matter of religious observances and (which is regarded as of no less importance) of certain sumptuary laws, directed in particular against wearing silk or gold, singing or playing on any musical instrument; nay, even all street games of chil'dren or childish persons; but, first and foremost, against that which the Wahabees seem to regard as the chief of sinsnamely, smoking tobacco, or, in their language, 'drinking the 'shameful.' Most amusing are the many gossiping pages which Mr. Palgrave describes to his own experiences respecting this kind of domestic inquisition, and multifarious the sarcasms which, with his particular turn of mind and antiMahometan prejudices, he pours upon it. How odious such a system must be, we may well conjecture from such personal acquaintance as we may have had with the doings of Želators, in a small way, in little towns and country parishes, especially in the northern portion of this island.

'I might almost leave my readers to suppose in what light such a body, and those who compose it, are regarded by the mass of the population. Surrounded with all the deference and all the odium consequent on their office and character, they meet everywhere with marks of open respect and covert distrust and hatred. Are a circle of friends met in the freedom of conversation? let a Zelator enter, their voices are hushed; and when talk is resumed, it follows a track in which the recording angels of Islam themselves would find nothing to modify. Are a body of companions walking gaily with too light a gait down the street? At the meeting of a Zelator, all compose their pace, and direct their eyes in momentary modesty on the ground. Is a stealthy lamp lighted at unseasonable hours? at a rap on the shutters, suspected for that of the Zelator, the "glim is "doused," and all is silent in darkness. Or, worse than all, is the forbidden pipe sending up its sinful fumes in some remote corner? at the fatal tap on the outer door the unholy implement is hastily emptied out into the hearth, and then carefully hidden under the carpet, while everyone hurries to wash his mouth and mustachios, and by the perfume of cloves and aromatic herbs give himself an orthodox smell once more. In short, schoolboys caught out by a severe under-master at an illicit prank-pious ladies surprised in reading the last French novel-or teetotallers suddenly discovered with a half-empty black bottle and tumbler on the table-never look more awkward, more silly, and more alarmed than Nejdeans on these occasions when a Zelator comes upon them.'

These half-missionaries, half-policemen, are authorised to carry into execution their own summary convictions by the stick, which they carry about them for use and not for show; the infliction being after the fashion of the correction of 'schoolboys;' more, we should imagine, after the time-honoured

usage still prevalent throughout great part of Germany; as, for instance, in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, under Grand-ducal superintendence, and also under the paternal government of Austria, where (as we lately read in the newspapers) an elected member of the Reichsrath, returning to his peasant constituents in Galicia, and not giving them a satisfactory account of his parliamentary proceedings, was laid across a bench by the meeting, and duly chastised with twenty-five blows of a hazel switch after the above patriarchal method. Yet, after all, from the anecdotes given by our author, the inspection seems on the whole pretty easily evaded, the punishments actually inflicted by the zelators little more than ludicrous. He himself attributes the comparative failure of the system to the innate toughness and tenacity of the Arab character.' There seems,' says Colonel Pelly, to be a good deal of quiet fun going on under the strict and fanatical exterior of the Wahabees. An amusing story was related to me yesterday ' of a man who complained to the Amir's son that one of his 'neighbours smoked. "How do you know it?" asked the Amir. "I smell it," replied the man. "Then you entered your neigh'bour's private apartment ?" " No," said the man; "I just put the tip of my nose in." Whereupon the Amir ordered the 'executioner to snip off the complainant's nose, so as to save it from the temptation of sniffing in another man's haram in 'future.' However, we fully agree with Mr. Palgrave that it is easy to imagine what so wide-reaching a power might become when placed in the hands of interested or vindictive administrators. Many and most obnoxious instances of its abuse,' he adds, were related in my hearing.'

6

Mr. Palgrave does not appear to have had any interview with Feysul himself. This deficiency is supplied by Colonel Pelly, who went to Riad from the shores of the Persian Gulf as the representative of this country, as we have said; although he has been hitherto duly and officially reticent as to the political objects and success of his mission. The following is a brief extract from an account of an interview, furnished by one of Colonel Pelly's party :

He (Feysul) said he could not be expected to say anything in favour of the English religion, but as to the government he preferred it to any he knew; and here, amidst profound silence, he offered up a prayer that "God would lead us to see the error of our ways, and "convert us from infidelity." He again spoke of Muskat

And now the words began to stick in our interpreter's throat, and the cold perspiration to drop from his forehead. I think he took fright at the prayer.'

The last words characterise full well the abject state of terror into which this pope-king of the pure Mahometans seems to have reduced at once those who approach him at home, and the vassal and neighbour potentates who dwell on his confines. According to the last accounts, received after Mr. Palgrave left Arabia, Abdallah the son of Feysul had captured the infidel,' that is, non-Wahabee, city of Oneyza, the only barrier on the road to Mecca, which may probably expect a second visitation from the armed purifiers of its abuses.

The Wahabee empire (says our author, summing up the expression of his bitter hostility to it) is a compact and well-organised government, where centralisation is fully understood and effectually carried out, and whose mainsprings and connecting links are force and fanaticism. There exist no constitutional checks either on the king or his subordinates, save what the necessity of circumstances imposes or the Koran prescribes. Its atmosphere, to speak metaphorically, is sheer despotism, moral, intellectual, religious, and physical. This empire is capable of frontier extension, and hence is dangerous to its neighbours, some of whom it is even now swallowing up, and will certainly swallow more, if not otherwise prevented.

