless persecution for years, by which I was made to expatiate the crime of not being an alien to my country, by treachery, or by birth, it was still abundant, when compared with my occasions, and was likely to continue so, as long as those occasions should last. "To this intended refusal, however, my friends in Ireland thought there were strong objections; they thought it would look like an accusation of the party at large, to the great majority of whom I had reason to be more attached than ever-they urged other inducements unnecessary to detail, and which I thought worthy my attention. There remained a still superior motive to decide me to have yielded to resentment, or disgust, and refused the offered situation, might be to carry disturbance and irritation to the bed of a dying friend; I knew the untemporising nature of Lord Ponsonby, where he thought his honour concerned, and I saw that the whole arrangement of the Administration for Ireland, as far as it depended upon him, might be dissolved, if he thought me ill-treated; I had a similar apprehension from the part you yourself would pursue upon such an occasion; and I could not but see, that if you and Lord Ponsonby were to withdraw your support from the Irish Administration, that unhappy country would have little to hope from any new order of things. I resolved, therefore, to submit, and to do so with. an appearance of as much good humour as I could affect. "At my next meeting with Mr. G. Ponsonby, which was purely casual (for I did not seek it) he asked me if I had not seen the Duke of Bedford? I said 'yes;" he said "he hoped everything was to my satisfaction." I answered “His Grace's reception of me has been extremely courteous." Even then, not a word of explanation from Mr. G. Ponsonby. G. Ponsonby. He merely informed me that Sir Michael Smith should be treated with on the subject of his resignation. And I must confess that he presented my condition. in a point of view which excited no ordinary sensations: for I now saw, that instead of coming into the stipulated situation by an undisputed claim of right, and without the burthen of one shilling expense to the country, I was flung upon the precarious chance of a place, which, it achieved at all, could be obtained only by a charge on the public, and rendered additionally disgusting to me by the appearance of a job. "At last, after delays perhaps not easy to be avoided, but certainly affording ample time for the triumph of my enemies and the vexation of my friends, both of whom looked upon me as insulted and abandoned, that treaty took place, without any participation of mine, and without the remotest hint that it could involve any stipulation |