Part 9

On the 6th of June, 1718, she left Constantinople with regret. And at this I do not wonder, for there was in her character a coarse sensual bent, closely approximating to the oriental cast of mind, which in a wild unpoliced capital, where, according to her own account, women live in a state of perpetual masquerade, might still more easily be yielded to even than in London. Of study and the sciences she had by this time grown tired. She regretted that her youth had been spent in the acquisition of knowledge. The Turks, who consumed their lives “in music, gardens, wine, and delicate eating,” appeared upon the whole much wiser than the English, who tormented their brains with some scheme of politics, I use her own words, or in studying some science to which they could never attain. “Considering what short-lived weak animals men are,” she adds, “is there any study so beneficial as the study of _present pleasure?_” And lest any one should mistake her after all, she subjoins, “but I allow you to laugh at me for my sensual declaration in saying that I had rather be a rich _effendi_ with all his ignorance, than Sir Isaac Newton with all his knowledge.” No doubt; and Lais, Cleopatra, or Ninon would have said the same thing.

Sailing down the Dardanelles, they cast anchor between the castles of Sestos and Abydos, where,

————In the month of cold December, Leander, daring boy, was wont,— What maid will not the tale remember?— To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!

Here she enjoyed a full view of Mount Ida,

Where Juno once caressed her amorous Jove, And the world’s master lay subdued by love.

The quotation is Lady Montague’s. Descending a league farther down the Hellespont, she landed at the promontory of Sigeum, and climbed up to visit the barrow beneath which the heroic bones of Achilles repose. Experiencing no enthusiasm at the sight of these Homeric scenes, she was unquestionably right in not affecting what she did not feel; but who, save herself, could have viewed the plains of Troy, the Simois, and the Scamander without having any other ideas awakened in the mind than such as the adventure of Æschines’s companion and the lewd tale of Lafontaine had implanted there? However, to do her justice, though she gives her favourite ideas the precedence, she afterward observes, “there is some pleasure in seeing the valley where I imagined the famous duel of Menelaus and Paris had been fought, and where the greatest city in the world was situated.” Here, though she is mistaken about the magnitude of the city, there is some sign of the only feeling which ever ought to lead a traveller out of his way to behold such a scene; and she goes on to say, “I spent several hours here in as agreeable cogitations as ever Don Quixote had on Mount Montesinos;” in which cogitations let us be charitable enough to suppose that “the tale of Troy divine” was not forgotten.

From the Hellespont they sailed between the islands of the Archipelago, and passing by Sicily and Malta, where they landed, were driven by a storm into Porta Farina, on the coast of Africa, near Tunis, where they remained at the house of the British consul for some days. Being so near the ruins of Carthage, her curiosity to behold so remarkable a spot was not to be resisted; and accordingly she proceeded to the scene, through groves of date, olive, and fig-trees; but the most extraordinary objects she met with were the women of the country, who were so frightfully ugly that her delicate imagination immediately suggested to her the probability of some intermarriages having formerly taken place between their ancestors and the baboons of the country.

From Tunis they in a few days set sail for Genoa; whence after a little repose they proceeded across the Alps, and through France, to England, where they arrived on the 20th of October, 1718.

Shortly after her return she was induced by the solicitations of Pope, whom two years of reflection had not cured, to take up her residence at Twickenham. But the poet must very soon have discovered that, in comparison with the “rich _effendis_” and “three-tailed” pashas of the East, his poor little, ailing person, in spite of his grotto and his muse, had dwindled to nothing in the estimation of Lady Mary. Lord Hervey, who, though he wrote verses, had not been “blasted with poetic fire,” was considered, for reasons not given, more worthy of her ladyship’s friendship. However, these changes were not immediately apparent, and other affairs, which came still more home to her bosom than friendship, in the interim occupied her attention; among the rest the idea of realizing immense sums by embarking in the South Sea scheme. She likewise allowed the poet, whom the original had captivated so long, to employ the pencil of Sir Godfrey Kneller in copying her mature charms to adorn his hermitage. She was drawn in the meretricious taste of the times: and the physiognomy of the portrait answers exactly in expression to the idea which we form of Lady Mary from her writings; that is, it exhibits a mixture of intellectuality and voluptuousness, of calm, confident, commanding complacency, bordering a little on defiance or scorn. Pope received the finished picture with the delight of a lover, and immediately expressed his conception of it in the following lines:—

The playful smiles around the dimpled mouth, That happy air of majesty and truth, So would I draw (but oh! ’tis vain to try, My narrow genius does the power deny), The equal lustre of the heavenly mind, Where every grace with every virtue’s joined, Learning not vain, and wisdom not severe, With greatness easy, and with wit sincere, With just description show the soul divine, And the whole princess in my work should shine.

