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I returned to Nazareth; and, after whole of my route; but the strictness remaining some days, went to Acre, in Damascus, in this respect, is more and visited Mount Carmel, about ten remarkable than in any other part of miles distant. I went to the top, and the Holy Land. The spot where the saw the spot where the Prophet Elijah vision appeared to the first Apostle, the resided. The river Kishon, so often house of Ananias, and the place he was alluded to in Scripture, flows along the "let down by the wall in a basket," are bottom of this mountain. shown; and the street called "Straight," (Acts of the Apostles,) still retains that name.

The governor is much respected; he succeeded Diazzar Pasha, one of the greatest Herods or Robespierres of the day, who struck off heads, scooped out eyes, and struck off noses, daily, for his amusement. The present minister, who acted in that capacity to him, had his nose bit off, and an eye taken out, for having offended him. Many are the miserable objects still to be seen going along the streets, whom this man disfigured, and whom he usually called his marked men.

I left Acre, and came on to Tyre, keeping close to the sea-side. The prophecy of Scripture is fulfilled, which declares that this place "shall be as a rock for fishers to spread their nets on." The place is in ruins. Anciently it was a magnificent city, "whose merchants were princes, whose traffickers were the honourable of the earth."

After this I arrived at Sidon, a day's journey distant from Tyre, where I met with much attention from Lady Stanhope, cousin of Mr. Pitt. She is called Princess here, and is greatly respected. I do not think she will ever return to Britain, but end her days at Sidon.

I proceeded; and, after a most toilsome and exhausting journey over chains of mountains for days, and crossing the top of Mount Lebanon, covered with snow, a journey that I really thought would have got the better of me, I arrived safely at Damascus ; the view of which, from the mountains descending to it, six miles distant, is most delicious. It is in the centre of a plain, boundless to the eye, and encircled with gardens to the extent of thirty miles. I know of no views that come near to it, unless it be those from Shooter's Hill, or Greenwich, near London. There is a population of 400,000. It is almost death to walk about the streets in any other than the Turkish habit. I have been obliged to adopt it during the

I remained here eight days; and, after another long journey of several days, I arrived at Balbec, to see the famous ruins. At entering the town, which has a population of 500, it has the appearance of one which has been severely bombarded. The houses are in ruins,

and have been built like huts, in many parts of which are the most precious carved stones, broken columns, and inscriptions, the fragments of the mass of ruins of the grand temple and buildings contiguous.

My eyes never have seen elsewhere, nor I believe ever will see, such magnificent architecture as is to be found on this spot.

The origin of the place has never been distinctly ascertained. One account is, that it was built for Pharaoh's daughter by King Solomon; and it corresponds with the description of the palace given in 1 Kings, chap. vii. ver. 8 and 12. A second is, it was the city celebrated by the Greeks and Latins, under the name of Heliopolis, or City of the Sun, and denoting by its present Arabic name, Baalbec, that is, the Vale of Baal, its connexion with the worship of the sun; of which Baal, the chief idol deity of the country, was an appropriate denomination.

In its general proportion and form, it is like the church of St. Paul's, Covent Garden; but that is quite insignificant compared with this temple, in point of magnificence, structure, and dimensions. There is a noble portico, sustained by pillars of the Corinthian order, each fifty feet in height and six feet in diameter.

Nothing can be more august than the view of the entrance. The front is composed of eight Corinthian pillars, and within these, at the distance of six feet, are four others similar. Through these

appear the door of the temple, which is majestic. Its case or portal resembles, in proportion and construction, the great marble portal at the west end of St. Paul's Church, London, but vastly superior in point of beauty and of richness of sculpture. The inside of the church appears to have been divided into three aisles, and lately the infidel Turks blew up with gun powder a su perb column and arch, the only one which remained. Contiguous to this grand temple, which, in point of architecture, is said to be without a fault, are the ruins of a palace of vast extent. Clusters of the finest columns are still remaining, braving the ravages of time. This must have been the residence of some powerful monarch. The stones are so enormous and massy, that one is sometimes really led to think the fabric could not be erected by any human being. In my life never have I seen any thing like them. For instance, there are three of these lying end to end, which are sixty-one yards, or 183 feet long. One of them sixty-three feet, the depth twelve feet, and breadth twelve feet; and, what is remarkable, they are raised up into the wall about twenty feet from the ground. Not a foot can be moved, in going about the town, without stumbling on some precious fragment, beautifully carved.

