1829-3 Nubia, and Palestine. I(i5 



When Mr. IVIadden afterwards had an interview with Mehmet Ali, his 

 prejudices appear to have been somewhat softened. He cannot, how- 

 ever, persuade himself to admit that which all the world knows to 

 be the truth, that with some of the vices and faults which belong to his 

 country, the Pacha is vastly superior in intellect, and even in honesty, to 

 the great majority of his cotemporaries ; but he does find out that he is 

 rather weak than wicked. Our traveller appears to have paid great 

 attention to that disease which is the scourge of the countries in which he 

 travelled — the plague ; and the result of his observations is, what indeed 

 he might have learnt without going so far (because the fact is per- 

 fectly familiar to all well educated medical men in this country), that the 

 plague is nothing more than a very aggravated kind of typhus. The 

 manner in which he proposes to cure it, by strengthening and stimulating 

 the system, is beyond all question very judicious ; but it is one which has 

 been long understood and practised, not perhaps by the rascals who call 

 themselves physicians in Egypt and Turkey, and who are often bankruj>t 

 barbers, or refugee waiters, but by every one who has a right to the 

 appellation of a professor of medicine. Grateful as we are, therefore, to 

 ]Mr. IMadden, for his discovery, our gratitude has its limits, because the 

 discovery is not qitite a new one. 



Without a much more reverent opinion, then, of his physic, than 

 his politics had inspired, we are ready to bear testimony to the power of 

 some of his descriptions, and the amusing nature of most of them. That 

 of the lunatic asylum at Cairo, is amongst the most distressing and fright- 

 ful we ever remember to have seen, and this without any exaggeration. 

 A story which he tells from the witticisms of Ebn Oaz, whom he calls the 

 Joe ]\Iiller of the East, and who was the buffoon of one of the Caliphs, is 

 characteristic enough : — 



" 'When the Caliph Haroun el Raschid (who was the friend of the great 

 Charlemagne.) entertained Ebn Oas at his court in the quality of jester, he 

 desired him one day, in the presence of the Sultana and a]l her followers, to 

 make an excuse worse than the crime it was intended to extenuate : the 

 Caliph walked about, waiting for a reply. After a long pause, Ebn Onz 

 skulked behind the throne, and pinched his highness in the rear. The rage of 

 the Caliph was imbountled. ' I beg a thousand pardons of your Majesty,' 

 said Ebn Oas, ' but I thought it was her Highness the Sultana.' This was 

 the excuse worse than the crime ; and of course the jester was pardoned." 



It is however a fault, unpardonable, that the relator introduces it by a 

 ribald sneer against the author of the Pleasures of IMemory — a poem 

 which will be read for ages after the very trunks which l\Ir. Madden's 

 travels must line, will have ceased to be. 



When this author has fairly put us out of all temper with his politics, 

 he reconciles us with the lively and unaffected narration of the events he 

 met with or saw. He is unquestionably a very observant traveller. For 

 all that he has seen with his own eyes, we would willingly take his own 

 word ; but the common propensity of travellers, and a somewhat heated 

 imagination, occasionally deludes him, when he gives opinions on specu- 

 lative matters, and he adopts, with a credulity in which his readers will 

 hardly sympathize, some of the marvellous relations of the persons he met 

 with. That part of his journeyings which lay through Egypt, is parti- 

 cularly well told ; his observations on the natural history of the country, 

 his inquiries into the manufacture of mummies, his relative measurement 

 of the heads of living. Copts and Nubians, and of dead Egyptians, are all 



