from the capital firstly, and then from the entire empire. No Roman censors in their palmy days had a higher range of authority, or were less fettered by all ordinary restrictions. Not only were these Zelators to denounce offenders, but they might also in their own unchallenged right inflict the penalty incurred, beat and fine at discretion, nor was any certain limit assigned to the amount of the mulet or the number of the blows." It might be supposed that the functions of these gentlemen would be exercised only amongst the lower orders, but this would be quite a mistake. Mr. Palgrave says: "Furnished with such powers, and backed up by the whole weight of government, it may be easily supposed that the new broom swept clean, and that the first institution of the Zelators was followed by root-and-branch work. Rank itself was no protection, high birth no shelter, and private or political enmities now found themselves masters of their aim. Djeloo'wee, Feysul's own brother, was beaten with rods at the door of the king's own palace for a whiff of tobacco smoke; and his royal kinsman could not or would not interfere to save him from inflict the legal chastisement. But 'Alee was a big strapping lad, and not easily floored; he soon tore himself away from his well-intentioned exehouse, calling madly for aid on his brother cutioners, and rushed into the interior of the Hasan. Out came the elder with a pistol in either hand, while 'Alee having picked up a dagger brandished it fearfully; and the old Na'ìb, aroused from sleep in his uptstairs bedroom, leaned over the parapet in his dressing-gown, like Shelley's grey tyrant father, and screamed out from above Persian threats and curses. The and Hasan ran after, sword and pistol in hand, Zelators turned tail and fled in confusion; 'Alee half-way down the street, beating one, kicking another, and leaving a third sprawling in the dust."-Vol. ii. p. 105. Here we paused to consider the case of these unhappy Sheeah heretics, who had so grossly maltreated this "holy squadron," backed up by the whole weight of government," and concluded that their fate would be terrible. That the Zelators, though naturally enough, from the nature of their office, not very popular, should not have been able, in the streets of Riad, to command assistance enough to protect them from the personal violence of foreign heretics, seemed strange. There could be no doubt, however, that blows, which, in the estimation of Arabs, can be atoned only by blood, would meet with condign punishment,-but not a bit of it. undergoing at fifty an ignominy barely endurable at fifteen. Soweylim, the prime minister, and predecessor of Mahboob, was on a similar pretext, but in reality (so said universal rumour) at the instigation of a competitor for his post, seized one day while on his return homeward from the castle, thrown down, and subjected to "Without delay the Na'ib donned his clothes so protracted and so cruel a fustigation that he and went to the palace, there to demand justice expired on the morrow. If such was the chas- for the housebreaking aggression thus committisement prepared for the first personages in the ted, and to protest very reasonably this time state, what could plebeian offenders expect? against the absurdity of compulsory attendance Many were the victims, many the backs that on divine worship. We did not think it necessmarted and the limbs crippled or broken. To- sary to accompany him, since our affair had at bacco vanished, though not in fumo, and torn any rate ended smoothly. But Aboo-'Eysa, silks strewed the streets or rotted on the dung- who had gone with the Na'ib, played the orator hills; the mosques were crowded, and the shops in our behalf. The result was a royal order isdeserted. In a few weeks the exemplary sem- sued to the Zelators not to trouble themselves blance of the outward man of the capital might further about us and our doings; while, in comhave moved the admiration of the first Wahha-pensation for past insults, the Persian ambassabee himself."-Vol. i. p. 411. dor was henceforth treated at the palace with greater decency by Mahboob and his crew. Having pondered on this formidable array of unlimited and apparently irresponsible power, backed by the whole strength of a despotic government, and on the manner in which it was exercised by fanatical Wahabys, we were surprised to find further on the following account of the only practical attempt to exercise those powers of which Mr. Palgrave speaks as of his own knowledge :— "From our door the holy squadron passed to that of the Na'ib. Here a thundering knock was at once answered by 'Alee, the younger servant, who with unsuspecting rashness flung the entrance wide open. No quarter to Persians: "Throw him down, beat him, purify his hide," was shouted out on all sides, and the foremost laid hold of the astonished Shiya'ee to Now, although the Na'ib, as the representative of a foreign government, was undoubtedly entitled to demand protection for himself and his servants from such intrusions, and especially from attempts to enforce by violence the spiritual discipline of Riad on the two members of his establishment, we must confess that the Zelators, of whose irresistible and irresponsible power Mr. Palgrave had led us to form so very exalted an idea, shrunk, in our estimation, after this affair, into the dimensions of ordinary and not very formidable beadles, who were kept well in hand, and whose power