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MEMOIRS
OF THE
LADY HESTER STANHOPE,

AS RELATED BY HERSELF
IN CONVERSATIONS WITH HER
PHYSICIAN;

COMPRISING
HER OPINIONS AND ANECDOTES OF
SOME OF THE MOST REMARKABLE PERSONS
OF HER TIME.

FREDERICK SHOBERL, JUNIOR,
PRINTER TO HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS PRINCE ALBERT,
51, RUPERT STREET, HAYMARKET, LONDON.

CONTENTS

OF

THE SECOND VOLUME.

1

MEMOIRS

OF

LADY HESTER STANHOPE.

45

CHAPTER II.

76

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

101

Conscription in Syria—Inviolability of consular houses—Panic and flight of the people of Sayda—Protection afforded by Lady Hester—Story of a boy—Mustafa the barber—Cruelty to mothers of Conscripts—Conscription in the villages—Lady Hester’s dream—Inhabitants of Sayda mulcted—Lady Hester’s opinion of negresses—Severity necessary in Turkey—Case of Monsieur Danna—Captain Y.—Mustafa Pasha’s cruelty.

November 18, 1837.—The conscription for Ibrahim Pasha’s army, called the nizàm or regular troops, was going on at this time, and created much distress in the towns and villages. Forced levies were unknown previous to the conquests of that ambitious prince; as it was customary for the pashas to keep in their pay mercenary troops, composed chiefly of Albanians, a nation that for some centuries had sent its hordes into different parts of the Turkish empire, under the guidance of enterprising chieftains, to seek military service. There were also Bosnians, Kûrds, and some Mograbýns or Moors: these, with the Janissaries or standing militia, 102 had exempted the inhabitants in general from enlistment; and, although the martial and turbulent disposition of the Mohametans had frequently manifested itself in their provincial insurrections and in the petty contentions between neighbouring chieftains, yet a man always went to the camp from choice and from the hopes of booty, and quitted it when tired of the service. But Ibrahim Pasha, among the innovations which he found it necessary or politic to introduce for the furtherance of his father’s views, saw that his whole dependance must be on the adoption of a conscription, after the manner of France and other European states. He had already drained Egypt, in this manner, of all her able-bodied youths; and, to supply the constant waste of men carried off by war and disease, he had, since his first taking possession of Syria, made an annual levy after harvest time.

At first, the idle, vagabond, thievish, and ardent part of the population supplied the numbers he required; and, as fast as they could be collected, they were shipped off to Egypt; where, marched to the Hedjàz and to distant wars, the major portion of them left their bones, whilst some gained rank and lucrative situations, and a few returned to tell the story of their exploits. For with Ibrahim there was no defined term of service; once a soldier, every man continued so until death or desertion broke the chain. In the same way the 103 Egyptian conscripts were sent into Syria: so that no sympathy, in either case, existed between the troops and the people amongst whom they were quartered, which acted as a direct check upon the spirit of insurrection.

So far, everything had gone on peaceably, and the quiet portion of the inhabitants rejoiced in seeing their neighbourhood cleared of such troublesome rabble. But latterly the conscription had begun to fall on the families of shopkeepers, tradesmen, small farmers, and the like: and it will be seen that, of all the changes introduced by Ibrahim Pasha into the government of the country, the conscription became the most odious.

The first intimation people had of the levies this year was one evening, when, as the inhabitants of Sayda were coming out of their mosques, gangs of soldiers suddenly appeared at the doors, and laid hands on all the young men. At the same moment, similar measures had been taken at the coffee-houses, and nothing was to be seen but young fellows dragged through the streets, or running off in all directions to secrete themselves in some friend’s house, stable, vault, or the like. The city gates were closed, and there was no outlet for the fugitives: but Sayda, although walled in, has many houses with windows looking on the fields; and from these, during the night, some let themselves down and escaped to the gardens, or villages, 104 or to Mount Lebanon. The next day the city wore the appearance of a deserted place: the shops were closed, and consternation reigned in every face. The panic became general.

It is customary in Turkish towns to consider consular residences as inviolable; a point on which, from apprehension of tumults and for personal safety, the consuls have ever been very tenacious. France possesses, from a long date, a khan or factory-house in Sayda, wherein the subjects of that nation reside. It is a square building with one gateway, containing a spacious quadrangle, surrounded by vaulted warehouses, and, over these, commodious habitations with a handsome corridor in front. It may be compared to a quadrangle of a college at the Universities. To this khan many of the young men fled, being admitted out of compassion, and in some cases for a consideration of a more tangible nature.

