terms on which Mr. Palgrave describes himself as associating with them, could be expected or could pretend to give. Mr. Palgrave writes well; his pen is fluent, we had almost said affluent; his command of language, his powers of description and dramatic delineation are considerable; and we cannot doubt that he writes with facility. These are great advantages, but they are also great temptations. To a man who commands those powers, and to whom it costs no unpleasant effort to exercise them, the temptation to rely upon these, rather than upon the accuracy that demands patient investigation, is strong; and to a man who feels in himself the power to embellish almost indefinitely any story or narrative that may take his fancy, the temptation "to touch it up" may be irresistible. When Sir Walter Scott, in playful mischief, anticipated his friend William Clerk, and told the story which he knew it was Clerk's intention to tell that evening, he could not refrain from embellishing it, or, as he said, "putting a cocked hat on its head and a cane in its hand." But Clerk, a keen and accurate historical antiquary, who valued the story because it was strictly true, accused Scott of spoiling it. Scott had no doubt improved it as a story, and perhaps had not much impaired it as a picture of manners; but he had converted a fragment of authentic history into a bit of fiction, more attractive, no doubt, than the original, but no longer an authentic record. It may perhaps be more Mr. Palgrave's misfortune than his fault that his story, which is always well told, should so often suggest the idea of the cocked hat and the cane. At the same time, a somewhat careful perusal of the book has led us to the conclusion, that whatever may be the ideal embellishments, they do not destroy the general likeness, and that the portraiture is still true, at least in the sense in which the higher kind of fiction is true, to the life and manners which it professes to delineate. What were the special objects which led Mr. Palgrave to undertake a journey attended with so much personal risk, in a country of which we already knew nearly all that we much cared to know, except latitudes and longitudes, which he had not the means of ascertaining, he does not distinctly inform us. He tells us indeed that he was then "in connexion with the order of the Jesuits, an order well known in the annals of philanthropic daring;" and that his expenses were paid by the Emperor of the French. He hints, too, at some mysterious object, the nature of which he does not choose, or does not feel at liberty, to March, divulge. What so clear-sighted a sovereign could employ Mr. Palgrave to do for him in Central Arabia, unless to purchase Arab horses, we confess ourselves unable to conjecture; but if we are to judge of Mr. Palgrave's qualifications for that office by his vague and unsatisfactory observations on the steeds which he saw in Nejd, we should be led to fear that he could not have been a very suitable agent to execute such a commission for one who knows a good horse as well as most men. What Mr. Palgrave's real views or purposes may have been, we have no means of knowing; and for our present purpose we have no concern with these, except in as far as they may be supposed to have influenced his manner of regarding what he saw and heard, or the freethe public. At the same time, we have dom and fidelity of his communications to found it impossible to resist the conviction have been unpremeditated and suddenly unthat his journey into Central Arabia must dertaken. Had it been otherwise, it cannot be supposed that he could have failed to ready publicly known of the region_in make himself acquainted with what was alwhich he contemplated travelling. We his having sought such information. On have not, however, discovered any trace of him unworthy motives, we are bound to as the contrary, unless we were to attribute to Arabia had been visited and described by sume that he was not aware that Central any European; and that when he entered the desert at Maan, on his way to Nejd, he imagined that he was about to enter a country unknown to Europeans. It is very remark. able, too, that he never appears to have got rid of this curious notion. His book, we return home; yet none of his readers, we presume, must have been written after his think, could have discovered, from anything that he has told them, that he was not the first European who had ever been in that country. It is not the less true that, since the conquest of Nejd and the overthrow of the Wahaby power by the army of Mohammed Aly of Egypt, in 1818,-that is, for Arabia, has been better known in Europe nearly half a century,-Nejd, or Central sula. than perhaps any other part of the Penin prominent places in the army with which The European officers who held dom, and which continued to occupy the Ibrahim Pacha subdued the Wahaby kingcountry for several years, did not fail to detailed information regarding Nejd, such collect, and to make public, an amount of as only their position in the service of the conqueror could have enabled them to ob-. tain from trustworthy sources, and such as " we do not possess, in a shape so authentic, regarding any other part of Arabia.