bably quite as amusing as the true, and give as striking a picture of the times. In this view the work is very interesting. We are transported into an age and country, where the gentlemen go out to work in the morning, with their steeds and lances, as regularly as the farmers with their team and plough, and indeed, a good deal more so. The Cid surpasses all his contemporaries for diligence and success in such laudable occupation. His course of enterprise is so rapid, so uniformly successful, and so much of a piece in other respects, that in some parts of the book the mind is quite tired of following him. In many other parts, however, the narrative is eminently striking, especially in describing some of the single combats, and most of all, in the long account of an extraordinary court of justice, held on two young princes or noblemen, who had abused their wives, the daughters of the Cid. Nothing in the whole library of romantic history can exceed this narrative. The Cid appears a humane warrior, according to the standard of those times, and yet he could calmly be guilty of the most infernal cruelties; for instance, burning alive many Moors, in the siege of Valencia. The destruction of "infidels," indeed, in any and every manner, seems to have been regarded as one of the noblest exercises of Christian virtue. Three or four of his constant companions in arms display such magnanimous bravery, and such an affectionate fidelity to him, as to excite the reader's interest and partiality in no small degree. A prominent feature of the story throughout, is the frequent recurrence of religious and superstitious ideas, in the discourse of the warriors, in all situations.

XX.

MODERN EGYPTIANS.

An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians; written in Egypt during the Years 1833, 4, and 5; partly from Notes made during a former Visit to that Country in the Years 1825, 6, 7, and 8. By EDWARD WILLIAM LANE.

A CURIOUS and reflective mind will not fall on many subjects more attractive than the relation of ancient regions, such as history and monuments have recorded them, to the same regions viewed in their modern and present state. It is striking to consider how widely they are, as it were, estranged from their primitive selves; insomuch that the mere local and nominal identity has less power to retain them before us under the original idea fixed on the place and name, than their actual condition has to present them as domains of a foreign and alien character. They are seen divested to so great a degree, of that which had created a deep interest in contemplating them, that we consign them to a distant province of our imagination, where they are the objects of a reversed order of feelings. We regard them as having disowned themselves, while retaining their ancient names, and their position on the earth.

We say, "divested to so great a degree;" for if the regions be eminently remarkable for natural features-mountains, rivers, defiles, and peculiar productions-these do, indeed, continue to tell something of ancient times. In keeping under our view a groundwork of the scenes we had meditated on, they recall to us by association what once was there, and is there no longer. But they do so to excite a disturbance by incongruity. What is there now, rises in the imagination to confound or overpower the images of what was there then. So that, till we can clear away this intrusion, we have an un

couth blending of the venerable ancient and the vulgar modern.

Again; there are seen in those territories striking relics of the human labours of the remote ages; which are thus brought back more impressively to the imagination than by the most prominent features of nature. But these disclaim more decidedly still, in the name of that departed world to which they entirely belong, all relationship with the existing economy of man and his concerns. They are emphatically solitary and estranged amidst that economy. Their aspect, in their gloom and ruin, is wholly to the past, as if signifying a disdain of all that later times have brought around them. And if, in some instances, man is trying to avail himself of some parts or appendages of them for his ordinary uses of resort or dwelling, we may, by a poetical license of thought, imagine them loathing the desecration. Still, as the vulgarities do obtrude themselves in contiguity, the contemplatist cannot wholly abstract himself from the annoyance.

Some of those scenes of ruin, indeed, and especially and pre-eminently the tract and vast remaining masses of Babylon, are placed apart by their awful doom, as suffering no encroachment and incongruous association of human occupancy or vicinity. There is no modern Babylon. It is secluded and alone in its desolation; clear of all interference with its one character as monumental of ancient time and existence. If the contemplative spectator could sojourn there alone and with a sense of safety, his mind would be taken out of the actual world, and carried away to the period of Babylon's magnificence, its multitudes, its triumphs, and the divine denunciations of its catastrophe.