The number of conscripts for Sayda, as was made known afterwards, had been rated at one hundred and eighty. When the first press was over, the government found the quota had not yet been half supplied: but the secret of the deficiency was kept, and it was given out that no more would be wanted. A smiling face was assumed by the commandant and his staff, and every expression of sympathy was in their mouths, to demonstrate the cessation of all farther oppressive 105 measures. By calming the people’s fears in this way, information was obtained as to those concealed in the French khan, and scouts were sent about the country to get tidings of the fugitives.

In the mean time, the caverns and excavations, once the beautiful sepulchres of the ancient Sidonians, in which the environs of Sayda abound, were converted into hiding-places, all well known to the peasantry and gardeners: but no soul was found capable of betraying the fugitives. Some were concealed by the Christian peasants in cellars, although the punishment of detection was a terrible bastinadoing. At the end of about a fortnight, when everything seemed calm again, all of a sudden the fathers of those who were known to be in the French khan were seized in their dwellings and shops, and brought before the motsellem or mayor. They were told that their sons’ hiding-places were known, and that means would be resorted to for forcing them to come out, if they, the fathers, did not immediately use their paternal authority to compel them. Anxious to save their children, they strenuously denied any knowledge of their places of concealment. Then it was that the dreadful work of bastinadoing began. From the windows of the east side of the khan was visible the open court in the front of the motsellem’s gate, where, according to the Eastern custom, he often sat to administer justice or injustice, 106 as the case might be, and through those windows the sons might behold their aged fathers, writhing with agony under that cruel punishment, until pain and anguish extorted the appeal of, “Come forth, for mercy’s sake! and save a father’s life.” Some yielded to the call, and some thought only of their own safety.

As happens always in all Turkish matters, much bribery arose from this state of tribulation. Nobody in these countries is inaccessible to a bribe. Many were the men in office who received gratifications of vast sums to favour the exemption or escape of individuals. Substitutes could hardly be got, even at the enormous premium of 10,000 piasters each, or £100 sterling; such a dread had the natives of being expatriated and subjected to military discipline! for in Ibrahim Pasha’s army the drill is indeed a terrible ordeal. There, inadvertency, slowness of apprehension, or obstinacy, is not punished by a reprimand, a day’s imprisonment, or double drill; but the poor recruit is, at the moment, thrown on the ground, and lacerated without mercy by the korbàsh.

Among the fugitives, there were two young men, the sons of a respectable shopkeeper, who, during twenty years, had been employed, more or less, by Lady Hester: these two fled for refuge to Jôon. No notice was taken of the circumstance by the government; 107 and, after remaining about six weeks under her protection, they returned to Sayda, where they remained unmolested. Her ladyship’s servants also enjoyed an exemption from the press; and, had she chosen to avail herself of the dilemma in which these unfortunate young men were placed, she might easily have ensured their servitude without pay, by the mere threat of turning them adrift: in which case they would have been compelled to remain upon any conditions she might have thought proper to propose.

An old Turk presented himself, one day, at my gate with his son, a boy about fourteen years of age, and, with earnest entreaties, begged me to take the son as my servant, no matter in what capacity, and for nothing. I asked him how he could be apprehensive for a stripling, too young to carry a musket; but he told me that his age was no safeguard. “Alas!” said he, “these unprincipled Egyptians will lay hold of him; for there are other kinds of service besides carrying a gun: you do not know them as well as we do.” I was very unwillingly obliged to refuse the man’s request; for how could a stranger violate the laws of a country in which he resided, any more than he could harbour a deserter in France, for example, where he would be brought to justice for so doing? But some of the agents of European powers do not scruple, in these parts, to enrich themselves by affording 108 protection to Turkish deserters, contrary to the edicts of a sovereign prince, and then set up, as an excuse, the want of civilization in Mahometan countries.

A woman, the widow of Shaykh Omar ed dyn, came also on a donkey to beg Lady Hester’s intercession with the commandant for one of her sons, a lad, who had been pressed in the streets. Lady Hester sent out word to her that she could not mix herself up in the business, and desired me to give her 500 piasters—I suppose to help her to buy him off. This son, Lady Hester told me, was a beautiful boy, and that she once had him in her house, but could not keep him—he was too handsome! * * * A sad picture this of the morals of the Syrian Turks, and yet a true one!