Here I spent a couple of days; and, after three days' journey, I arrived at Baureuth, took a vessel, and came here, on my way to Antioch and Aleppo;

and from which I mean to go to Constantinople, make the tour of Greece, and, if it please God, I hope to be in old England in winter. I have given you a very slight account of my travels in this letter, and I delay all particulars till we meet.

It would take a long summer's day to impart to you the hardships I have encountered, the privations I have been forced to submit to, the hair-breadth escapes I have experienced, the horrid savage Arabs I have been among, the difficulties in the languages encountered. I travel with one servant only.

I have a patent letter from Rome that has commanded at the convents all I could desire, and our ambassador at Constantinople has also sent me a firman from the Grand Signior.

In most parts of my journey I have been obliged to take escorts of soldiers, on account of the dangerous state of the countries. The manners are totally at variance with those in Europe, and every thing appears "passing strange" to a traveller, when be first put his foot in this country.

I have not met with a single Englishman in the whole of my route.

Do remember me kindly to good Mrs. I******, and the accomplished lady we visited at Oxford, whose name I really forget; and believe me my dear I******, W. R.

Your's truly,

P. S.-The name of Englishman is highly respected in all the countries I have passed through.

Extracted from the New Monthly Magazine, January 1820.
THOMAS MOORE, ESQ.

"Some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

THERE
HERE are sometimes persons to
be met with in life, whom the
whole world seems to have conspired to
treat with causeless and capricious in-
dulgence, as if," mistaking the reverse
of wrong for right," they have imag-
ined this would be an atonement for
their hourly wrongs of insulted genius
and neglected merit. Thus we often
see, in an ill-regulated and unhappy
family, parents who are distinguished
by their indiscriminate severity to their

deserving offspring, fling the whole weight of their fondness into the scale of demerit and ingratitude, and like Titania, become "enamoured of an ass," and their folly becomes at once their punishment and their degradation. When the world is thus determined, it is incredible with what punctuality it fulfils the conditions of this compact— how it praises and patronizes its adopted favourite-how it exaggerates all its merits, gives bail for all its offences,as if

there were no merits but what its praise the sickening and yet insulting arrogance of their egotism, know more of human concerns

and the human heart than

Moore does, however they disguise and abuse the knowledge they possess. He is not a man of acute and deep observation in human life, a man skilled in detecting and tracing the changes that the mind undergoes from the modifications of society, the vicissitudes of manners and opinions, and from the topographical influence of local residence and inci

dental proximity to objects different from what it is usually familiar with.

must sanction, and no offences but what its protection must justify-let a being so favoured and so flattered be guilty of every irregularity, let him have insulted decency, profaned religion, trampled on social order, and traduced constituted authorities, society still hugs him to her bosom, and whispers in a palliating tone that it is Alcibiades defacing the images of the gods-doubtless the apology is sufficient-but not to me.Let it be remembered, that the l'Enfant gâté whether in the nursery or in life always betrays the same tendencies- Scott and Hogg, and even Southey, the same petulance, premature restless- know infinitely more, and have infiniteness, and disgusting frowardness. His ly more the power of painting freshly is always the vaulting ambition that and vividly the changes of the mind as o'erleaps itself, and falls on t'other caused by what may be called the va side." His too is the "tetchy and rious dispensations of manners, often as wayward infancy" or, to drop the "powerful as the dispensations of religion language of metaphor, such a being can in producing an exterior revolution in at once borrow his subsistence from the the aspect of society. powers he vilifies- -accuse the atmosphere he lives in for the breath it lends bim-and insult the laws, for the protection they afford him for abusing them. Yet this shall be a being flattered and caressed, noticed by nobles, and adorned by women of rank and fashion. He shall pass like a meteor from England to Ireland, shedding a brilliant, ominous, and pestilential glare on both countries, and our literary astronomers shall apply their telescopes, and call this newlydiscovered planet-Moore,

From what the eminence of Moore has risen it would be rather difficult for candid criticism to discover. He is best described by negatives. He is not a man of superlative poetical powersLord Byron is far beyond him in all the true essence of genius, in all the constituent and elementary parts of a genuine poet.