So long as Wahabeeism shall prevail in the centre and uplands of Arabia, small indeed are the hopes of civilisation, advancement, and national prosperity, for the Arab race.' (Vol. ii. p. 83.)

6

It may be so, but it must be remembered that even Mr. Palgrave, thoroughly good hater as he is, confesses (vol. i. p. 317), that the Wahabee rule has established peace and order in what was formerly the most turbulent region of Arabia: that merchant and villager, townsman and stranger, are alike 'freed from predatory inroad and from roadside assault; and, so far as these rovers are concerned, cultivation and commerce may proceed unimpaired.' And so said Burckhardt half a century ago: A country once conquered by the Wahabee ' enjoys under him the most perfect tranquillity, &c.' And what would be the result of the overthrow of that dominion? Partly the restoration of Turkish rule, the most deadening of all misgovernments, with its rooted oriental vice of coldblooded cruelty, from which even Mr. Palgrave declares the Arabs of Nejed and their rulers to be remarkably exempt; a rule of which he himself says that in juxtaposition with 'the Ottoman, the Nejdean has no need of whitewashing; he 'becomes positively fair by the contrast.' And, wherever this might not prevail, the alternative would be the anarchical fury of the separate chieftains of every walled city and every Bedouin tribe, governing a people (if our traveller's account of them is to be believed) as completely free from the ties of religious

faith, where Wahabee influence does not prevail, as from those of political unity.

We must here part company with Mr. Palgrave, not having space to follow him through the remainder of his narrative. Suffice it to say, that after his hair-breadth escape from the court of Riad, he traversed the sandy desert, or Nefood,' which lies between Nejed and the Persian Gulf; made some stay in the maritime province of Hasa, now a dependency of the Wahabees; visited by sea various ports of the Sultan of Oman, on both sides of the gulf, including the once famous Portuguese emporium of Ormuz; and thence, after undergoing the shipwreck which we have mentioned, finished his Arabian travels at Muscat, from whence he took ship for the head of the Persian Gulf, and returned to Europe by the line of the Euphrates. Since Bruce, no traveller has appeared, in our judgment, able to bring before the reader with such vivid reality the scenes of an entirely new country, and the usages of hitherto unknown men, nor to invest with so much interest his own career of personal adventure among comrades of so strange an order; since Kinglake, none possessed of that union of scholarlike refinement and knowledge of the world with picturesque genius, wit, and irony, which appeals with such peculiar force to cultivated and fastidious classes of readers. The vivid perceptions and rapidity of judgment, as well as the intense partialities, which characterise his mind, affect his work unfavourably in more ways than one--besides making him to a certain extent untrustworthy (we have explained already the limits within which we use this expression, and have given instances to justify it), they make him unnecessarily lengthy, and somewhat confused. His way of interspersing narrative with discussion, though often entertaining enough, leads to a good deal of repetition, and has on the whole the effect of wearying the reader; and he seems scarcely to have given himself the trouble of reading over what he had written out of the abundance of his mind, and so reducing it into more manageable compass. He is a writer, therefore, whom it is not very satisfactory to take up at intervals and read by passages; but whom if you once fairly grapple with, you find it extremely difficult to let go. We can only wish him safety and success on the still more perilous enterprise which he has now undertaken, and hope he may find among the dwellers in Abyssinia people to hate as heartily, and therefore describe as forcibly, as his Bedouins and Wahabees of Arabia.

ART. VIII.-The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. By JOHN P. PRENDERGAST, Esq. London: 1865.

WE E fear that a long time must elapse before Ireland will become, like the imaginary island of Sir Thomas More, 'sola insula velut una familia est.' She is far too retrospective for her unity and prosperity, and her traditions, for at least three hundred years past, have a very disquieting tendency. The disaffection and rancour of other days, which misguided ambition or instinctive turbulence could so easily direct to purposes of danger, have no doubt largely disappeared, through the policy of conciliation and confidence wisely adopted by modern statesmanship. The demagogue by nature, the rebel by temperament, the malcontent by misery, have almost gone out of date. But it is nevertheless true that, running side by side with a modern movement in hopeful alliance with British progress and ideas, like the Gulf Stream keeping its own distinct current through the broad ocean which envelops but cannot displace it, there are still discernible in Irish society certain traces of the ancient animosity of race and religion transmitted by direct descent from the proscriptions and confiscations of the seventeenth century. The recent ebullition of the Fenian conspiracy, without leaders, without objects, without a cause, is but another proof of the readiness with which the lower classes of the Irish people listen to any one who appeals to their ancient hatred of the Saxon. Bayonets and hemp, as Moore observes, are not good amoris stimuli, and Ireland can never say to England, as Héloïse to her tutor Abelard, that his correction only made her love him the more. Politicians have happily long since given up the idea that the true interest of one class in a country can ever be permanently attained at the prejudice of any other; for bitter experience has taught us that the evils which affect one class poison the sources of wellbeing in all, the sensation created by ills endured being propagated by a chain of the most subtle sensibility. We are not aware that there is any public writer who would attempt, in these days of political equality, to justify the conduct of England towards the sister-country during the long period of their connexion, when she was often, like an untameable beast, scourged and manacled into madness; but it is nevertheless sometimes forgotten by her too generous and partial defenders that Ireland was often far from a guiltless victim of oppression, and that there were grave and critical circumstances in the civil and religious history of England-at least during the im