November 20.—After a succession of sunny days, finer and warmer than an English summer, the wind got up at the change of the moon, and it blew a gale. The effect of gloomy weather in climates naturally so genial as that of Syria is perhaps more impressive than in one like that of England, where clouds and fogs are so common. I was therefore in a fit humour to listen to the melancholy stories of her ladyship’s secretary, Mr. Michael Abella, who had been absent a day or two to see his father and mother at Sayda. He told me that the press for recruits continued with unabated severity, and that the military commandant 109 and motsellem were resorting to measures, which, I thank God, are unknown in England! From imprisoning and bastinadoing fathers, with a view to make them produce their children, a measure which had already induced several families to abandon their homes, they now proceeded to bastinado the neighbours and acquaintances of the fugitives, in order to wring from them the secret of their hiding-places.

The reader is already in some degree familiar with the name of Mustafa, the barber, well-known in Sayda for his skill in shaving, phlebotomizing, and curing sores and wounds. He had four or five sons, and he had taken his donkey and ridden up to Jôon to beg of Lady Hester Stanhope to admit one or two of them into her household, in order to save them from the conscription. In the interim, two others had taken refuge in the French khan, and one had fled to Tyr; but the father said he expected hourly to be seized and put to the torture, if some means were not afforded him for protecting his children. “A letter from the Syt mylady to the commandant,” added Mustafa, “would be sufficient to save my two boys who are in the French khan, and it is so easy for her to write it.” Lady Hester, being ill, could not see Mustafa, and I went to her and stated his supplication. She considered the matter over, and, as Mustafa was rather a favourite, she said at first—“I 110 think I will write to the commandant; for poor Mustafa will go crazy if his children are taken away from him. I have only to say that I wish the commandant to bakshýsh” (make a present of) “these boys to me, and I know he will do it:” then, reflecting a little while, she altered her mind. “No, doctor,” says she, “it will not do: I must not do anything in the face of the laws of the country; and, besides, I shall have all the fathers and mothers in Sayda up here. Go, tell him so.” I did, and Mustafa returned very much dispirited to Sayda.

He had scarcely got back to his shop, when, as he had anticipated, he was summoned before the motsellem, and questioned about his children. With an assumed air of cheerfulness and submission, he answered that they were within call, and, if necessary, he would fetch them immediately. The motsellem, by way of precaution, was about to send a guard of a couple of soldiers, to see that no trick was played him; but Mustafa, laughing, exclaimed—“Oh! don’t be afraid of me: I shan’t run off. That man” (pointing to a small merchant of his acquaintance standing by)—“that man will be bail for my appearance.” The man nodded his head, and said—“There is no fear of Mâalem Mustafa: I will be responsible for him.”

Mustafa went towards his house, and, as soon as he was out of sight, looking round to make sure that he 111 was not followed, he hurried to one of the outlets of the town, entered a lane between the gardens, and, mounting again on his own donkey, which he had left with a friend in case of such an emergency, rode off. Not appearing within the expected time, search was made for him, and, when he was not to be found, the man, who so incautiously vouched for his reappearance, was seized, bastinadoed, and thrown into gaol. Mustafa, in the mean time, had taken the road to Jôon,—not to Lady Hester’s residence, but to Dayr el Mkhallas, the monastery, where he had a good friend in the abbot, and was immediately sheltered in a comfortable cell. Nor did he, when he heard what cruelties had been inflicted on his bail, move one inch from his retreat, but there remained for about six weeks, until, by negociations with the commandant and by the sacrifice of a good round sum, he was informed that his children were safe, and that he might return unmolested.

The secretary told me that, in some cases, mothers were suspended by the hair of their head, and whipped, to make them confess where their children were concealed. Surely such horrors are enough to make men hold these sanguinary tyrants in abhorrence, who, whatever their pretended advances towards civilization may be, never suffer it to soften the barbarity of their natures. Of civilization, they have borrowed conscription, 112 custom-houses, quarantines, ardent spirit and wine-drinking, prostitution, shop licensing, high taxation, and some other of our doubtful marks of superiority; but whatever is really excellent in an advanced state of society they have forgotten to inquire about. The secretary added that, when down at Sayda, he had seen a lad, nursed in the lap of luxury, the only child of respectable parents, at drill on the parade outside of the town, with two soldiers who never quitted him. The drilling was enforced by cuts of the korbàsh. So long as the recruits remain in Sayda, their parents are allowed to supply them with a meal and other little comforts; but, when transported to Egypt, and perhaps to the Hedjàz, they are exposed to hardships unknown to European troops. Their pay is fifteen piasters (3s. 2d. English) a month.

