Unused to hard labour, with a constitution far from robust, I could not be of much service to any one who might purchase me, and he would either sell me again at a loss, or vent his disappointment by blows. Whatever mental acquirements I was possessed of would only serve to render misery more poignant. The Moor, the Arab, like all primitive people, value only physical strength. The first thing a purchaser of slaves in Barbary examines about the person of the male is the palm of his hand, which if it looks soft and tender, the slave is often rejected. A callous hand is there the best recommendation. It is thus that our institutions, our education, serve to estrange us from the other races that inhabit the world; and the wretch who by accident is cast out of the pale of civilization, is the more miserable in proportion as he has been refinedly brought up.

These reflections were by no means, as some would imagine, out of place. They were not the offspring of a heated imagination, for I was then in a country where about two thousand of my countrymen, of Europeans, were dragging, at that time, the chains of slavery, and working under the lash. In Europe, we feel secure, and strut about with great consequence or indifference; but if we pass the narrow tract of sea which divides us from Barbary, what are we? little better than beasts of burthen, perhaps less valuable. Man is there reduced to his animal worth, to the estimate of his physical powers; he becomes truly a degraded creature. How much work can he do? The answer to this one question comprises all his claims to live and to be fed. The property about him is no longer his own; it belongs as well as the surplus of his labour to those who are stronger than him. What a social code! And is this the natural code of man, as some have maintained?

Personal slavery, however ancient its practice, is a horrible state. An individual can judge of it more justly when he sees it in the persons of men of his own colour, of his own country; speaking his own language; when he touches as it were the evil with his own hand, as I have had occasion to do in Barbary. And if we think of the condition of females-of our own countrywomen,-and many there were at the time I am speaking of, who, from the kind protection of their Christian parents and relatives, had been all at once transported into Moorish captivity, to become the sport of the caprice, and the forced victims of the brutal instinct of their barbarous masters, who, by their religious prejudices, are taught to value women in general, even Mahomedan women, as little more than so many heads of cattle-the very idea is enough

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to drive the mind to frenzy. What must it be to an Italian, a Greek, a Spaniard, whose daughter, or sister, or wife, has undergone this cruel fate? Of all the wrongs inflicted upon man, this is perhaps the only one he cannot forgive; it is sufficient to madden a whole population to despair and revenge.*

While thoughts of this nature filled my mind, I was proceeding, looking wistfully towards the hills on the right and the dusty plain intervening, almost expecting to see grim Bedouins starting from behind every bush, and now and then casting a glance on the sea, which was not far on our left; that sea which divided me from Christian land. Having repeatedly observed our janizary looking also towards the sea, and sighing deeply, I began to examine this man more attentively. His complexion was as dark as that of the other Moors; but I thought I perceived a peculiar expression of intelligence in his features. I felt there was something about this man less foreign to me than about the others. I spoke to him in Italian, and he answered me with an accent too familiar to my ears to be misunderstood. I was no longer in doubt upon the place of his birth; he had been a Christian! He was now a soldier of Mahomet, a renegado.

I was not sufficiently unprejudiced, as some persons would express it, to be unmoved by the impressions which the sight of this being, the first renegado I had ever seen, and in such a place, was calculated to produce. I felt no instinctive dislike towards Mussulmans in general; but the idea of a man forsaking the mild religion of Jesus, the creed of his fathers, for the stern and fierce doctrines of the Arabian impostor, had something in it repulsive. It excited grief, and at the same time curiosity. I continued to talk to this man. I found him communicative, and plain speaking. At last, I collected from his answers the whole of his little tale of misery.

It was a short simple history, the epitome of that of many of his brethren in woe. He was born in Sicily; and as he named his country he pointed out towards the sea beyond which it lay, with a look of deep regret. He had been taken

*These reflections apply to an epoch in which Christian captivity was in 'full practice all over Barbary. Lord Exmouth's expedition against Algiers has given a deadly blow to this detestable custom; yet it has been of late occasionally revived, and the war between the Turks and Greeks has filled again the bazars of Asia and Africa with human flesh. When will the time come when Mahomedan powers shall be obliged, in their wars with Christians at least, to treat prisoners like other civilized nations do, and not to insult nature any longer? This might, perhaps, be obtained by remonstrances from all the European powers united.

by the Barbary pirates while a sailor-boy on board a Sicilian felucca. Having been sold, he passed several years in the most oppressive slavery, ill-treated, beaten, and scantily fed. At the same time he was told by some zealous Mussulman that he might alter his situation for the better, by abjuring his religion and assuming the turban. He long resisted the temptation of Satan, as he expressed it; the struggle between faith and nature became every day more painful; at last in an evil hour he yielded, submitted to the rites of Islamism, became free, and was placed in the guards of the Bey. His pay was sufficient to his wants; he was now going to do duty at Tunis, after having been some time in garrison at Biserta. The renegado said this in a manner that won my sympathy. He had fallen, but not without having first endured a severe trial. He was evidently a Christian in his heart; the tears were in his eyes as he confessed his apostacy, at the same time looking cautiously about him, that no one of our fellowtravellers should notice his grief. His wish, his only wish, he said, was to put his feet once more on the soil of his beloved country and die a Christian. "Oh," he exclaimed, "if I could but cross that arm of sea !" I asked him if there was no chance of effecting this? He said it was a most difficult and dangerous step, as renegadoes are always jealously watched by the native Mussulmans, who mistrust them, and who would have no mercy on him if he were caught endeavouring to escape.

