spective governments under which they lived.* We found the Jew sitting in a small and mean apartment, in the court of the palace, surrounded by a number of writers, all apparently of his own religion. Mr. Bankes had brought letters to him from Lady Hester Stanhope, which procured us a good reception. After a few minutes' conversation, and the serving of coffee, we expressed a wish to be permitted to see the palace of the pasha, the castle, the armoury, and any other public building that might be deemed worthy of a stranger's attention, which, after some hesitation, arising from the peculiar circumstances of the government at the present moment, was at last acceded to.

As no regularly appointed pasha had yet replaced the late governor of Damascus, who had recently died on his route of return from the pilgrimage of Mecca, the administration of affairs was vested in the hands of his kihyah bey, or prime minister. A message was therefore sent in to an inner apartment of the palace, stating the nature of our visit, and the request we had preferred; when the bearer of it soon returned, and invited us in the name of his master, to "the presence." We readily followed him, and found the venerable Turk seated in a small but richly furnished apartment, guarded and attended by at least fi fty handsome officers, all armed with sabres and dirks, and all superbly dressed. We were desired to seat ourselves on the sofa beside these chiefs, before whom stood in groups an equal number of armed attendants, and were treated with great respect and attention.

* It is worthy of remark, that Damascus was considered by some of the older writers as the original city of the Jews; and, indeed, we have it mentioned as the birth-place of Eliezer, the steward of the household of Abram, before he was promised to be the father of the whole race, and of Israel, whose children they were to be called. The author, who describes it as the original city of the Jews, calls it also "the most noble of the cities of Syria," which it still continues to be. He adds, that the Syrian kings boasted their descent in a right line from Queen Semiramis; and says, that the name of Damascus was given to the city by one of its earliest kings, who was himself so called, and in honour of whom the Syrians afterwards worshipped the sepulchre of his wife Arathes (probably Aradus on the coast), as a temple, and esteemed her a goddess in the height of their most religious devotions.

The rich Jew, Mallim Yusef, who conducted us to the presence of the kihyah bey, seated himself with the greatest possible humility on the floor beneath us, at the feet of his superiors who occupied the sofa, first kneeling, and then sitting back while kneeling, on the heels and soles of his feet, with these and his hands completely covered, in an attitude and with an air of the most abject and unqualified humiliation. Mr. Bankes was dressed as a Turkish effendi, or private and unmilitary person: I still continued to wear the less showy garments of the Christian merchant, with which I had replaced my Bedouin garb. The rich Jew was dressed in the most costly garments, including Cashmere shawls, Russian furs, Indian silks, and English broad-cloth: all, however, being of dark colours, since none but the orthodox Mohammedans are allowed to wear either green, red, yellow, azure, or white, in any of their garments, which are therefore, however costly in material, almost restricted to dark browns, blacks, and blues. Among the party was also a Moslem dervish, with a patchwork and party-coloured bonnet of a sugar loaf shape, and his body scarcely half covered with rags and tattered garments; his naked limbs obtruding themselves most offensively, and his general appearance being indecent and disgusting. It was impossible not to be struck forcibly with the different modes of reception and treatment adopted towards us, more particularly as contrasted with our real and apparent conditions. The Jew, who was by far the wealthiest and the most powerful of all present, who lived in the most splendid house in Damascus, and fed from his table more than a hundred poor families every day, who literally managed the great machine of government, and had influence enough, both here and at Constantinople, to procure the removal of the present bey from his post if he desired it, was obliged to kneel in the presence of those who could not have carried on the affairs of government without his aid, while the dervish, contemptible alike for his ignorance and arrogant assumption of superiority, was admitted to the seat of honour, and, with ourselves, who were of a faith as far removed

from their own as the Jew's, was served with coffee, sherbet, and perfumes, and treated by the attendants with all the marks of submission and respect.