After the expiration of two or three weeks, the shaykhs or head-men of the villages in Mount Lebanon, received orders to levy their contingent of recruits, and pretty much the same scenes were acted over again. From the village of Jôon eight conscripts were required; for, although the population might be five hundred persons, there were but few Mahometan families. No sooner had the estafette, who brought the order, alighted at the Shaykh’s door, than the mussulman peasants to a man seemed to guess what its contents were, and every one who 113 thought himself liable to serve made off to the forests. Among the lads put down on the roll were two, the brothers of Fatôom and Sâada, Lady Hester’s maids. The girls fell on their knees, kissed her feet and the hem of her robe, and prayed her, for God’s sake, to save them. Lady Hester returned the same answer she had done to Mustafa, the barber, and to the other applicants, that she could not act contrary to the laws of the country, and that they must take their chance.

Three or four days had elapsed, when, quitting my house in the morning to go to Lady Hester’s, I found that all her people were full of an extraordinary dream she had had. She had seen in her vision a man with a white beard, who had conducted her among the ravines of Mount Lebanon to a place, where, in a cavern, lay two youths apparently in a trance, and had told her to lead them away to her residence. She attempted to raise them, and at the same moment the earth opened, and she awoke. As soon as I saw Lady Hester, she recounted to me her dream to the same effect, but with many more particulars. Being in the habit of hearing strange things of this kind from her, I thought nothing of it, although I well knew there was something intended by it, as she never spoke without a motive.

Next morning I saw, as I passed the porter’s lodge, 114 two peasant lads sitting in it, and, as soon as I got to Lady Hester’s room, she asked me if I had observed them.—“Isn’t it wonderful, doctor,” said Lady Hester, “that I should have had exactly the same dream two nights following, and the second time so strongly impressed on my mind, that I was sure some of it would turn out true: and so it has. For this very morning, long before daylight, I had Logmagi called, and, describing to him the way he was to go in the mountain until he should come to a wild spot which I painted to him, I sent him off; and, sure enough, he found those two lads you saw, concealed, not in a cavern, but in a tree, just where I had directed him to go.

“They are two runaway conscripts, and, although I know nothing of them, yet I seem to feel that God directed me to bring them here. Poor lads! did you observe whether they looked pale? they must be in want of nourishment; for the search that is going on everywhere after deserters is very hot. Logmagi himself had no very pleasant duty to perform; for, if they had mistaken him for a man in search of them, one against two in the heart of the mountain ran some risk of his life. You know, one deserter the other day wounded three soldiers who attempted to take him, and another killed two out of five, and, although taken, was not punished by the Pasha, who exchanged 115 willingly an athletic gladiator, who had proved his fighting propensities, for two cowards.”

These lads, whom Lady Hester pretended not to know, were the two brothers of Fatôom and Sâada: they were put into a room in an inner enclosure, where they had comfortable quarters assigned them, and were kept for two months hid from observation; by which means they escaped the conscription of that year. At the end of their term, they were one day turned out, told they might go home in safety, and warned that, if ever they made their appearance near the house, they would be flogged. Such were Lady Hester’s eccentric ways; and just as they were wasting their breath in protestations of gratitude, they were frightened out of their senses. No doubt, the reason was that, as from their long stay in the premises, they were more or less acquainted with every locality, it might be that they had formed plans to carry off stolen goods, which Lady Hester thus had the foresight to frustrate. She never told me that her dream was an invention, but I believe that it was.

In addition to the loss of a son, or a husband, or a brother, which the dozen families of Jôon (for there were no more) had to complain of, these same families were taxed at the rate of one, two, or three hundred piasters each, in order to furnish the equipment of the 116 soldiers draughted from among them. For, under the pretext of sending off each recruit with a good kit and with a little money in his pocket, a benevolence tax was invented, the greatest part of which, after the parings of the collectors, went to the Pasha’s treasury, and the half-naked recruit was left to take his chance. Oh! that a European soldier could see what these men are compelled to live on—how they sleep, how they are flogged—and how they are left to die!—and yet suicide is unknown among them.

The bastinado in Sayda was succeeded by mulcts. An order was published by the Pasha, that those whose sons had concealed themselves, or did not appear by a certain day, should be taxed collectively 1,300 purses, a sum more than enough to pay for substitutes. An appeal was made to Ibrahim Pasha to lessen the fine, but the result never came to my knowledge.

November 19.—I had taken to my house to read the book that Sir Gore Ouseley had sent Lady Hester Stanhope, and I related to her the anecdote of the old woman and the copper dish.[12] This threw a gleam of satisfaction over her countenance. “Ah!” said she, and she made a sigh of pleasurable feeling, “these are the people I like; that’s my sort: but the people 117 now-a-days, who call themselves gentlemen, and don’t know how to blow their nose!—when the first peer of the realm will go about bragging what a trick he has played some poor woman whom he has seduced! Cursed be the hour that ever the name of gentleman came into the language! I have seen hedgers and ditchers at my father’s, who talked twice as good sense as half the fine gentlemen now-a-days—a pack of fellows, that do little else than eat, drink, and sleep. Can one exist with such persons as these? or is it to be supposed that God can tolerate such brutalities?”