was very far from being either unlimited or irresponsible. Our author's account of the moral condi tion of the Wahaby capital is as repulsive a picture of human depravity as we remember to have met with, and he attributes its bad pre-eminence in vice mainly to the efforts of the government to enforce religious observ ance: to drive them from Riad, they found it prudent to decamp quietly, and proceed to Hofhoof, in the Wahaby district of Haza, to which, although they had for a time been permitted to remain at Riad, they had on their first arrival been directed to betake themselves. They performed the journey without molestation, and at Hofhoof lodged in the house of their friend Aboo Eysa, whose home and family were in that town. As they approached the shores of the Persian Gulf, they observed a very perceptible change in the appearance, the dress, the manners, and character of the inhabitants, and even some difference in their language, when compared with that of the tribes in the interior. The people of Hasa had long main other countries on the shores of the Gulf, which had in some respects modified their habits and character. Mr. Palgrave is thus led into the following singular statement :— "Meanwhile poor morality fares little better in this pharisaical land than in Burns's Kilmarnock, or Holy Fair. True, lights are extinguished an hour or so after sunset, and streetwalking rigorously inhibited; while in the daytime not even a child may play by the roadside; not a man laugh out. True, profane instruments of music disturb not the sacred hum of Coranic lectures, and no groups of worldly mirth offend serious eyes in the market-place. But profligacy of all kinds, even such as language refuses to name, is riper here than in Damascus and Seyda themselves, and the comparative detained a commercial intercourse with the cency of most other Arab towns sets off the blackness of Riad in stronger and stranger contrast. A government which, not content with repressing scandalous excesses, demands from its subjects fervent and austere piety, will soon discover that, while attempting to render an impossible service to the cause of virtue, it has in truth only promoted vice,' is one of the many just remarks of a well-known modern author. In fact, most of what Macaulay observes on this very topic in his 'Critical and Historical Essays, whether his theme be the Rump Parliament and Puritan austerity, or the hideous reaction of immorality under the reign of the latter Stuarts, may be almost literally applied to the present condition of the Arab kingdom of saints, while it foretells a future inevitably not remote. "-Vol. ii. pp. 24, 25. Mr. Palgrave may have authentic information which entitles him to institute these hideous comparisons, and to decide that Riad is more infamous than even Damascus or Seyda; but as the information on which this opinion is founded must have been derived from other persons, and as we have not learned to place implicit reliance on all that his informants have told him, or on his power to discriminate between such of their stories or statements as are true and such as are not, observing, moreover, that Mr. Palgrave hates the Wahabys and their whole system with a cordial hatred, we are not inclined to accept his decision as infallible, or his account as unquestionable. We prefer to suspend our judgment for the present, considering it not impossible, had Colonel Pelly seen as much of the people of Riad as he saw of their chief, Feysul, that his picture of the one might have been as unlike Mr. Palgrave's as his portrait of the other undoubtedly is. The travellers were all along regarded as spies, which Mr. Palgrave seems to admit that they were; and having offended the truculent Abd-Allah, the son of Feysul, who threatened their lives, and seemed determined or at "The European public is deluged with accounts of Arab customs, Arab ways, Arab qualities, houses, dresses, women, warriors, and what not; the most part from materials collected in Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, 'Irāk, perhaps Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco: the best in Djiddah and on the Red Sea coast. Sometimes a romantic spirit will furnish scenes among the hybrid Bedouins of Palmyra as portraits of Arab life; sometimes we are invited to study Arab society in a divan at Cairo or Aleppo. Such narratives, however accurate they may be for the localities and races they describe, have not an equal claim to the title of correct delineations of Arabs much as if the description of a backwoodsand of Arab customs. The case appears to me man of Ohio should be given for a faithful portrait of a Yorkshire farmer, or the ways and doings of Connaught for a sketch of Norfolk life and manners. Syria and Egypt, Palmyra and Bagdad, even less Mosoul and Algiers, are not Arabia, nor are their inhabitants Arabs. ture of Curdes, Turcomans, Syrians, PhoeniThe populations alluded to are instead a mixcians, Armenians, Berbers, Greeks, Turks, Copts, Albanians, Chaldæans, not to mention the remnants of other and older races, with a little, a very little Arab blood, one in twenty at most, and that little rediluted by local and territorial influences. That all more or less speak Arabic is a fact which gives them no more claim to be numbered among Arabs, than speaking bad English makes an Englishman of a native of Connaught or of Texas. For the popular figure of the Bedouin, I must add, that