head and neck of a beautiful woman, wings, and a crown;-and moreover, according to some grave authorities, a peacock's tail, brought the Prophet here on his way to heaven, in that wonderful journey which is the greatest miracle recorded of Mahommed-and the most impudent lie that ever an audacious blasphemer imposed upon the credulity of his disciples. Here he had sight of the Houris. The rock upon which he stood received the print of his sacred foot, and pilgrims are now permitted to touch-not to seethe sacred impression, and sanctify themselves by passing the hand which has touched it over their face and beard. A piece of fine green marble on the pavement is shewn as the Door of Paradise. Strait is the door as well as the way-being but fifteen inches square-and it is fastened down by four or five gilt nails; there were more formerly, but the devil, attempting to get in by this door, pulled them out; these he was unable to extract;-perhaps they were clenched on the other side. Here also is the invisible balance in which souls are weighed; and the invisible bridge which is sharper than the blade of the sword, which extends over the abyss of Hell, and over which lies the only road to Paradise. And here is the rock Sakhra,-a marvellous rock, under which, according to the author of the Messiral-Ghorum, all the waters of the earth have their source: nor is this the only thing for which the rock Sakhra is marvellous-for, according to the same author as quoted by Medjired-din, it is well known that the rock is suspended between the earth and heaven. It is true that this miracle is no longer visible, a vault having been built over the rock since a woman, who had gone under it in devotion, unluckily miscarried there for fear it should fall upon her. Before this accident pilgrims used to stand under it and see the palpable miracle; the author of the MessiralGhoram had himself seen it, and who shall dispute his authority, or that of the Judge Medjired-din Ebil-yemen Abdor-rahmen ElAlemi, who quotes him? The rock Sakhra is in the middle of the world, and it is upon this rock that the Angel Israfil will stand when he blows the trumpet which is to summon all men to their final judgement. If a stone were to be dropped from the New Jerusalem it would fall upon the rock Sakhra. The Kaaba on the day of judgment is to come to the rock Sakhra. Ali Bey found some columns within the forbidden ground which he supposes to be the remains of Solomon's Temple. Dr. Clarke, who had not only the perseverance and activity requisite for seeing whatever was within his reach, but had also the comfortable faculty of discovering whatever he wished to find, saw from the governor's windows some of that reticulated stucco among these buildings, which is commonly considered as an evidence of Roman work.' Whitaker of Manchester, whose whole historical works were formed by a series of inductions inductions in the potential mood, was not more hardy in inferring that things must have been, because they might have been, than is the Cambridge traveller. He brings forward these fragments of the opus reticulatum as an existing evidence, in the words of the margin, or in the words and capital typography of the text, A STANDING MEMORIAL OF JULIAN'S DISCOMFITURE; and reasoning upon the miracle which this evidence is to prove, repeats the assertion of Moyle, that he sees not with what forehead any man can question the truth of it.-The old scholastic education had at least one merit, that it made men logicians. The Mussulman who visits the sacred place of the temple of Jerusalem performs an act of penance as well as devotion; for he must walk barefooted to the several stations; there is no traced path, and the court is entirely covered with thistles and thorny plants growing close together, so that this part of the pilgrimage becomes an actual punishment. This was not always the case: a legend related by Medjired-din in his description of this sanctuary describes the ground as covered with anemonies and camomile. A spring without the walls, which Christians call the Fountain of Nehemiah, is believed by the Mussulmen to come miraculously from the well of Zemzem. It is true,' says Ali Bey, that my coarse palate found a remarkable difference between these two waters; this seemed to me very cold, and I had found that at Mecca very warm; the former was sweet and good, the latter briny-the miracle is therefore not perceptible by sense.' The Persians have in like manner persuaded themselves that the well in their great mosque at Sultanieh is supplied from Zemzem. From Jerusalem the traveller proceeded to Damascus, Aleppo, and Constantinople; a supplementary chapter by the editor conducts him. to Bucharest, and abruptly concludes the work. Whether the advantages which this enterprizing Spaniard derived from his assumed character have answered his own expectations, he himself best knows; public expectation will perhaps be disappointed, but with little reason. He has penetrated into the forbidden places, seen all that was concealed from Christian eyes, and reported faithfully and fully all that he saw. Few travellers would be disposed to pay the same price for the privilege of sweeping the Kaaba, and drinking the water which was sanctified with its dirt: but perhaps there are some who, if they had appeared in the same character, would have profited by it in a different manner. Bruce would not have contented himself with speculating at Morocco upon the interior of hidden Africa; he would have reached Tombuctoo, and traced the Niger to its termination, or have perished in the attempt. He would have profited by his favour at the sultan's court to have studied and developed the characters of those 31 ! those who composed it, and have given us pictures which should have lived for ever. Barrow would have borne with him a sounder judgement and a more observant eye. And Dr. Clarke!-Doctor Clarke would have opened Eve's grave, bargained with the Wahabees for Mahommed's coffin-and discovered David's harp, Solomon's seal, Jeroboam's calves, and the horns of Jupiter Ammon,if he had not been discovered himself in the emperor of Morocco's seraglio. ART. II.