I sat by, as I was accustomed to do, on such occasions, mute; knowing that a word uttered at that moment would only increase her irritation, instead of appeasing it. She went on: “And whilst you show no more sensibility than that wall, here am I, a poor dying creature” (and then she wept so that it was piteous to hear her), “half killed by these nasty black beasts. Last night, instead of coming refreshed out of my bath, soothed by a gentle perspiration, I was drier than ever, with my mouth parched, my skin parched, and feebler than I was yesterday. But they will all suffer for it; not here, perhaps, but in the other world: for God will not see a poor miserable creature trampled under foot as I have been.”

As she grew a little calm, I expressed my regret to 118 see her so annoyed and tormented by her servants. The conversation then turned on blacks: and I asked—“Are they then never susceptible of feeling: can kind treatment never work on their sensibility?”—“Doctor,” answered Lady Hester, “they have neither one nor the other: it is a bit of black skin, which the people of the country say you must work on with the korbàsh, and with nothing else. I recollect an aga, who told me that he had a black slave, who, when he first bought her, one day got hold of his poniard, and seemed as if she was going to stab him with it. He started up, seized his sabre, and gave her a cut or two; then, with a switch, beat her pretty handsomely. From that day she became fond of him, faithful, and so attached, that, when he wanted to sell her, she would not be sold, but always contrived that the contract should be broken by her swearing she would kill herself, throw herself over the terrace, or something, that made the buyer refuse to take her.

“I recollect another story. There were five European travellers coming down the banks of the Nile on horseback, when they saw an aga, who was sitting in the open air, lay hold of a black woman by the hair of her head, throw her down, and flog her most unmercifully with the korbàsh. One of the party was a German count, or something, who, being what you call a humane man, said he must interfere; but the 119 others told him he had better not. However, he did: and what was the consequence? why, the woman immediately jumped up, called him an impudent rascal, slapped his face with her slipper, hooted him, and followed the party until she fairly frightened them by her violence.

“No, doctor, they do not like mild people. They always say they want no old hens, but a jigger” (I believe her ladyship meant some ferocious animal) “for their master. As for what you say, that the common people of this country stand in respect of nobody, I can tell you that they do. You should have seen the Shaykh Beshýr, how they respected him. When I was at his palace, I recollect, one day, one of his secretaries brought in a bag of money. ‘Is it all here?’ said the Shaykh, with a terrible, cross, frowning face. ‘It is, your felicity,’ said the man. ‘Very well,’ said the Shaykh, still with the same fierce countenance; and I asked him what he put on such a severe look for to a very pleasing-looking man. ‘Why,’ answered he, ‘if I did not, I should be robbed past imagination: if I said to him, I am much obliged to you, sir; you have given yourself a great deal of trouble on my account, and the like compliments, he would go away and chuckle in his own mind to think his peculations were not suspected; but now he will go, and say to himself, I will bet an adli some one 120 has told the Shaykh of the five hundred piasters that were left for me at my house: I must send directly, and desire they may be returned—or, he knows about the tobacco that was brought me by the peasant; I had better get rid of it; and so on. Their peculations are past all bounds, and they must be kept under with a rod of iron.’

“There was Danna, the poor old Frenchman, who lost his trunk with all his doubloons in it: do you think he would ever have found them, if the Emir Beshýr had not sent Hamâady to that village about a league off—what do you call it?—where the robbery was committed? He assembled all the peasants, men and women, and he told them—‘Now, my friends, Monsieur Danna does not want anybody to be punished, if he can help it; therefore, you have only to produce the money, and nothing farther will be said: for the money was lost here, and some of you must know where it is.’ To see what protestations of innocence there were, what asseverations! and from the women more than the men. So Hamâady, finding that talking was of no use, heated his red-hot irons and his copper skull caps, and produced his instruments of torture; and, seeing that the women were more vociferous than the men, he selected one on whom strong suspicions had fallen, and drove a spike under her finger-nails. At the first thrust, she screamed out—‘Let me off! 121 let me off! and I will acknowledge all.’ She then immediately confessed—would you believe it?—that the curate’s son had robbed Danna, and she had shared the money with him.

