With respect to the general knowledge and historical information displayed, as Mr. Galt thinks, by the author of this work, we will venture to assert that more general ignorance and a more complete obscurity as to the events of his time were never brought together in one volume. Instead of reading him to elucidate history, history must be read to comprehend him; and even in the kind of information which one might suppose him best able to give, namely, on the private manners and social character of Old America, we find him trifling without gaiety and tedious without matter; all we can gather from his statements is, that the society in which he describes himself to have lived was low in intellect and vulgar in manners; and indeed his general representations do as little credit to the American character, as his writings do to English literature.

He no doubt considered himself (and may be forgiven, since Mr. Galt has fallen into the same mistake) as a very learned personage; and indeed he shows his proficiency in the belles-lettres, by sundry elaborate and recondite quotations from our poets, which he sometimes alters with the most classical felicity to suit the topic he may have in hand. In his various readings' of the Latin poets he is not altogether so happy: we doubt, with all our complaisance for his attainments, whether 'quadrupedante sonitu -ungula domum'-haud ignarus mali, &c. be greatly improved either in euphony or metre; and we think that- miros audire Trajedos' might, without much peril to orthography, have been left as the critic found it.

In the matter of the French tongue, too, in which the author deals largely, we are sorry to be obliged occasionally to differ from him; and indeed Mr. Galt does not assert that he illustrates that language. We hesitate to admit that the Duke de la Rochefoucault, or any other good Frenchman,' would cry, Vive le nation et sa gloire;' nor can we well believe that Mr. Talon, an eloquent French advocate, would exclaim-Ce n'est pas lui, c'est le vin que parle.' We have even some doubt whether a black boy, domesticated in a family, can be properly called 'enfunt de maison. p. 259.

But these are trifles; which would not have deserved notice, if the general knowledge of the author were not so loudly insisted upon, and if he were not himself so nice a verbal critic as to discover that Sir William Howe's expression, of General Washington's dispatches being badly compiled' was not English. We apprehend that it is English, and might, moreover, have had a little satirical meaning at bottom.

In conclusion;-the author's hatred of France, and his newborn respect for England,-his tardy admiration of Washington, and.

his

his virulent hatred of Jefferson, his disapprobation of Mr. Fox, and his condescending notice of Mr. Burke,-do not soften our Tory hearts; and we are sorry to have so many points of even apparent agreement with such a writer: for we scarcely remember to have met with an emptier pretender to literature-or a grosser apostate in politics; a feebler eulogist where he is indulged, or a more scurrilous slanderer when he is thwarted; and we can honestly assure Mr. Galt,-without overrating his talents and taste in the least,-that he is himself capable of adding a thousand times more lustre to the English language than the author of such an absurd farrago as he has here thought proper to reprint.

ART. V.-Travels in Palestine, through the Countries of Bashan and Gilead, east of the River Jordan; including a Visit to the Cities of Geraza and Gamala, in the Decapolis. By J. S. Buckingham, Member of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta ; and of the Literary Societies of Madras and Bombay. London. 4to. pp. 550. 1821.

IT

T is a distinction reserved, we believe, for the work before us, to display a blunder of the first magnitude upon its title-page. The names of two ancient cities only (Geraza and Gamala) are there set forth in capitals; and of these two, the one is certainly wrong, and the other doubtful. We must, therefore, commence our strictures with assuring- the Member of the Asiatic Society at Calcutta, and of the Literary Societies at Madras and Bombay,' that he, decidedly, was never at Gamala, and very possibly not at Geraza, in the whole course of his journey. Such an outset is not encouraging; but let us nevertheless follow our traveller to his preface, where he presents us with some choice flowers of rhetoric: we cull the first that comes to hand :

❝ Alexandria, at length, received me into her port: and the Pharos, the catacombs, Cleopatra's obelisk, and Pompey's pillar, were all objects of youthful veneration, which I now beheld with correspondent pleasure, I ascended the Nile with the Odyssey and Telemaque in either hand; and Homer and Fenelon never interested me more than upon the banks of this sacred stream.

"The proud capital of the Khalifs, "Misr, the mother of the world," Kahira, the victorious," placed me amid the scenes of oriental story, the venerable pyramids carried me back to the obscurity of ages which are immemorial. The ruins of Heliopolis inspired the recollection of Pythagoras, and the Grecian sages who had studied in its colleges; and the hall of Joseph brought before my view the history of Abraham and his posterity, of Moses and Pharaoh, and of all the subsequent events that befel the race of Israel.'-p. viii.

Almost

Almost every one, without visiting Alexandria, knows, what Mr. Buckingham, who has been there, it seems, is ignorant of, that the ancient Pharos does not exist, and that its vestiges are to be found only at the bottom of the sea! The Odyssey and Telemaque, it will be admitted, were very singular guide-books upon the Nile, and we can hardly imagine what confusion of ideas could recommend them as appropriate companions for such a voyage: they might, however, be sufficient for one whose classical perceptions were so acute, as to enable him to find ruins at -Heliopolis, where a single obelisk still erect, and a small spring 'still flowing, are the only indications, to ordinary travellers, of the site; but when he mistakes the Saracenic hall, built and named after one of the Mahommedan governors of Egypt, not 800 years ago, in the heart of a city that is itself but little older, for a work of the Patriarch Joseph, and the children of Israel, we must in conscience absolve his guides, incompetent as they are, and give the whole credit to himself.-The ingenious personage who confounded Alexander the Great with Alexander the coppersmith, was but a feeble type of our author.