After a short conversation on general subjects, in which political news and exchange of compliments had the largest share, two cawasses, or soldiers, with silver sticks, were ordered to attend us around the palace, and we accordingly withdrew. On the intelligence of the late pasha's death first reaching Damascus, the treasury, and all the apartments of his residence which were thought to contain any valuable articles, were instantly secured with bolts and bars, and placed under lock and seal, in which state of security they still remained, this being assigned to us as a reason why the apartments best worth seeing were not at present accessible. We were, therefore, shown only a few of the rooms of the palace, and all of these fell far short of our expectations, having nothing of magnificence in their appearance. Many of them, indeed, were so mean as to force comparisons of a ludicrous nature, and present the image of a barber's shop, a tailor's board, &c. This was particularly the case with one small apartment which was said to be a favourite one of the late pasha, in which he generally took his evening coffee, though such a place would be appropriated to no higher use than a scullery in any decent house in England. The choice of such a place was probably, however, not in conformity with the natural taste of this Turkish chief, but from an affectation of simplicity in public, which is by no means uncommon with those who indulge in the greatest luxuries and sensualities in private, and who are withal the most inexorable of tyrants, as evinced, among others, in the character of the late pasha of Acre, surnamed Jezzar, or the butcher, from his bloody cruelty, who nevertheless assumed in public the simplicity of a patriarch or a hermit.

From seeing the lower apartments of the palace, we were taken to a flight of wooden stairs, which we ascended, and came to a long gallery at the top, from which we were shown through

T T

the windows the interior of a fine room, the embellishments of which were really handsome. The marble pavement, the gilded and enamelled friezes, cornices, and ceilings, the pointed arched recesses, the curious and costly mosaic of the inlaid doors, were all extremely beautiful; and this splendour of the pasha's retirement might well compensate for his public appearance of humility. We learnt that this was the principal apartment in which he received and passed his leisure hours with the ladies of his harem; a word which to an English ear conveys an idea of indulgence in voluptuous pleasures, and is calculated to give the most erroneous notions of Turkish life, the harem being no doubt as often the scene of cruel and ferocious violence as of consenting love. We learnt that there were now in the palace a number of the pasha's wives and concubines, under charge of a bearded old man, who was pointed out to us, and not in the keeping of eunuchs, as is almost universally the case. They would remain here, we were told, closely immured and jealously guarded in their confinement, until a person deputed from Constantinople should arrive to take them to the Grand Signor, or Sultan of Stamboul, who has alone the power of adding them to the innumerable victims of his own imperial harem, or disposing of them as may suit his pleasure in marriage to his favourite officers. The reflections suggested by this communication, formed a powerful drawback from the pleasure we derived from the gay and happy scene of yesterday, while it confirmed my impression of the dreadful insecurity of life and liberty under a despotism so unlimited as this.

Our next visit was to the armoury, in the great court before the palace. We saw here thirty brass field-pieces, six-pounders, of Turkish foundry and well mounted, being ranged in front of the armoury, and ready for immediate service. Within these were some few heaps of shot and shells, and a number of large jars filled with tar; several closed palanquins or tachterevans, which are borne between two camels, and used for the conveyance of the pasha's ladies, whenever he may need their attendance in any

journey or excursion, and particularly for the pilgrimage to Mecca. There were also about fifty large and very old blunderbusses, capable of carrying a ball of about a pound weight, and furnished with a swivel just before the match-lock, so as to admit of its being fastened to a saddle and fired from a dromedary's back, or from the ground, as occasion might require. This place might be called the magazine of the Hadj, rather than the general armoury, as all these articles, we were told, were kept exclusively for the pilgrimage to Mecca, and put in requisition on the departure of the annual caravan.

From hence we went to the castle, which is not far distant from the magazine described. It is a large edifice, constructed in nearly the same style as the great castle at Bozrah, and surrounded with a broad and deep ditch of rustic masonry. It appears to be a work of great antiquity, and to have undergone many alterations, additions, and repairs, at different periods. The stones of the oldest parts of this building, near its foundation, are of an extraordinarily large size. The rustic masonry is the only feature of Roman architecture that it possesses, as the arches of the interior are chiefly of the pointed form, like those of Ádjeloon and Assalt. These castles, instead of elucidating the history of the pointed arch, and defining the line which separates the eastern from the western style of architecture, or serving to mark the distinction between the Roman, the Saracen, and the Gothic orders of building, offer perpetual contradictions, and make the subject more difficult and obscure. In the same edifice we had seen the round, the flattened, and the pointed arch, rustic masonry on the exterior front, and fine smooth masonry in the interior walls; yet all apparently of the same age, and, in many instances, certainly all coeval with the original construction of the work in which they appeared.

At the castle of Athlete, on the sea-coast of Palestine, Mr. Bankes acknowledged to me that he had seen sufficient of these mixed features to create strong doubts in his mind as to the accu