“Now, tell me, was it best that the old Frenchman should die of starvation, or that the rascally thief of a woman, who had induced the curate’s son to commit the robbery, should be punished, as a warning to others? If such severe punishments were not used among them, we should not sleep safe in our beds. How well is it known that they have with pickaxes opened a roof, and thrown in lighted straw to suffocate people, that they might rob in security.

“I recollect once, when Captain Y. was here, I was showing him the garden; and, seeing some lettuces which were badly planted, he said to me, ‘That’s not the way to plant lettuces: they should be so and so.’—‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I have told the gardener so a hundred times, and he will never listen to me.’—‘Oh! oh!’ said he, ‘won’t he? Let me bring a boatswain’s mate to him, and I’ll soon see whether he will or not?—‘You are very good,’ was my answer; ‘but then I should lose your company for half a day, and I had rather have no lettuces than do that.

“When I first came to this country, you know perfectly well that I never behaved otherwise than with the greatest kindness to servants. You ask me 122 why I don’t now try gentle measures with them, rewarding the good, and merely dismissing the idle and vicious: my reply is, I did so for years, until I found they abused my forbearance in the grossest manner. Do you think it would frighten the rest, were I to turn away one or two? no such thing. Why, upon one occasion, four of them, after they had received their wages, and had each got a present of new shawls, new girdles, and new kombázes, all went off together, clothes, wages and all, in the night. It is by degrees I am become what I am; and, only after repeated trials and proofs of the inefficiency of everything but severity, that I am grown so indifferent, that I do nothing but scold and abuse them.

“But you talk of cruelty: it is such men as Mustafa Pasha, who was one of those who besieged Acre when Abdallah Pasha was firmanlee” (proscribed), “that you should call cruel; he was indeed a sanguinary tyrant. Doctor, he made a noise sometimes like the low growl of a tiger, and his people knew then that blood must flow. It was his custom, when the fit was on him, to send for some poor wretch from prison, and kill him with his own hand. He would then grow calm, smoke his pipe, and seem for a time quieted. But he was a shrewd man, and a clever pasha. He wrote with his own hand (which pashas never do, except on particular 123 occasions) a letter to the Shaykh Beshýr, desiring him to pay marked attention to me. The Shaykh was highly flattered with the distinction shown him.”

The recollection of the Pasha’s civility and the Shaykh Beshýr’s letter recalled her thoughts to what she had proposed to do at the beginning of the evening, which was to write an answer to Sir Gore Ouseley, and to thank the Oriental Translation Fund Society for their present. This was done in a letter from which the following are extracts:—

To the Right Hon. Sir Gore Ouseley, Bart.

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Rainy season—Lady Hester’s despondency—Her Turkish costume—Turkish servants—Terror inspired by Lady Hester in her servants—Visit of Messieurs Poujolat and Boutés—Lady Hester’s inability to entertain strangers—Her dejected spirits and bad health.

November 24.—Still rain, rain! The courtyards were deep in mud and puddles, and the men-servants walked about in wooden clogs, such as are worn in breweries. The flat roofs, which cover the houses in most parts of Syria, are made of a cement of mortar and fine gravel, in appearance like an asphaltum causeway. In the hot months fissures show themselves; and it rarely happens, when winter comes on, that, during the first heavy rains, the wet does not filter through. Lady Hester, therefore, had to suffer, as well as all the house, from this annoyance, hardly bearable when a person is in health, but extremely distressing and even dangerous in sickness. For some days past pans had been standing on the bedroom 128 floor to catch the droppings, and it continued to rain on. The sloppy communications from door to door, where every door opens into a courtyard, gave likewise a damp to the apartments only supportable in a climate as mild as that of Syria. Snow had covered the upper chain of Mount Lebanon in great abundance, and the wind blew furiously. Everybody was out of humour, and many of the servants were labouring under bad coughs and colds: but the women, notwithstanding, always moved about the house with naked feet. It was a wonder to see how, with coughs that might be heard from one courtyard to another, they constantly went barefoot, and yet got well; and a servant, if sent to the village, was sure to leave his shoes at the porter’s lodge, and, drawing his sherwáls or trousers up above his knees, to set off as light as a deer through the pelting storm, careless of wet, if he could but cover his head.

I saw Lady Hester about two in the day: she was in low spirits, lying in her bed with the window and door open from a sense of suffocation which had just before seized her.

“Would you believe it,” said she, as I entered, “those beasts would leave me to die here before they came to my assistance! and, if I happen to fall asleep, there is not one would cover my shoulders to prevent my taking cold.”

129 Poor Lady Hester! thought I, the contrast between your early days and your present sufferings is almost enough to break your heart. So I abused the maids handsomely; and then, being satisfied with the warmth of my expressions, and having vented her own anger, she began to talk composedly.