The verses are insipid enough, like most compliments; but they express an opinion which circumstances very shortly afterward compelled him to change, when the princess became transformed into a modern “Sappho” and, thrown with Lord Fanny, Sporus, Atossa, and many others, into a group, was “damned” by satire to “everlasting fame.”

Lady Montague’s life, many years after her return from the East, was spent like that of most other ladies of fashion, who mingle a taste for literature and politics with gallantry. Her letters to her sister, who now, through the attainder and exile of her husband, Erskine Earl of Mar, resided abroad, abound with evidences that the pleasures which she had heretofore regarded as the _summum bonum_ soon palled the appetite; and that as the effervescence of animal spirits which, during her youth, had given a keen relish to life subsided, a metamorphosis, the reverse of that of the butterfly, took place, changing the gay fluttering summer insect into a grub. A cynical contempt of all things human succeeded. Into the grounds of her separation from her husband I shall not inquire. Ill health was at the time the cause assigned. The triumph of the political party to which she was opposed has since been absurdly put forward to account for it: but she had, no doubt, other reasons, much more powerful, for cutting herself off, during a period of twenty-two years, from all personal intercourse with her family.

Be this however as it may, in the month of July, 1739, she departed from England, and bade an eternal adieu to Mr. Montague and the greater number of her old friends. Her first place of residence on the Continent was Venice, from whence she made an excursion to Rome and Naples, and, returning to Brescia, took up her abode in one of the palaces of that city. She likewise visited the south of France and Switzerland. The summer months she usually spent at Louverre, on the lake of Isis, in the territories of Venice, where gardening, silk-worms, and books appear to have afforded her considerable amusement. In 1758 she removed to Venice, and, her husband dying in 1761, she was prevailed upon by her daughter, the Countess of Bute, to return to England. However, she survived Mr. Montague but a single year; for, whether the sudden transition to a northern climate was too violent a shock for her frame, or that a gradual decay had been going on, and was now naturally approaching its termination, she breathed her last on the 21st of August, 1762, in the seventy-third year of her age.

Her letters have been compared with those of Madame de Sevigné, but they do not at all resemble them. The latter have a calm, quiet interest, a sweetness, an ingenuous tenderness, a natural simplicity, which powerfully recommend them to us in those moments when we ourselves are calm or melancholy. Lady Montague’s have infinitely more nerve and vigour, excite a far deeper interest, but of an equivocal and painful cast, and while, in a certain sense, they amuse and gratify, inspire aversion for their writer. On the other hand, Madame de Sevigné is a person whom one would like to have known. She is garrulous, she frequently repeats herself; but it is maternal love which causes the error. In one word, we admire the talents of Lady Montague, but we love the character of Madame de Sevigné.

RICHARD POCOCKE.

Born 1704—Died 1765.

THIS distinguished traveller was born at Southampton, in the year 1704. The scope of his education, which, besides those classical acquirements that usually constitute the learning of a gentleman, embraced an extensive knowledge of the principal oriental languages, admirably fitted him for travelling with advantage in the East. But previously to undertaking that longer and more important journey upon the history of which he was to rest all his hopes of fame, he resolved to visit some of the more remarkable countries of Europe; and accordingly, on the 30th of August, 1733, he departed from London, and proceeded by the usual route to Paris. The curiosities of this accessible country, France, of which we often remain in utter ignorance, because they are near, and may be easily visited, appeared highly worthy of attention to Pococke. He attentively examined the palaces and gardens of Versailles, St. Germain, and Fontainebleau; the remains of antiquity at Avignon, Nismes, and Arles; and the architectural and picturesque beauties of Montpellier, Toulon, and Marseilles.

From France he proceeded into Italy, by the way of Piedmont; and having traversed the territories of Genoa, Tuscany, the territories of the church, of Venice, and of Milan, he returned through Piedmont, Savoy, and France, and arrived in London on the 1st of July, 1734.

This tour only serving to increase his passion for travelling, he, on the 20th of May, 1736, set out from London on his long-projected journey into the East. He now directed his course through Flanders, Brabant, and Holland, into Germany, which he traversed in all directions, from the shores of the Baltic to Hungary and Illyria. He then passed into Italy, and proceeding to Leghorn, embarked at that port, on the 7th of September, 1737, for Alexandria in Egypt, where he arrived on the 29th of the same month.