I met the man again afterwards in a coffee-house in Tunis. He seemed grateful for the interest I had evinced in his favour. He had only exchanged one sort of captivity for another, for he was now a prisoner at large within the limits of Barbary. But at least he was no longer ill-treated, and he was sufficiently fed. I could not judge very severely of the poor man, considering the circumstances in which he had been placed; his image has often haunted me afterwards. I hope his fond wish of returning to Christian land may have been granted him by that mercy which alone knows how to judge us rightly.

After twelve o'clock we arrived on the banks of the river Mejerdah, the Bagradas of the ancients. Here I was again in a land of classical recollections. It was on the banks of the Bagradas that Regulus killed the enormous serpent by means of balistæ and catapultæ, as described by Roman historians, fond of the marvellous. Not far from the mouth of the same river once stood Utica, the last asylum of Cato and of Roman liberty.

We waded through the Mejerdah, and I was cautioned not

to drink of the water as being unwholesome. At the first light of dawn we arrived before a country-house of the Bey, a few miles from Tunis: we entered a spacious court, having a marble fountain in it, and there I took a copious draught of delightful spring water.

We soon resumed our journey. The morning was rapidly extending its light; we were approaching an ancient aqueduct resembling those in the neighbourhood of Rome. It was the aqueduct which once brought water to Carthage. We passed under one of its arches, not far from the ground where that proud city formerly stood. I saw on our left the hill upon which the famous citadel Byrsa was built. Nothing now remains of Carthage but the name; the point of land on which it stood is called Capo Cartagine.

A strange eventful history is this of our world! On contemplating the grave of that famous rival of Rome,-on seeing the silence and desolation which now reigns all around the spot where it was, and where once all was bustle, life, and splendour, its harbour now filled up, its buildings utterly effaced from the surface of the earth, for no remains there are above ground, the aqueduct being the work of the Romans when they built the second Carthage-when I recollected the like scene of desolation which surrounds the city of the Seven Hills, the eternal walls, which perhaps one day will become as completely destroyed and as indistinguishable as those of Carthage-when I reflected upon all this, and then turned to my companions, and thought of the Sicilian renegado, of our individual miseries, I felt how insignificant they appear by comparison. Reflections of a similar nature must have animated old Marius, when he replied to the officer who brought him the order of the Prefect to quit the coast of Africa as being the enemy of Rome: "Tell him, thou hast seen Marius sitting amongst the ruins of Carthage."

Yet our thinking slightly of individual misfortunes, when compared to the great calamities which befal nations, is after all rather a delusion of our imagination than a real philosophical reasoning; for what are the calamities of nations but an aggregation of the calamities of individuals? We ought to be on our guard against this too fashionable, too poetical, error, not merely because it is a logical error, but because it is apt to harden us against the distress of humble individuals. Those whose sympathy is only excited by the aspect of a city in ruins, or of a princess in tears, may at times forget that their next door neighbour is in want of bread to keep his family from starving.

On approaching Tunis we passed by a vast cemetery,

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strewed over with small tomb-stones, some of which are distinguished by a roughly-sculptured turban for the men, a rose or other flowers for the females. The Mussulmans devote a large extent of ground near their cities for their burial-places. The only being we met in these solitudes was a woman shrouded in black, who was sitting on one of the stones and muttering some prayers; one of the Moors gave her a small coin,

At last, at seven in the morning, we entered the gates of Tunis, after fourteen hours' journey, through which I had not seen a trace of habitation excepting one village we passed not far from Biserta. Harassed with fatigue, heat, and thirst, I was happy to find myself again in the haunts of men, though they wore turbans and beards, and spoke a strange, and to me unintelligible, language. Even the turbaned blacksmith, one of the first citizens we met in the suburbs of this Barbary metropolis, pleased me with his sooty but humourous features, as he grinned a Sliem Alec in return for the salutation of our conductors.

We proceeded through streets as narrow as those of Biserta, but much more crowded and animated; we passed by some rich shops and good buildings; we met superbly dressed Mussulmans, mounted on horses splendidly caparisoned; in short, we were again among the bustle of a great capital and of a commercial city, though very different from any Christian capital or sea-port town.

Our Ragusian captain, who had been here before, con ducted me and my fellow-passengers to an inn, or locanda, kept by an Italian, in the district inhabited by the Franks, and not far from the mansions of the European Consuls; where I was glad to rest on a straw mattress after the fatigues of the night. A. V.

NARENOR.-A TALE.

Some are so curious in this behalf, as those old Romans, our modern Venetian, Dutch, or French; that if two parties dearly love, the one noble, the other ignoble, they may not by their laws match, though equal otherwise in years, fortunes, and education, and all good affection. In Germany, except they can prove their gentility by three descents, they scorn to match with them. A noble man must marry a noble woman, a baron a baron's daughter, a knight a knight's, a gentleman a gentleman's; as slaters sort their slate, so do they degrees, and family.-BURTON's Anatomie of Melancholy, p. 349. Folio edition.

IN the days of fairies and necromancers, (happy days! there is nothing like them now!) lived a peasant of the