I remained until near dinner-time, and, after dinner, went to her again. She observed that the nights were dreadfully long, and that she should be obliged to me if I would read to her. Her stock of books, and mine too, was very small, and, after naming a few, which did not please her, I recollected she had asked me once if I had by me a heathen mythology, and she immediately fixed on that. So, writing on a slip of paper to my daughter to send me hers, Lady Hester said, “First let me order a pipe for you:” for this was usually the preliminary to all business or conversation. Every sitting was opened with a pipe, and generally terminated with one; as her ladyship would say, “But, before you go, doctor, you must smoke one pipe more.” When the book came, she desired me to turn to the part about Jupiter Ammon, and it will be seen farther on why she did so. After a page or two, she began to talk of the coming of the Mahadi, and the conversation was prolonged far into the night. She afterwards ordered tea—for I now drank tea with her almost every evening—and I then returned to my house, 130 covered with my thick capote, which, in the short distance of a few hundred yards, could hardly save me from being wet through.

November 25.—The annual fast of the Mahometans, called Ramazàn, had begun on the preceding day. It is customary for persons of rank to make presents of clothes and other things to their dependants, during the lunar month that the Ramazàn lasts, in order that they may appear dressed up in finery on the first day of the succeeding new moon, at the holyday of the Byràm, which succeeds it, as Easter-day does Lent among Christians. Lady Hester, who never was behindhand in beneficence, made it a rule to clothe all her Mahometan servants anew at this season, as she did all her Christian ones on New Year’s Day or at Easter. New capotes, pelisses, sherwáls, shirts, shifts, turbans, gowns, &c., were always bought previous to the time; and, the best being given to the most deserving, the worst to the least so, with none at all to the lazy and worthless, some sort of activity was observable in their service previous to the expected time. But the objects they coveted once in their possession, they soon relapsed into their customary sloth.

Some of these articles of dress were lying on the floor, Lady Hester having had them brought for her to look at. She said to me, “You must take home 131 one of these abahs[14] to show to your family. You must tell them,” continued she, “that once I had all my servants clothed in such abahs as that: but they played me such tricks, I have given it up. Some sold them; and, on one occasion, four of them marched off within twenty-four hours after I had dressed them from head to foot, and I never saw them again: isn’t it abominable? At the time that I dressed them so well, and rode out myself with my bornôos, crimson and gold, the gold lace being everywhere where silk tape is generally put, I did not owe a shilling in the world.”

“Once,” she continued, “when riding my beautiful Arabian mare Asfoor, near a place called Gezýn, in that crimson bornôos, with a richly-embroidered dress under it, and on my crimson velvet saddle, I happened to approach an encampment of the Pasha’s troops. Several benát el hawa” (street ladies), “who were living with the soldiers, ran across a field to come up with me, thinking I was some young bey or binbashi. Every time, just as they got near, I quickened my horse’s pace, that they might not see I was a 132 woman: at last, two fairly came and seized my knees, to make me turn and look at them. But what was their confusion (for such women are not so hardened as in Europe) when they saw I had no beard or mustachios, and was one of their own sex!”

Lady Hester related this droll adventure to me more than once, to show, I believe, what a distinguished and real Turkish appearance she made on horseback, which was perfectly true: but to return to the servants.

A Turk for work is little better than a brute animal: he moves about nimbly, when roused by vociferation and threats, and squats down like a dog the moment he is left to himself. England produces no type of the Syrian serving-man. He sets about his work as a task that is given to him, and, when it is over, sits down immediately to smoke his pipe and to gossip, or seeks a snug place near at hand, and goes to sleep. You call him, and set him to do something else, and the same practice follows. The next day you expect he will, of his own accord, recommence what was shown to him on the preceding one; but no such thing: you have to tell him over again, and so every day. He is a thief from habit, and a liar of the most brazen stamp, as no shame is ever attached to detection. In plausible language, protestations of honesty and fidelity, he has no superior; 133 and, if beaten or reviled, he will smother his choler, nay, kiss the hand that has chastised him, but waits a fit opportunity for vengeance, and carefully weighs kicks against coppers. He is generally so servile as to make you bear with his worthlessness, even though you despise him; and, when your anger appears to threaten him with the loss of his place and is at the highest, he smooths it down with an extraordinary day’s activity, making you hope that a reformation has taken place in him: but it is all delusion. And think not that you, a Christian, can raise your hand against the meanest servant, if a Mahometan: when you would have him beaten, you must employ another Mahometan to do it, who will, however, lay on to your heart’s content.