It is a remark which I have frequently made during the composition of these Lives, that when an original-minded traveller directs his course through a well known but interesting country, we follow his track and peruse his observations with perhaps still greater pleasure than we should feel had he journeyed through an entirely new region. In the former case we in some measure consider ourselves competent to decide upon the accuracy of his descriptions and the justness of his views; while in the latter, delivered up wholly to his guidance, and having no other testimony to corroborate or oppose to his, we experience an involuntary timidity, and hesitate to believe, lest our confidence should lead us into error. Besides, in no country can the man of genius fail to find matter for original remark. No man can forestall him, because such a person discovers things literally invisible to others; though, when once pointed out, they immediately cease to be so. His acquirements, the peculiar frame of his mind, in one word, his individuality, is to him as an additional sense, which no other person does or can possess; and this circumstance, which is not one of the least fortunate in the intellectual economy, delivers us from all solicitude respecting that lack of materials for original composition about which grovelling and barren speculators have in all ages clamoured; while the consciousness of mental poverty has generated in their imaginations an apprehension that every one who approached them had a design upon their little pedler’s pack of ideas, and driven them into anxious and unhappy solitude, that, like so many spiders, they might preserve their flimsy originality from the rough collision of more robust minds.

The feeling which leads learned and scientific men one after another to Egypt is the same with that which, after long years of absence, induces us to visit the place of our birth. Philosophy, according to popular tradition, had its birthplace on the banks of the Nile—though those of the Ganges appear to possess a better claim to the honour; and it is to examine the material traces of early footsteps, urged by some obscure secret persuasion that momentous revelations respecting the history of man might be made, could we, if I may hazard the expression, re-animate the sacred language of the Egyptians, who, as Shelley phrases it,

Hung their mute thoughts on the mute walls around,

that traveller after traveller paces around the mysterious obelisks, columns, and sarcophagi of Karnac and Edfu. Countries which have never, so far as we know, been inhabited by any but savage tribes, however magnificent may be their scenery, however fertile their soil, can never, in the estimation of the philosophical traveller, possess equal attractions with India, Persia, Egypt, or Greece: they resemble so many theatrical scenes without actors; and after amusing the eye or the imagination for a brief space of time, excite a mortal _ennui_ which nothing can ward off. The world itself would be a dull panorama without man. It is only as the scene of his actions, passions, sufferings, glory, or shame, that its various regions possess any lasting interest for us. Where great men have lived or died, there are poetry, romance,—every thing that can excite the feelings or elevate the mind. “Gray Marathon,” Thermopylæ, Troy, Mantinea, Agincourt, Waterloo, are more sublime names than Mont Blanc or the Himalaya. On the former we are lifted up by the remembrance of human energy; the latter present themselves to us as prodigious masses of brute matter, sublime undoubtedly, but linked by no glorious associations with the triumphs or the fall of great or brave men.

The above remarks appeared necessary to explain why we are never weary of accompanying travellers through Egypt, Palestine, and the other celebrated lands which border the Mediterranean: I now proceed with the adventures and researches of Pococke. On arriving at Alexandria, a city which, when taken by the Arabs, contained four thousand palaces, as many baths, four hundred public places or squares, and forty thousand Jews who paid tribute, he immediately exerted himself to gratify his curiosity, and this so imprudently, that he led several soldiers into a breach of duty, in showing him the ruins of the ancient Pharos without permission, for which they were afterward punished. Several travellers have pretended that the coffin of Alexander the Great is still preserved in a Mohammedan mosque in this city, and we find Bruce, thirty years after Pococke, making very diligent inquiry among the inhabitants respecting it. It is certain that the remains of the Macedonian king were deposited in a golden coffin in the royal tombs of Alexandria; but in the age of Augustus his bones had already been transferred from their gorgeous lodgings to humbler ones of glass, in which they were brought forth from their narrow house for the inspection of the tyrant, who threw flowers and placed a golden crown upon the coffin. However, when we reflect that even in so peaceful a city as Caen, the remains of William the Conqueror could not be preserved a few hundred years from popular insult, it seems extremely improbable that those of Alexander should have been suffered to escape for two thousand years in a place which has experienced so many and such dreadful vicissitudes.

