and water the new institutions which are springing up like a luxuriant vegetation in a favourable climate, but at the same time to exercise a fatherly control, prevent the country from rushing into downright republicanism, and not permit the Christians to positively oppress their weaker Mohammedan brethren. He is a very affable man, with a broad, smiling face, and an amiable rotundity of person which causes his gorgeous uniform to burst its buttons and gape at critical points. He pays me long visits for the purpose of political discussion, being, as he calls it, tout à fait dans les idées libérales, and in order that this outpouring of radical views may not be interrupted, he brings a soldier to mount guard over the door. No tortures could maketo these feelings anything like the prominence which really belonged to them at the time of his travelling, he will not seem a very good teacher. Once having determined to write the sheer truth concerning the things which chiefly have p. xxxixinterested him, he must, and he will, sing a sadly long strain about self; he will talk for whole pages together about his bivouac fire, and ruin the ruins of Baalbec with eight or ten cold lines.

But it seems to me that this egotism of a traveller, however incessant, however shameless and obtrusive, must still convey some true ideas of the country through which he has passed. His very selfishness, his habit of referring the whole external world to his own sensations, compels him, as it were,