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EXTRACTS, to O'BRIEN.

July 20th, 1799. THE Bey's Physician dined with me to day, and confidentially told me that the Regency had it in contemplation to declare war against Spain; and only waited the return of two merchant vessels, which had gone thither. thither. Speed to the measure! It will give us relief. Pity it is, that the Italians were not included in the personae tramatis. Mussulmen, catholics, assassins, thieves, beggars, pimps. In Heaven's name, let them devour each other. The world is afflicted with their abominations. I wish I could thunder with a voice like Jove: I would project electric bolts, omnipotent among them, thicker than the stars of heaven; more irregular than the dreams of guilt; pointed with blue wrath, terrible as hell; and, in one permiscuous labyrinth of contageous vengeance, ingulf them and would then people the coast of the Mediterranean with a new race of men, upon a construction of my own, who should never suffer lust, nor avarice, nor the cholic.

:

I am sorry that the request of the "female Bocris”* is inadmissible, being much disposed to serve them. But, I have already employed a "hack sansal" from among the dispersed, who serves me as a drogoman, broker, footpage, groom, scullian, bottlewasher, aid du corps and physician who was born in Gibralter, is free of London, a convict from Ireland, a burgomaster of Holland: was circumcised in Barbary; was a spy for the Devil among the Apostles at the feast of Penticost, and has the gift of tongues has travelled in all Europe, and will undoubtedly be hung in America, for I intend to take him there. He is the most useful scoundrel in the world. He interprets, trades, runs, holds a horse,

* Two ladies in Algiers, who wished Eaton to take one of their men servants.

scrubs, makes punch, intrigues, fights and prescribes for me, for the moderate sum of five dollars per month, and the perquisite of purloining every thing which I cannot miss. I regret that I cannot oblige the ladies.

EXTRACTS; to Hon. S. LYMAN, Esq. Springfield.

April 26th, 1799.

A mind accustomed, in a country like ours, to feast on the calm and manly happiness of contemplating, on every point, his fellow men in the full enjoyment of equal rights and equal protection, must here be almost transported to madness in viewing the extremes of intolerable insolence and of the basest abjection which every where exhibit themselves.

Blindness seems peculiar to this country. The streets are crowded with blind beggars, sitting wrapped about with miserable blankets, crying for charity for the love of Mahomet. I believe I have passed an hundred of these wretches in half a mile's walk. I think this malady may be imputed to the stimulating effect of tobacco smoke, which is taken incessantly among the men, without a sufficient use of animal food to restore the fluids which are dissipated by this unnatural stimulus. The use of tobacco in any shape I believe pernicious to the human system. Experience has taught me it is so to habits like mine; and observation has persuaded me it is so to all habits. Yet it seems to fascinate half the world of mankind: but in no place are men so tobacco-mad as in the Turkish dominions. It is as uncommon to meet a Turk here without a pipe as it is to meet a stripling in our fashionable towns in Amer ica without a segar.

TO GEORGE HOUGH, Esq.

September 15th, 1799. TIME was, friend Hough, when you and I laughed away an hour as happily as poor men could.

But no more! That however is a portion of the past, on which I frequently seize, and in a kind of retrospective pleasure act over and over again, to fill the vacuity of the present.

This place of my exile furnishes much material for contemplation, but very little of enjoyment; it is therefore among the ruins of departed pleasures that my mind retrogrades for subsistence: few periods furnish more than that of our early acquaintance.

