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A RAMBLE WITH THE TRAVELLERS. 



OUR recollections of Travellers have been called up, by a perusal of 

 Mr. St. John's lately published " Lives" of some of the most celebrated 

 of them. 



To the philosophic inquirer, surveying with anxious eyes the various 

 moral features which characterise the physiognomy of the great human 

 family, the study of man under the variations of climate must continue 

 to be one of surpassing interest The researches of such men as Pococke, 

 and Chardin, are to him magic threads, by whose guidance he is enabled 

 to penetrate into the devious labyrinths of fiction and fable, and to trace 

 out with a precision otherwise impossible, the footprints of ancient cus- 

 toms which have been worn out by the successive generations of time, 

 and the introduction of a more refined civilization. The true traveller 

 is in fact the philosopher of history, and he beholds, as in an enchanted 

 mirror, the past ages, in their pride and magnificence, passing before 

 him. Gibbon formed his idea of the " Decline and Fall of the Roman 

 Empire," while lingering among the ruins of the Coliseum. But inde- 

 pendent of any higher or more consequential reason, the narratives of 

 travellers will always be read with delight, for their own sake. They 

 prove to us in every page the correctness of Lord Byron's remark, that 

 " truth is stranger than Jiction." The imagination of the most fertile 

 novelist cannot pourtray feelings so various, or shades of character so 

 many-coloured, as are to be found in the high-ways and by-ways of 

 human life. The wonderful sights of Ibn Batuta, are contrasted with 

 the plain and unornamented science of Hasselquist, and the cold and 

 passionless classicalities of Pococke, with the daring and untiring enthu- 

 siasm of the unfortunate Ledyard. We have romance and reality so plea- 

 santly blended, that we do not stop to separate one from the other. We 

 have not forgot the pleasure with which we dreamed in silent wonder 

 over the terrible accounts of c( fish which resembled a mountain," and 

 whose eyes were like two doors, " so that people could walk in at 

 one eye and out at the other ;" or of the pearl-divers, who remained 

 under water for two hours without any personal inconvenience ; or of 

 that extraordinary tree which possessed the power of bestowing rejuve- 

 7iescence, so that any one fortunate enough to catch a falling leaf, was 

 restored by an alchymy more rapid than that attributed to the philoso- 

 pher's stone, to his summer bloom and activity. The celebrated Mi- 

 chaelis, thought that the stones upon which Moses had commanded the 

 laws of God to be graven, might be at some future period discovered 

 in Palestine ; and many early eastern travellers were not without a hope 

 of taking the accurate dimensions of the foot-prints of our Saviour. 

 Some odd twenty years ago, we never doubted the Indian traveller, 

 when he described the Land of Darkness, as being situate forty days* 

 journey from the city of Bulgar, in Siberia.* 



Those days of beautiful credulity are gone by, and we are now de- 

 sirous of obtaining the reality without the romance. The diffusion of 

 travellers over the world, has been gradually increasing from William 

 de Rubouquis, who hoped to convert the Khan of Tartary to the ca- 



* The narrative of the extraordinary traveller to whom we allude, Ibn Batuta, 

 has been translated, it may be recollected, by Professor Lee. It abounds in mar- 

 vels of the most startling character. 