-Waterloo, and other Poems. By J. Wedderburne rature: what Dean Swift ridiculed as a visionary scheme has been reduced, by modern ingenuity, into actual practice; and the fancy of the Laputan philosopher to make a machine for grinding the vocabulary into treatises has been, it seems, realized by our ingenious neighbours the French. Everybody knows that M. Didot is not only a celebrated printer, but a great mechanist, and, if not the inventor, at least the introducer of that mode of printing called Stereotype, in which the lines and words are not made up of separate letters as heretofore, but are cast at once into permanent forms ready for use. Having words, and even lines, thus prepared, it was a natural yet ingenious thought to endeavour to apply some moving power by which they might be disposed in proper places and forms, without the delay, expense, and uncertainty of human labour. This moving power M. Didot seems to have acquired; and in the little work before us he exhibits a complete specimen of his success. It was not, indeed, to be expected that the machine, however ingenious, could always place the words in intelligible order, or work out any thing like sense or meaning; but as to the mechanical part it has succeeded surprizingly, and, to the eye, the lines of this pamphlet look as like real bona fide verses, as if they had been written by the hand of man, and printed by the ordinary process of the press. It occasionally, indeed, happens, (we suppose from the accidental breaking of a pully or a spindle,) that some of the lines want a foot, and that there are little flaws in different parts of the work; but errors of this kind in so new an invention are inevitable. We know that Sir Richard Arkwright's cotton machine, improved as it has been by long experience, will sometimes make a flaw in a piece of goods; we are therefore not to be surprized if M. Didot's verse-engine should be, at its first setting off, liable to similar accidents. But while we do full justice to M. Didot's ingenuity, we can not not but lament the ill-temper and hostile feeling towards England, which has induced him to announce the fortuitous produce of his engine as an English poem, and to affix to it a name, which, if not the name of an Englishman, is at least a union of English names: very probably there may be no individual of the double name of Wedderburne-Webster; still, however, the names are so notoriously British, that all foreigners, and even some of our own countrymen, will, we doubt not, believe that there is really such an author as J. Wedderburne-Webster, Esq. to the no small disparagement of our literary, and even of our national character. But that which shews at once the depth and source of the malice of the French printer and his associates, is, that they have selected the immortal day of Waterloo as the object of their experiment, and that the nonsense which their machine à vapeurs (so they call their steam-engine) has ground, is represented by them as a song of triumph on that great victory. We are ready to admit, that the French nation can never look back on that day without some emotions of sorrow, and that even the existing government may feel some slight twinges on the score of national vanity; but we think that the Royalist Police would have shewn no more than a becoming gratitude to this country if it had prevented a publication which-under the colour of a new mechanical discovery-is evidently intended to throw ridicule on the battle of Waterloo and the British language and nation. What would be thought if we were to collect all the French exercises of a ladies' boarding-school, print them on fine paper with Bulmer's best types, and circulate them in France under the title of Eloges de Sa Majesté Louis XVIII, par le Comte de la Grenouillière? Doubtless the French ambassador would not be slow to complain of such an indiguity; yet these French exercises would certainly be as much an éloge of his Majesty, as the verses of the pseudoWedderburne-Webster are an éloge on Waterloo. But our readers will be, by this time, curious to see some patterns of this curious workmanship-it is our duty to give them, but we do so, not without regret that the names of Soignies, Hougoumont, Waterloo, and Wellington, should be thus degraded. That we, however, may not be in any degree participes criminis,' we shall give our extracts verbatim, literatim, and, if we may use the expression, punctatim. The following, we suppose, may pass for the invocation— To sing in such an humble lay; But But might his lowly, feeble lyre, In others, wake th' heroic fire Like a bright beacon on the steep, 'Twould cheer his lonely vessel o'er the deep.'-p. 7. Our readers will observe what pleasant confusion the machine has made here. The Muse is of the masculine gender, and has a lyre, which lyre is a bellows, which bellows is to wake a fire, which fire is to be a light-house, by which light-house his (the Muse's) lyre or bellows (now become a ship) is to be cheer'd o'er the deep! What must the French think of us when they are told that these are English verses! Again Bear witness, Soignies' darkling bowers, Hath mark'd the downfal of the rebel train !'-p. 10. This whole stanza is a curious piece of verbal Mosaic; but the most wonderful of all is that line in which a wood and a house are jointly apostrophised with a singular pronoun and a plural verb, on the subject of a talkative battlement common to both. In fact, M. Didot himself appears so pleased with the effect of his machinery in this instance, that he grows quite wanton upon it, and in a strain of no great courtesy or grammar, adds, Whether this is the case, I really do not know, but if any person is inclined to dispute the point, I have no possible objection to THEIR going to Hougoumont to ascertain it.'-p. 75. But we have a further complaint against our ingenious persecutor. Having apparently collected from the conduct of our countrymen who literally swarm round every penny-show-box in Paris, that John Bull is somewhat muddy-headed, he has taken an insidious advantage of the circumstance to propound a riddle to him, which would have puzzled Sphynx herself. the vulture shriek'd aloud, And the red traveller sought his shroud.'-p. 9. 'Now riddle-my-ree, what is this?' After a hundred conjectures, we ended with determining that it was One of the Foot-guards going on the forlorn hope. No such thing. It is the rising sun! The peculiar malice of the question lies in this, that whereas the 'red traveller' of Ossian (from whom the word is taken) is broad and bright and glowing,' the red traveller of the poem is first black, and then of no colour at all, for he never makes his appearance! VOL. XV. NO. XXX. BR The |