This country is indeed beautiful and naturally productive of every thing which any soil or climate on earth can be made to produce; but it is badly cultivated, because the wretched subjects who are parched upon its surface have so precarious a title to the produce of their labor, that they find no stimulus to industry and enterprize. A naked subsistence therefore bounds their ambition, and a confirmed state of oppression has settled them into habitual indolence and contentment. Upon the vast surface of this extensive coast, naturally as fertile and as generous as the bosom of youth, little else is to be seen than wandering families of sunburnt Moors, whose only houses are tents of camels hair, and whose only property is a few herds of cattle and sheep, a little poultry and a patch of corn. A handful of olives and a morsel of bread serve them for their daily subsistence. A mat of reeds furnishes their bed, their seat and their table and a flannel blanket, thrown loosely about them, their whole wardrobe. The simplicity of their living is a striking proof how little may suffice to support life; and when contrasted with the tables of the affluent, proves also how much is devoured there without zest and without cheer, which might otherwise relieve distress and gladden the heart of sorrow. They seem to have enough and to be happy. They enjoy perfect health; live to great old age, and then gradually decline away, like old trees, without pain and without even a consciousness of decay. Such are the natives of the country. The Turks are en

So indeed are the

tirely a different species of men. inhabitants of their cities and walled towns. The eity of Tunis is inhabited by a morty herd of animals. Here within the circumference of about seven miles, three hundred thousand souls are cramed into subterraneous cells, Jews, Moors, Italians and Turks, like moles, bats, vipers and wolves. The houses are generally low, built of brick or mud; their walls contiguous to each other, admitting the light only through an aperture in the top; and, the narrow streets are so filled by the offal of two or three thousand years, that the descent to the floor in many of them is from one to two or three feet. The middling and poorer people have but one apartment, an oblong square arched over, about fifteen feet long and from ten to twelve broad. The better sort have square houses, with an open space in the centre, on each side of which is a room with necessary apartments. Here and there are elevated, among these dens, spacious stone buildings of rich Turks and foreign ministers; huge piles of castles and enormous mosques. The tops of the houses are all flat, and in the wet season of the year are covered with vegetation, which, viewed from the terrace of the American house, which has an elevation of three story above the ordinary houses, present a very grotesque appearance. Of the great number of souls, who inhabit this small space, one half, the women, never but once, during their whole lives, go without the walls of their wretched prisons; and then only to be transplanted into a confinement which has undoubtedly more allurements but stricter vigils, the house of a husband; and never without the walls of the city. Add to this, one third of the whole number, the mechanics, who never during life go three leagues from the spot of their birth. Here then are two hundred and fifty thousand animals, in the shape of human beings, who vegetate and set in the same sink. The small number who venture out confine their travels to privateering and commercial

voyages, within the confines of the Mediterranean, er to the semiannual revolution of the camp, to gath er tithes from the poor natives.

They have no books but the Alcoran, which, not one in a hundred can read, and of course no light but divine light, which, all experience teaches us, when admitted in exclusion of the light of common sense, guides men to palpable darkness. From these premises you will conclude that superstition and fanaticism have their rankest growth here. No-They are ranker in Italy and Spain, because speculators in divinity have more influence there; but here they are rank. In the twilight, (this is the time of prayers,) when parting day and solitude shed a kind of solemnity over the mind, I frequently walk upon my house top and view the animal world below. 1 behold at the same instant hundreds of souls upon their terraces prostrating themselves at the shrine of their tutelar deity, while in the cells below and mosques is heard the din of incessant prayer. With their faces towards Mecca, they kneel, they pray; fall prostrate on the ground and kiss the dust. They continue long at these devotions. With sad distor tions of countenance, souls agitated with holy zeal, and hearts religiously distended with hatred towards the unbelieving dogs who are not blinded with their light, they bless God that they were born under the influence of the true religion, and were not left to perish under Christian delusion.* A thousand ideas, faster than I can digest them, rush upon my mind on these solemn occasions: and, whether from pity or from sympathy I know not, my soul joins the torrent of prayer. "Incomprehensible source of being and perfection! Can these devotions of thy creatures, so sensible of their dependence, however darkly ignor. ant they are, and however erroneous they may be,

* I asked a Turk who frequents my house if he would go to America and turn Christian? He said he should like to go there; but for a thousand worlds he would not turn Christian and lose his soul.