even were he sketched, as he rarely is, from the genuine nomade of Arabia, it would be no juster to bring him forward as an example of Arab life and society, than to publish the 'Pickwick Papers, or Nicholas Nickleby,' with 'Scenes in High Life,' or 'Tales of the Howards, ' on the back. These unlucky and much-talked of Bedouins in the Syrian, also miscalled Arabian, desert, are in fact only hybrids, crosses เ who are beyond his limits, cease to be Arabs, and any one who encountered them in Meso be imposing on the public; but whenever they return within his limits, they become Arabs again, and he may describe them as such. What we have said of the Shammar applies equally to other tribes, who, according to Mr. Palgrave, would be genuine Arabs when within his limits, and would not be Arabs at all, but hybrids, when beyond them. This is surely very childish. between Turcoman and Curdish tribes, with a small and questionable infusion of Arab blood, and that too none of the best, like a wine-potamia, and described them as Arabs, would glass of thin claret poured into a tumbler of water. In short, among these races, town or Bedouin, we have no real authentic Arabs. Arabia and Arabs begin south of Syria and Palestine, west of Basrah and Zobeyr, east of Kerak and the Red Sea. Draw a line across from the top of the Red Sea to the top of the Persian Gulf; what is below that line is alone Arab: and even then do not reckon the pilgrim route, it is half Turkish; nor Medina, it is cosmopolitan; nor the sea-coast of Yemen, it is Indo-Abyssinian; least of all Mecca, the common sewer of Mahometans of all kinds, nations, and lands, and where every trace of Arab identity has long since been effaced by promiscuous immorality and the corruption of ages. Mascat and Kateef must also stand with Mokha and 'Aden on the list of exceptions."-Vol. ii. p. 162. The inference from all this is apparent. Having led his readers to believe that Central Arabia was an unknown country till he visited it, Mr. Palgrave now wishes to persuade them that there are no genuine Arabs anywhere else; from which it follows that no one has ever seen genuine Arabs except himself. Niebuhr and Burckhardt, and others, who saw only the mongrel Arabs of Mocha, Yemen, Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Hejaz, are not to be relied on, and Mr. Palgrave alone is to be trusted. Seriously, the assertion contained in the concluding sentences of the preceeding extract is very absurd. It is the hasty utterance of a man who is ill-informed on the subject, and whose overweening confidence leads him to mistake his own fancies for facts. There are several tribes, one part of which inhabits the country south and west of Mr. Palgrave's line, while another part inhabits, for the whole or greater part of the year, the countries beyond it. Let us take, for example, the great tribe Shammar. They have their head-quarters, so to speak, at Djebel Shammar, or, as Mr. Palgrave has it, Djebel Shomer, but the numerical majority of the tribe spend the greater part of every year, and some clans or divisions often spend a whole year or more, beyond the limits assigned by Mr. Palgrave, pitching their tents and feeding their flocks, in Irak and in Mesopotamia; but there is a frequent interchange of families and individuals between the nomade and the settled portions. Many of those who are in tents in Irak or Mesopotamia own lands in Djebel Shammar, and many of the families residing in the towns and villages of that district have flocks with the nomades, and some member of the family in their tents. Acording to Mr. Palgrave the Shemmer Except with regard to certain limited classes in the places which he visited, Mr. Palgrave's notions about Arabs, their actual condition and locality, seem to be unaccountably misty and imperfect. Of this, the passage we have just quoted is by no means the only indication we have found in his book. The fact is, that there are, beyond the limits specified by our author, Arabs as genuine or "authentic as any to be found within those limits, but who have never been to the south of his fanciful boundary. "Ex pede Herculem," he tells us somewhere, is an excellent adage; but a description of the foot or the hand does not, he says, always furnish a complete idea of the body or the head. This is quite true, and he is, of course, to give us the whole; but he has simply reversed the process. His Hercules is all head, without body, arm, or foot, and without a leg to stand upon. From Hofhoof the travellers proceeded to Kateef, in order to embark at that port for Bahrein. At Kateef they found the negro Wahaby governor occupying a building, by tradition attributed to Karmat, founder of the Karmathite sect, which, for some fifty years during the tenth century of the Christian era, was the dominant power in the peninsula of Arabia, and carried its ravages to Syria. If this tradition be well founded, it would settle a point in Arabian geography which puzzled Niebuhr, and over which the generally sure-footed D'Herbelot stumbled; but Mr. Palgrave does not care for these things. He expresses an opinion that the building is not of the tenth, but of the twelfth or thirteenth century; but the reasons he assigns are not satisfactory; and we are on the whole inclined to believe the tradition which would identify Kateef with the Hajar of the Karmathians, and the building referred to with the palace which Karmat built there, and called