He is not a man of profound research and erudition. He is no explorer of the untravelled deserts of the soul,-not a man who can drop his line of investigation further than ever "did plummet sound," and bring it up tinged with the proof of his startling and profound discoveries. Wordsworth, and even Wilson, and the school of lakers, with all the distortion of their affectation, all their lisping and babyish mawkishness, all

There is nothing in the writingsthere is nothing in the mind of Moore, that can furnish the brilliant and chivalric paintings of Scott (for Scott is a painter more than a poet); nothing that can furnish the strong national characterism, the wild, picturesque, and yet vital, delineation of the untamed ferocity of the mountain chiefs, the lifeless austerity, the super-human abstraction, the aßiros Bios, (mixed with the wildest enthusiasm of military glory, and the implacable obstinacy of Judaical pertinacity, singularly and inharmoniously blended with the language, not the spirit, of the Gospel) in his representation of the covenanters-nothing that can, in fact, give us the wild, and yet awful, picture of a nation in masquerade, all disguised, yet all known, the fantastic spirit of some presiding demon in the garb of religion, arraying all in their appropriate costume, dictating to al! their creed of blasphemy and nonsense, like the devil Milanax, in the Duke of Guise, prompting them with their parts when they fail, and finally, dis-robing them of their borrowed vestments at the hour of their departure, and whispering to them the fallacy of their pretensions, and the awful reality of their despair. Such are the powerful pictures that the great writer, we allude to has drawn of

periods more interesting as they become more obscure from the interruptions of time, the incuriosity of contemporaries, and the infidelities of tradition.

In what, then, is Moore eminent ?Not in the naked and gigantic sublimity of absolute genius-not in the piercing and profound anatomy of the human heart not in the keen, various, and amusive display of the anomalies of human life-not in the strong and thrilling personification of human passion-not in the salutary and heart-touching impression of one mighty moral. He has fluttered" about and about" Parnassus, sending to us occasionally music from the breezes he inhales, and colours from the flowers he visits: but every breeze brings withering on its wings, and every flower in its fragrance reminds one of the blossom of the Upas Tree: it is all infection and death-Death not mortal only. In adverting to the poetry of Moore, I am forced to undertake a painful task; it is horrible to excruciate morbid impurity by the touch, that, in order to heal, must first feel, expose, and exasperate the seat where the venom is lodged-but it is necessary.

her

Of a poet in our days much is demanded, and must be paid. Thank God, we have done with the times when the first writers in Britain were obliged to saturate a royal mistress with fulsome praise more prostituted (if possible) than person, and to beg their "leave to toil" of a wretch who sometimes sold it in the venality of regal rapacity, and sometimes in the comparatively innocent intoxication of the vanity of her feelings or her profession. Dryden,and Lee, and Otway, may perhaps be forgivProstituted genius was their crime -but want was their apology.

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suffered,) turns volunteer in the cause of impurity, who blasphemes decency. without the pretext of a bribe from necessity, and, reversing the accusation of Satan," serves the Devil for nought." Such has been Moore from his youth: his earliest efforts resembled a kind of premature dance round a Priapus. The loathsome obscenity, and wild contortions of his motions were forgiven, or overlooked. We ail fondly hoped that a phoenix would arise from the impure and fetid ashes of Tom Little;—that, to borrow the language of *Buchanan, the child who had "perfected the praise of the infamous phallic idol in the procession of Jaggernaut," might yet become a convert to Christianity, and renounce the vile and impure idolatries of his infancy.

