"Tout homme doit au public le tribut de son activité, et devrait s'efforcer de laisser quelque trace honorable de son existence." (DE WEISS.) The Author of the present volumes, after passing the summer of the year 1828 amidst the most beautiful provinces of Spain, and the winter of the same year in the south of Italy, was induced by an accidental solicitation of friendship, to visit the Ionian Islands in the spring of 1829. But the vicinity of these islands to Continental Greece, the Peloponnesus and the Archipelago, held out temptations for a more extended gratification of his curiosity, too strong to be resisted. He yeilded; and having had the unexpected good fortune of traversing these regions of beauty and of desolation without encountering a single hinderance, or once experiencing a moment's uneasiness, either for the safety of his person or his purse, he was emboldened by this success to look, with an aspiring eye and high hopes, towards the more interesting countries lying deeper in the East; for the visiting of which he prepared himself during the winter months he spent at Smyrna. Accordingly, in the early part of the following year (1830), he embarked for Egypt, where his excursions up the Nile extended to the Second Cataract. On his return to the shores of the Mediterranean, he crossed the sea from Damietta to Jaffa; and having visited the whole of Syria and Palestine, including the countries lying east of the Jordan and the AntiLibanus, wintered in Aleppo. In the spring and summer of 1831, he wandered over the more in teresting parts of Asia Minor and reached Constantinople in the fall of the same year. In 1832 he returned to western Europe by way of Adrianople, Salonica, Thessaly and Athens, entering the port of Ancona the 29th of May; "longæ finis chartæque viæque❞— an exact cycle of three years having revolved since he embarked, on the very same day, from Otranto for Corfu. Such is the brief outline of a tour, dilating itself from an intended period of a few weeks to as many years, and undertaken originally with no other object in view than that of gratifying personal curiosity. The Author can, indeed, with sincerity disclaim ever having entertained the remotest intention of putting in type his notes and observations at the time he made them; confessing with cheerfulness, that however much he may have travelled for his own amusement and instruction, he considers himself in many ways inadequate to furnish proper data for the solution or elucidation of questions, which concern in a higher degree the Geographer and Archaiologist. But having made a more complete and extensive a tour of the Levant, than it has happened to others to have done, his sole object in publishing the present volumes has been a wish to be useful to the general reader, by imparting in a simple and embodied form, the result of his own personal observations upon countries he has visited, together with that information concerning them which hitherto lay scattered over the works of a hundred different authors. For this reason, as well as for the specific and undigressive style in which the narration is carried on, he is induced to think that his work will be of great convenience to future travellers, well remembering the grievous encumbrance of huge volumes on the way, which he humbly considers are much better consulted in the seclusion of a library, than on the high road from Jerusalem to Damascus. With respect to the subject-matter of the work, no one can be more fully aware of its simple and unpretending qualities, than the Author himself; who is prepared to incur blame and objection from many, for being silent, where there existed so much to enkindle the imagination, and where so many |