Mahādia. Had Mr. Palgrave been aware of the interest attaching to the question, he might perhaps have been able to decide it. From Kateef the travellers proceeded to Bahrein, where Aboo Eysa joined them. Here they separated, Barakat, the youth of On the river Don, in Aberdeenshire-best known to the world by its Auld Brig, which Lord Byron, photography, and its own exceeding beauty have made famous-is the house of Stoneywood, four miles from the sea. It was for many generations the property of the Lords Frazer of Muchals, now Castle Frazer, one of the noblest of the many noble castles in that region, where some now nameless architect has left so many memorials of the stately life of their strong-brained masters, and of his own quite singular genius for design. Zahlah, proceeding with Aboo Eysa to Aboo | obite family in the latter half of last cenShahr, commonly called Bushire, while Mr. tury we have had the privilege of enjoying, Palgrave with a servant of Aboo Eysa's and we wish we could tell our readers half named Yoosef (Joseph) Ebn-Khamees, who as vividly what it has told to us. We shall was charged with presents for chiefs on the try. coast, and for the Imam of Muscat, took shipping for Oman, their ultimate destination being Muscat. Off the south-eastern coast of Oman their barque foundered in a gale; most of the passengers and some of the crew perished, but our traveller, his companion Yoosef, the skipper, and some others, took to the boat and got ashore. The whole account of the gale and the shipwreck is well told, and has a strong Arab smack about it, from its family resemblance to a similar catastrophe that befell Sindbad the sailor somewhere thereabouts. But we shall not follow Mr. Palgrave into Oman. Any one who may desire accurate information regarding that part of Arabia will find it in Wellsted. Before concluding, we desire to say, that had we considered Mr. Palgrave's Central Arabia an ordinary book of travels in the East, we should not have taken the trouble to examine it so much in detail, or to point out the errors to which we have directed attention. It is because we consider Mr. Palgrave no ordinary traveller, and no ordinary writer, that we have deemed it right to deal with him as we have done. So far as we are aware, this is his first effort; we sincerely hope it will not be his last; and that, when he next comes before the public, it will be with a full appreciation of the serious responsibility incurred by every man who undertakes to instruct his fellows. We hope that the success of his first venture will not mislead him; that he will not be content to be read and laid aside like the last new novel or romance; that by abating his confidence and recognising the necessity for careful investigation and diligent research in order to get at the "truth of fact," and by not appreciating beyond its value the " truth of imagination," he may yet give us a book of travels of the highest class. We believe he has it in him, if he can but resist the temptations which have prevented him from accomplishing that object in the attractive book which we now close. ART. II.-A JACOBITE FAMILY. DID you ever, when journeying along a road at night, look in curiously at some cottage window, and like a happier Enoch Arden, watch unseen the bright life within, and all the naïve ongoings of the household? Such a glimpse of the inner life of a Jac Stoneywood was purchased near the close of the sixteenth century, from the Lord Frazer of that time, by John Moir of Ellon, who had sold his own estate, as tradition tells, in the following way:-Bailie Gordon, a wealthy Edinburgh merchant, made a bargain with the Laird of Ellon, when in his cups, to sell his estate at a price greatly under its value. The country folk, who lamented the passing away of the old family, and resented the trick of the bailie, relieved themselves by pronouncing their heaviest malediction, and prophesying some near and terrible judgment. Strangely enough, the curse, in the post hoc sense, was not causeless. A short time after the purchase an awful calamity befell Mr. Gordon's family. Its story has been told by a master pen, that which gave us Matthew Wald and Adam Blair, and the murderer M'Kean. We give it for the benefit of the young generation, which, we fear, is neglecting the great writers of the past in the wild relish and exuberance of the too copious present, It will be an evil day when the world only reads what was written yesterday, and will be forgotten to-morrow. "Gabriel was a preacher or licentiate of the Kirk, employed as domestic tutor in a gentleman's family in Edinburgh, where he had for pupils two fine boys of eight or ten years of age. The tutor entertained, it seems, some partiality for the Abigail of the children's mother, and it so happened, that one of his pupils observed him kiss the girl one day in passing through an anteroom, where she was sitting. The little fellow carried this interesting piece of intelligence to his brother, and both of them mentioned it by way of a good joke to their mother the same evening. Whether the lady had dropped some hint of what she had heard to her maid or whether she had done so to the preacher himself, I have not learned; but so it was, that he found he hadbeen discovered, and by what means also. The idea of having been detected in such a trivial trespass was enough to poison forever the spirit of this juvenile Presbyterian-his whole soul became filled with