48 H. S. Jarrett— Customs among the Bedouins of the Haw an. [No. 2, 



However honourable to the writer of this lively sketch may be 

 the industry and powers of observation it displays, its style and accu- 

 racy in point of language are scarcely creditable to the schoolmaster. 

 Gray, writing to Horace Walpole regarding Boswell's Journal of a 

 Tour to Corsica, which had not long before been published says : ' The 

 pamphlet proves what I have always maintained, that any fool may 

 write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he 

 heard and saw with veracity." This opinion toned down in the politer 

 phraseology in which Walpole subsequently expressed it, cannot fairly 

 be resented by any writer to whom it may be applied. ' Mr. Gray, the 

 poet has often observed to me, that if any person were to form a book 

 of what he had seen and heard, it must, in whatever hands, prove a 

 most useful and entertaining one." As there is no reason to doubt the 

 veracity of the following narrative, its value as a description of modern 

 life among a historic race, lingering for centuries on the fringe of civi- 

 lization yet untouched by it and still associated with the romance 

 of desert chivalry, should need no literary ability to recommend it. 

 This it certainly does not possess. As will be seen from the numerous 

 foot-notes to the text, the solecisms are frequent and though the con- 

 stant repetitions of phrase, wearisome without lucidity, savour of the 

 school-room, the gross deviations from grammatical rules suggest 

 that the educational staff of the province is itself in need of the 

 training it professes to supply. This fault is, however 1 , common, as 

 Palgrave tells us, at the present day not only in Hijaz and Yemen, 

 but more marked in Egypt and Syria, and most at Baghdad and 

 Mausil, where the current speech is defective, clipped and cor- 

 rupted in desinence, accent and phraseology. This is not due to 

 dialectic change but to absolute degeneracy in form and character, 

 noticeable in the meagre and artificial elocution of even those suffi- 

 ciently educated to avoid the low provincialisms and errors of the 

 illiterate. As a contrast to this base and degraded speech, he notices 

 the pure well of Arabic undefiled that pours spontaneously from the 

 lips of ragged urchins throughout Jabal Shomer and in the uplands 

 of the Nejd country, as correct in expression as any rhythmical 

 challenge of war or dirge of grief chanted in the desert in the Time 

 of Ignorance. It is not to be expected that the language of Sbanfara 

 and Nabigha, of ImruT Kais and Labid, of men whose verse and ordi- 

 nary speech were identical in substance if not in form, and who 

 ' lisped in numbers, for the numbers came,' is to be found even among 

 the Bedouins of the Decapolis, much less in the mouths of Syrian 

 pedagogues of the Lebanon. Not a single instance, observes Lane, is 

 said to be known of any individual's having acquired a perfect knowledge 