From Alexandria he proceeded to Rosetta, in company with the English consul; and on approaching within a few miles of the city, was surprised to find a tent pitched, and an excellent collation laid out for them in the desert, for which they were indebted to the politeness of the French merchants, several of whom came out more than a league to meet them. Horses, likewise, were sent for their use by the Turkish governor of the city, whose opinions respecting the natural fitness of asses to be the coursers of Franks seem to have been quite heterodox. To add to the compliment, servants were sent whose business it was to run along by the side of the equestrian travellers; and in this unusual style they entered Rosetta.

It was now the latter end of October, and Egypt, which goes annually through as many changes as a butterfly, was already beginning to put on its winter dress, in which alone, according to the opinion of connoisseurs, it should be contemplated by the admirers of the beautiful. Its landscapes, it is well known, are very peculiar. There are no glaciers, toppling crags, or mountain torrents; but there are gardens filled with palm, orange, and almond trees; fields of young rice more green than the emerald; villages perched on little eminences, and flanked by date groves; diminutive lakes with reeds on greensward enamelled with flowers around their margin; and to crown all, one of the mightiest rivers in the world rolling along its broad waters through scenes of sunshine and plenty, and through ruins of such prodigious magnificence, that they seem rather to be the remains of a former world than the works of that race of pigmy stature which now inhabits it. A large portion of the rich fields in the vicinity of Rosetta belongs to Mecca; and the inhabitants have a tradition that a member of the prophet’s family resided on a neighbouring spot, where a mosque was afterward erected, to which, should the Holy City ever be wrested from the faithful, all devout persons would go on pilgrimage.

Locke, in combating the doctrine of innate ideas, and in order to show that modesty, as well as all the other virtues, is an acquired habit, cites from Baumgarten a description of the nudity and immoral practices of the Mohammedan saints of Egypt, which in that country were not merely tolerated, but vehemently approved of. Two of these naked saints Pococke himself saw in the city of Rosetta. The one, he observes, was a good-humoured old man; the other a youth of eighteen; and as the latter walked along the streets the people kissed his hands. He was moreover informed that on Fridays, when the women are accustomed to visit the cemeteries, these holy men usually sat at the entrance, when the visiters not only kissed their hands, but carried their religious veneration so far as to practise the same ceremony with which the ancients adored their Phallic divinity, and the modern Hindoos pay their reverence to the Lingam. Something of this kind our traveller says he witnessed at Cairo, but that the sight was too common to command the least attention.

Having seen the principal curiosities of this city, and visited the Greek patriarch, who entertained him with a pipe, a spoonful of sweet syrup, and coffee, he set out on the 4th of November for Cairo, sailing in a large kanja up the Nile. Besides the constantly shifting scenes presented by the shores of the river, which were of themselves sufficient to render the voyage a pleasant one, the passengers were amused by Arab story-tellers, and representations of rude farces, in which the sailors themselves were the performers. The lakes of natron, a little of which dissolved in vinegar is, according to Hasselquist, a sovereign remedy for the toothache, Pococke did not visit; but he was informed by some of the passengers that their environs abounded with wild boars. On the 11th of November they arrived at Cairo. This city, during his stay in Egypt, may be regarded as his home, from which his excursions radiated in various directions. Though the principal object of Pococke’s travels, perhaps, was the examination of antiquities, and the illustration of ancient geography, he very wisely extended his researches to the modern condition of the country, and the manners of its actual inhabitants. He visited the convents of dervishes and monks, the cells of hermits, the cemeteries of Turks, Jews, and Christians, and observed with care the character and costume of every class of the population, from the sovereign bey to the houseless courtesan, who, like Tamar in the Bible, sat by the wayside to inveigle passengers. His remarks upon ancient Memphis,—the site of which, as I have already observed in the life of Shaw, he fixed at Metraheny,—and on the pyramids, are still, notwithstanding all that has been since written, highly worthy of attention. He was not, like Hasselquist, deterred from ascending to their summit by the heat of the stones or by tempestuous winds; he measured their dimensions; descended into the well; and speculated on their use and origin.

Shortly after his visit to the pyramids, he set out on an excursion to the district of Faioum, and the Birket el Keroun, or Lake Mœris, with the governor of the province, who happened to be just then returning home from Cairo. His companion was a middle-aged Mussulman, of a lively, cheerful temper, who made no scruple of associating with a Frank, or even of eating with him, and drinking _liqueurs_, which are not prohibited in the Koran, not having been invented when it was written. It could not, however, be said that they fared too luxuriously on the way; their meals, like those of Forster and his Ghilān Seid, consisted for the most part of bread, cheese, and onions. After this frugal supper, they reposed at night in a grove of palm-trees.