the blackest demons of rage, and he resolved to sacrifice to his indignation deadly a disgrace. It was Sunday, and after going to the church as usual with his pupils, he led them out to walk in the country-for the ground on which the New Town of Edinburgh now stands, was then considered as the country by the people of Edinburgh. After passing calmly, to all appearance, through several of the green fields, which have now become streets and squares, he came to a place more lonely than the rest, and there drawing a large clasp-knife from his pocket, he at once stabbed the elder of his pupils to the heart. The younger boy gazed on him for a moment, and then fled with shrieks of terror; but the murderer pursued with the bloody knife in his hand, and slew him also as soon as he was overtaken. The whole of this shocking scene was observed distinctly from the Old Town, by innumerable crowds of people, who were near enough to see every motion of the murderer, and hear the cries of the infants, although the deep ravine between them and the place of blood, was far more than sufficient to prevent any possibility of rescue. The tutor sat down upon the spot, immediately after having concluded his butchery, as if in a stupor of despair and madness, and was only roused to his recollection by the touch of the hands that the instruments of what he conceived to be so seized him. "It so happened that the magistrates of the city were assembled together in their councilroom, waiting till it should be time for them to walk to church in procession (as is their custom), when the crowd drew near with their captive. The horror of the multitude was communicated to them, along with their intelligence, and they ordered the wretch to be brought at once into their presence. It is an old law in Scotland, that when a murderer is caught in the very act of guilt (or, as they call it, red-hand), he may be immediately executed, without any formality or delay. Never surely could a more fitting occasion be found for carrying this old law into effect. Gabriel was hanged within an hour after the deed was done, the red knife being suspended from his neck, and the blood of the innocents scarcely dry upon his fingers."* The boys were the sons of the new Laird of Ellon. It adds something to the dreadfulness of the story that it was the woman who urged the wretched youth to the deed. We remember well this Gabriel's Road, the lane leading up past "Ambrose's," the scene of the famous Noctes. It is now covered by the new Register Office buildings. But to return to the ex-Laird of Ellon. Mr. Moir, having lost one estate, forthwith set about acquiring another, and purchased Muchalls, its Lord having got into difficulThe lady of the Castle, loath, we doubt ties. Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk, vol. ii. not, to leave her "bonnie house," persuaded Mr. Moir to take instead, the properties of Stoneywood, Watterton, Clinterty, and Greenburn, on Don side, which were afterwards conjoined under the name of the barony of Stoneywood. The grateful Lady of Frazer sent along with the title-deeds a five-guinea gold piece-a talisman which was religiously preserved for many generations. earliest record down to their close, to have The family of Stoneywood seem from the been devotedly attached to the house of Stuart. In the old house there long hung a portrait of Bishop Juxon, who attended Charles I. on the scaffold, and through this prelate must have come a still more precious relic, long preserved in the family, and which is now before us, the Bible which the doomed King put into the hands of the Bishop on the scaffold, with the word "Remember," having beforehand taken off his cloak and presented it and the insignia of the Garter to the same faithful minister and friend; this is one of our glimpses. We have the sacred and royal book before us now, a quarto, printed in 1637, bound in blue velvet, and richly embroidered and embossed with gold and silver lace. There is the crown and the Prince of Wales' feathers, showing it had belonged to Charles II. when prince. He must have given it to his hapless father, as the C. P. is changed into C. R. Though faded it looks princely still. One of its blank leaves, on which was written "Charles Stuart ano. dom. 1648," was, along with the gold piece, pilfered as follows: "Miss Moir, who was rather of an unaccommodating temper, remained alone at Stoneywood for a year longer, and in fact until the sale had been completed, and it became necessary to quit. The retired and solitary life she led during this last period was taken advantage of by a woman in her service, of the name of Margaret Grant, to commit various thefts, with the assistance of a paramour, who happened unfortunately to be a blacksmith. By his means they got the charter-chest opened, and abstracted thence the prophetic gold piece, gifted by Lady Fraser two hundred years before, and also Bishop Juxon's valuable legacy of King Charles's Bible, presented to him on the scaffold. The gold piece was readily made available, and was, of course, never recovered, but the Bible proved to be a more difficult treasure to deal with, it being generally known in the county to be an heirloom of the Stoney wood family, and accordingly, when she offered it for sale in Aberdeen, she became aware that she was about to be detected. She took the precaution to abscond, and suspecting that mischief might come of so sacrilegious a theft, she |