* The Wahabys, as is well known, are not a nation, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, but a sect, composed of men of many different tribes and principalities. They may be shortly described as Mohammedan Puritans. The sect takes its designation from its founder, Ibn-Abd-ul-Wahab, who, about A.D. 1746, began to inculcate his religious opinions at Derayeh, which became the Wahaby capital. He required the most rigid observance of all the precepts of the Coran, from which the Mussulmans had everywhere widely departed. He rejected all the legends, and all but the well-authenticated traditions, with which successive commentators had overlaid the original text. He taught that to address prayers or supplications to Mohammed, or any other departed mortal, or even to associate in prayer any other name with that of the One God, is idolatrous. He enforced the obligation of praying five times daily, and strictly observing the fast of Ramadan. He prohibited the use of anything intoxicating, and of games of chance; required that certain crimes and moral delinquencies should no longer be tolerated, but should be severely punished; enforced the obligation of giving a certain proportion of a man's means in alms, and of putting a stop to usury; and he enjoined at least one pilgrimage to Mecca. These are all in strict conformity with the precepts and injunctions of the Coran. He farther forbade the use of tobacco, or of silk or gold in man's attire, holding these and other adornments of the person to be fit only for women, He ordered all domes and other monuments that had been erected over the graves of reputed saints to be destroyed, and forbade the erection of any such, because persons were thereby induced to address prayers or supplications to beings who had been but mortals like themselves, and thus to be guilty of idolatry. Such are the leading doctrines inculcated by Ibn-Abd-ul-Wahab more than a century ago. They were enforced by the sword of Saoud, chief of Derayeh, the reformer's efficient patron and disciple, and are still professed and enforced in like manner by the Wahabys, with the whole power of their government, and with unabated fanaticism. A succession of hereditary chiefs, who *It may be proper to explain that the term Central Arabia, as used by Mr. Palgrave, means the Wahaby kingdom, commonly known as Nejd, which embraces not only the ancient province of Nejd, or the high lands, but several other petty principalities, which have been annexed to it either by conquest or by voluntary submission. were able administrators and distinguished military leaders, enabled the Wahabys to extend their dominions, to consolidate their power, and to found a kingdom, which now includes the whole country from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the vicinity of Mecca and Medina, and which for a time included also the whole of the Hejaz. In a country the normal condition of which was such as prevailed in Arabia, where every tribe was at war with its neighbor, and not unfrequently one division of a tribe was at war with another; where revenge for blood was regarded as a sacred obligation, and the object of almost every contest was plunder, and its result devastation, the growth of and power strong enough to maintain peace and give security to agriculture and commerce, to person and property, must be a mighty gain. But, strange as it may seem, it is still true that the only basis on which a power has hitherto been established or maintained in Central and Northern Arabia has been religious fanaticism. It was so with the first Mohammedan empire; it has been so with the other minor powers that have established their domination over a part of the country for a time; it has been, and it is now, with the Wahabys. No other bond seems to be strong enough to bind these Arabs together, and when the fanaticism. has cooled the bond has been loosed. may, however, be centuries before it has so cooled in Nejd. The facts that the Wahabys are a small minority, yet strong enough to be aggressive, and that they occupy a country singularly difficult of access to an organized force, from whatever side it may advance, together with the knowledge that they are hated, as only Orientals can hate, by the Mohammedan populations around them, may probably suffice to keep alive the burning fire of their zeal. It The history of their military successes has been for the most part, as that of Asiatic conquerors has generally been, but a chronicle of massacre and pillage. While they were led by such men as Saoud, the founder of their power, or his son Abd-ul-Azeez, or his son, the second Saoud, their military successes were almost uninterrupted; but under the feeble and avaricious Abd-Allah, son of the latter Saoud, they made an unskilful and ineffectual resistance to Ibrahim Pacha. Had the father of Abd-Allah, who died before the Egyptians invaded Nejd, survived to conduct the war, the result would probably have been disastrous to the Egyptian army. Mr. Palgrave gives us in some detail, though in detached portions, a history of the Wahabys; but his information was collected |