Egypt has monuments of antiquity surpassing all others on the globe. History cannot tell when the most stupendous of them were constructed; and it would be no improbable prophecy that they are destined to remain to the end of time. Those enormous constructions, assuming to rank with nature's ancient works on the planet, and raised, as if to defy the powers of man and the elements and time to demolish them, by a generation that retired into the impenetrable darkness of antiquity when their work was done, stand on the surface in solemn relation to the subterraneous mansions of death. All the vestiges bear an aspect intensely and unalterably grave. There is inscribed on them a language which tells the inquirer

that its import is not for him or the men of his times. Persons that lived thousands of years since remain in substance and form, death everlastingly embodied, as if to emblem to us the vast chasm, and the non-existence of relation, between their race and ours. A shade of mystery rests on the whole economy to which all these objects belonged. Add to this our associations with the region from those memorable transactions and phenomena recorded in the sacred history, by which the imagination has been, so to speak, permanently located in it, as a field crowded with primeval interests and wonders.

It may then be asserted, perhaps, that Egypt surpasses every tract of the world (we know not that Palestine is an exception) in the power of fascinating a contemplative spirit, as long as the contemplation shall dwell exclusively on the ancient scene. But there is a modern Egypt. And truly it is an immense transition from the supernatural phenomena, the stupendous constructions, the frowning grandeur, the veiled intelligence, the homage, almost to adoration, rendered to death, and the absorption of a nation's living powers in the passion for leaving impregnable monuments, in which after their brief mortal existence they should remain memorable forever, to the present Egypt as described by Mr. Lane. But this Egypt, as it is spread around the wonderful spectacles which remain to give us partially an image of what once it was, disturbs the contemplation by an interference of the coarse vulgar modern with the solemn superb ancient. At least to a reader who has not enjoyed the enviable privileges of beholding those spectacles, and so practically experiencing how much they may absorb and withdraw the mind from all that is around them, it would seem that the presence of a grovelling population, with their miserable abodes, and daily employments, combined with the knavish insolent annoyance of the wearers of a petty authority, must press on the reflective spectator of pyramids, temples, and catacombs, with an effect extremely adverse to the musing abstraction in which he endeavours to carry his mind back to the ancient economy. As to any advantage to arise from contrast, there is no need of it. And besides, the two things are too far in disproportion for contrast. Who would let hovels and paltry mosques come into comparison at all with the pyramids and the temple of Carnac ?

Mr. Lane has surrendered to the antiquarian and imaginative tribe the vestiges of the ancient country, and strictly ad

hered to his purpose of describing its present state and people. This he has done in such a manner that his work may be considered as nearly superseding all the slighter sketches conveyed to us in the narratives of the numerous recent travellers. He has possessed the advantage over them of a protracted residence, of having one special design to prosecute, of a competent mastery of the language; and of possessing a certain flexibility of adaptation to the notions and habits of the people, by which he has insinuated himself into a familiarity and confidence with them quite out of reach of any passing visitant. The result is a work surprisingly comprehensive and particular. His vigilant inquisitiveness has gone into all the detail of dress, domestic manners, conventional observances, superstitious notions and ceremonies, ordinary occupations, traffic, political economy, official administration, and characteristic diversities of the several sections of the heterogeneous population; which are exhibited with a minuteness and precision, to make us marvel at his untiring patience of investigation. All is set forth in the plain language of an honest intention and labour to give a matter-of-fact account of things, without any flourishing off into sentiment or ambitious speculation. It could not be so amusing a book as those which have been made up of picturesque touches and incidents of adventure; it necessarily partakes of what we are apt to call dry; but it will be the repository to be consulted by every person who wants to know any thing about any part or circumstance of the character, habits, and condition, of the modern inhabitants of the old realms of the Pharaohs.

The author's observations were chiefly made in Cairo, the capital, and its precincts; but that portion of the country may, he says, be taken as very competently representing the general character and state of the nation, and of the Mahomedan world to a much wider extent than the Egyptian section; for, says he,

"In every point of view, Musr (or Cairo) must be regarded as the first Arab city of our age; and the manners and customs of its inhabitants are particularly interesting, as they are a combination of those which prevail most generally in the towns of Arabia, Syria, and the whole of Northern Africa, and in a great degree in Turkey. There is no other place in which we can obtain so complete a knowledge of the more civilized classes of the Arabs."

It is out of the question to attempt any thing like an analy