The main object of the preface, he himself informs us, is to give us some measure and standard of his qualifications as a traveller and writer! Upon these, he enlarges with an amiable 'complacency, as conceiving himself one destined, and even in a manner compelled,' under the penalty of reproach,' to add to the common fund of human knowledge,'-and one to whom the Periplus of the Erythrean sea offered a fine field for commentary and correction.' We admit, however, that the preface affords a fair sample of the work, which, like that, is made up of very large phrases, and very small facts, with a copious admixture of extracts from some authors which are in every body's hands and of the hard names of some others which, we are very sure, were never in Mr. Buckingham's; insomuch that we were constantly reminded of that first of cosmogonists,' the celebrated Mr. Jenkinson, and looked forward with anxious expectation for the names of Sanchoniathon and Berosus. These, however, do not appear: but that of Quaresimus (which is found in the second paragraph) frequently occurs in his erudite references, although there is internal evidence that he has not read this author, in a gross mistake which he could not have committed had he ever consulted hima mistake into which it is hard to conceive how any person could fall, who has actually visited the Holy Land. At Ramlah, or Ramah,* in his way from Jaffa to Jerusalem, he enters into a long disquisition

6

* Ramah is said, by St. Jerome, to be in the tribe of Benjamin, seven miles distant from Jerusalem, near to Gibeah of Saul, and not far from Bethel, all of which circum

disquisition to prove this to be the birth-place and burial-place of the Prophet Samuel. Now, so far as the site of any place in scripture geography is identified, the Ramah of Samuel is, and has always been, perfectly well known. It lies almost as wide from this place as Jerusalem itself does, being on the left hand of the road from the holy city into Samaria, and standing so conspicuously on an eminence, that any one of the monks ('ignorant' as he represents them to be) could have pointed it out from the convent at Jerusalem. The prophet's tomb is there shown in a mosque, and held in veneration by both Christians and Mahomme→ dans. All this he might have found in Quaresimus : he might have found it, too, at some length in Pococke, whose name he frequently introduces without the slightest acquaintance with his work, unless perhaps with his margin and his index; and the reason that these have been of no avail to him in the present instance, is, that the place in question is not now called Ramah, but simply Samuele. An error in name is fatal to one who relies on 'an index, but not to one who peruses an author.

Mr. Buckingham does not appear to be very scrupulous in examining the sense of his extracts, since we frequently find him setting down a passage in his note that makes directly against some sagacious conclusion in his text, as p. 335, where, anxious to identify a village called Boorza, with the Bosor of the Maccabees, he subjoins a Latin sentence, in which Bosor is termed a city of the Moabites, whereas he has just told us that he was now in the land of Bashan. At p. 323. he and his own witness are at issue upon a point of a similar nature: thus he either convicts his authorities of error, or himself, and we shall hardly be disposed to balance long between them. In order to establish that Emmaus was near to Gamala, he brings forward (p. 434.) a passage from Josephus, which neither says nor implies any such thing; and we can venture to assure him that Vespasian, in passing from one to the other, must have marched round nearly one half of the lake of Tiberias, (the two places lying on opposite sides of it,) and that the hot springs, in favour of which this notable extract is introduced, have no more relation to Emmaus, than the city, at whose feet they lie, has to Gamala. The complicated ignorance and absurdity of the following illustration will not easily be matched. Good wine from Libanus was, it seems, set before him at Naza

stances correspond with that place now pointed out, (as well as his interpretation of Ramah in Hebrew, i. e. high ;) but not one will tally with Ramlah (Arimathea,) which is three or four times farther from Jerusalem, is not in Benjamin, nor near to Bethel, and stands low. The passage is in St. Jerome's Commentary on Hosea.

The meaning of the word Ramlah, Mr. Buckingham's Asiatic scholarship should have taught him, is not 'high' but sand.'

reth.

reth. mation:

This simple fact provokes the following gratuitous infor

'It seems to have been peculiar to the NAZARITES to suffer their hair to grow long, and to abstain from the use of wine, on making a sacred vow: and the story of Delilah, and Samson, who was a NAZARITE, is familiar to all.'

Nazarite, this critical inquirer takes for granted, must mean a native of Nazareth! but there is yet no danger of his reader being deceived, since he makes, as usual, his appeal to a testimony that contradicts him: for all to whom the story of Samson is familiar, well know that he was of Zorah, and had no connection whatever with Nazareth; and that consequently a Nazarite is not a Nazarean. This mode of producing evidence against himself really spares us so much trouble, that we cannot feel too grateful for it.

His field of compilation is not, however, confined to the writers of antiquity—as the storm drives at any door he knocks,' Nearly six pages (367-373.) are allotted to a paper by an anonymous author in the Gentleman's Magazine;' and we know not whether we owe it to the ignorance of Mr. Urban's ingenious correspondent, or to his own, or to both, that he writes Arena,' for Podium, in his details of a theatre; and Piraum more than once for the Piraus of Athens.

We shall not be accused of bestowing an undue share of attention on the examination of the nature of Mr. Buckingham's citations, when we inform the reader that they occupy the full half of the volume. The day, however, is happily gone by when such a mode of book-making could pass upon the world for learning. Pedantry is not the name for it, because that seems to imply something, at least, of erudition and research; whereas this is that sort of fitting on of ready-made extracts from indexes and margins, and gazetteers, and magazines, which is the legitimate resource of provincial guide-books, and tours to Lakes and Watering-places, where it is easy to gain a few pages by setting out from the Druids, and the Ancient Britons, and Boadicea. This class of literature, it fortunately does not fall within our province to notice; but we can hardly suppress our disgust when we find this beggarly process introduced into the classic and holy regions of the East, and obtruded upon our notice in the pages of a quarto volume.

There is yet a charge of a more serious nature which lies against this work, and which we will simply preface with an extract from the author's introductory observations :—

At every step of a traveller's progress through Palestine, his indignation is so roused by attempted impositions on his judgment, and

BB 3

sometimes