Has this been the case-I must with revolting hand and pen track him thro' his course of unrepudiated indecency— unqualified jacobinism; and, I dread to add, unrepented infidelity: of the two former the most ample proofs are to be found in his writings-the last must be referred to his conscience; and first of the first, I hesitate not to say, that Moore is a writer whose impurity is the most wilful, deliberate, and persevering, that ever insulted heaven and contaminated society.

The maxim of the ancient orator, that action-action-action, was the soul of oratory, appears to have been translated by Moore, construing the essence of poetry into-lust—lust— lust. I can find nothing else in his writings. I have read them all. How much he owes me for reading them; how much more may he owe me for distinguishing him as he deserves—as the high priest, not even of the Venus semireducta, but of the "dark veiled" Cotytto-of the Venus YVETUλλs. If want of decency is want of sense-what shall we think of the man who insults both by going out of his way in the restless search after obscenity, who can publish such lines as these:

Thus in our looks some propagation lies,
For we make babies in each other's eyes.

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Who can insult the Deity in his wrath, and his creatures amid the terrors that the visible display of that wrath excites, even amid the brute creation, and deify Just in the lines that follow :

Loud howled the wind in the ruins above,

the application, is willing to "count all things lost" if he " may win" the demon of purity, "and be found in him;" as he doubtless will one day, however he may deride the creed that whispers the prediction. I am weary of this vile re

And murmured the warnings of time o'er ourt head, search; it is like the loathsome labour

While fearless we offered devotions to love,

The rude rock our pillow, the rushes our bed.

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Take another specimen. Moore is not satisfied with the copious resources of his own imagination: fertile in inexhaustible impurity, he flies to the "integros fontes" to the French writers. He " pumps for life the putrid well of death." He disdains not to translate into English the vilest sillinesses of French epigrams-for example:

Your mother says, my little Venus,
There's something not correct between us,
And you're as much in fault as I ;
Now, on my soul, my little Venus,
It would not be correct between us,
To let your mother tell a lie.

The poetry of this morceau is as contemptible as its sentiment is disgusting one might exclaim with Hector M'Intyre, in the Antiquary, "I vow I have not heard a worse halfpenny ballad;" yet thus low can Moore descend to the worship of obscenity-others kneel, but he submits to grovel. Endowed at least with a rich and brilliant imagination, with a power of painting all that is bright and beautiful in physical creation, all that is splendid and voluptuous in moral existence, with a felicitous fluency of versification "unimitated and unimitable,”-with a power of deluging the ear and soul with an inebriating torrent of melody; with all this, Moore, if I may dare to borrow

↑ Bad grammar is not seldom combined with the outrages of blasphemy.-Vide Paine, passim.

of Celia's lover in Swift. I have only to add, that neither time nor conscience have arrested the hand, or smitten the heart of Moore. He sings on his song of voluptuousness without any " mitigation or remorse of voice." The "floating brothel," as Voltaire called the Island of Love in the Lusiad of Camoens, is a nunnery, a temple of vestals, contrasted with the seraglio-scenes so vividly painted in the "Veiled Prophet ;" it is a fountain of the nymphs, compared with the loose, luxurious, and triumphant tide of debauchery that overwhelms every page of the description of the "Feast of Roses."

This man has risen by satire, but what is his satire? That which the object may be proud of. He grasps at the straws on the surface, he spurns the pearls he has not the courage to dive for. I have but two pictures more of Moore to present, and then I have done with him. I have seen him (any one may see him) seated at the piano, surrounded by simpering matrons, some unconscious, some but too conscious of the meaning of his warblings; rank after rank of beautiful unmarried females trembling on the verge of impurity, as they crowded and blushed around their favourite minstrel. I have seen him at his state dinner in Ireland, surrounded by the shouting O'Donnells and O'Connells, and all the endless Os of Irish genealogy, pledging his soul to them in rosy libations of wine for his patriotism, and proving it by his determined irrevocable absenteism; blessed pledge, such as the Irish, when flattered into popularity by English readers and English booksellers, never fail to give their country. I have done with him. What can contempt heap further on a man than to call him what he is—a jacobin in politics-a reckless sensualist in poetry—a practical infidel in religion." Such be thy Gods, oh Israel !" woe, woe those who bow before them.

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