What has been said above applies to the menials of towns and cities. Of another class of servants taken from the villages, Lady Hester used to say, “I have tried the Syrian fellahs” (peasants) “for twenty years as servants, and I ought to know pretty well what they are fit for. It is my opinion that, for hard work, lifting heavy things, going with mules and asses, for foot messengers across the country, and for such business, you may make something of them, but for nothing else. The women are idle, and prone to thieving; and it is impossible to teach them any European usages.”

134 One day, in walking through the back yard, I observed two stakes, about six feet high and sharply pointed, stuck deep and firmly into the ground, which had before escaped my notice. I inquired what they were for, but got no satisfactory answer, the dairyman, to whom I addressed myself, using the reply so common throughout the East, Ma aref (I don’t know); for no people in the world have so quick a scent of the danger of being brought into trouble by professing to know what is inquired about as the Orientals. A Jew, in a street in Turkey, and a Christian likewise, is sure to answer the most simple question by an “I don’t know”—“I have not heard”—“I have not seen;” for he fears what that question may lead to, and that, if he knows a little, a bastinadoing may be resorted to to make him know more: so I afterwards asked Lady Hester. “Oh!” replied she, “I’ll tell you how those stakes came there: I had forgotten all about them. One day, at the time they were robbing me right and left, I ordered the carpenter to make two stakes, such as people are impaled upon, and to erect them in the back yard. I spoke not to any one why or wherefore I had given the order; but if you had seen the fright that pervaded the house, and for weeks how well the maids behaved, you would then have known, as I do, that it is only by such terrible means that these abominable jades can be kept under. From 135 that time to this it appears the stakes have remained; for, as I never go into that yard, I had forgotten them: but since they are there still, there let them be.”

Thus Lady Hester was dying in a struggle to cure her men and maids of theft, lying, and carelessness, whilst they ended the month with the same indifference to honesty, truth, and cleanliness, as they began it.

Each one was a sycophant to those who had authority over him; each one distrusted his comrade. Lady Hester might say with truth, “If I did not act so, they would cut your throat and mine:” but why did she keep such wretches about her? why not turn them away, and procure European servants? or why continue to live in such a wild mountain, and not make her dwelling-place in or near a city, where consular protection was at hand? The first three questions I have endeavoured to answer already; and, as for the last, respecting consular protection, he that had dared to suggest such an expedient of safety to her would have rued the observation. To name a consul in that sense to her was to name what was most odious; and the epithets that were generally coupled with their names were such as I have too much respect for that useful body of magistrates to put down in writing.

Saturday, November 25.—As I was returning from 136 the village about four in the afternoon, on ascending the side of the hill on which Lady Hester’s house stands, I met four persons mounted on mules, and conjectured them, by their boots, which were black, and reached up to the calf of the leg, not to be of the country; for in Syria either red or yellow boots are always worn. They had on Morea capotes, and their dress was that of the more northern provinces of Turkey. In passing them, I said, “Good evening!” in Arabic, but, on receiving no answer from the two nearest to me, I looked hard at them, and immediately saw they were Europeans.

On alighting at my own door, I asked the servant if he had seen anybody go by, and his reply was, that three or four Turkish soldiers had passed. I then inquired of one of Lady Hester’s muleteers, who was unloading some provisions he had brought from Sayda, if he knew who the four men were whom I had seen; and he answered that, at the foot of the hill, they had inquired of him the road to Jôon, and that they were Milordi travelling: Milordo being the term applied to every European who travels in the Levant with a man-servant, and has money to spend.

I went in to Lady Hester a few minutes afterwards, and told her that some travellers, as I thought, to get a nearer view of her house than could be had from the high road, had made a round, and had just ridden past 137 the door. About a quarter of an hour afterwards, the maid brought in a message from the porter to say that two Franks, just arrived at the village of Jôon, had sent their servant with a note, and the porter wished to know whether the note was to be taken in. For Lady Hester had been so tormented with begging letters, petitions, stories of distress, &c., that it was become a general rule for him never to receive any written paper, until he had first sent in to say who had brought it, and from whom it came; and then she would decide whether it was to be refused or not. The note, accordingly, was fetched.

Lady Hester read it to herself, and then the following conversation took place, which will explain some of the reasons why she did not always receive strangers who presented themselves at her gate. “Yes, doctor,” said she, “you were right: they are two travellers, who have been to Palmyra and about, and want to come and talk to me concerning the Arabs and the desert. Should you like to go to Jôon, and tell them I can’t see them, because I have been confined to my room for several days from a bad cold?” I answered, “Certainly; I would go with the greatest pleasure.” She then rang the bell, and desired the servant to order my horse. She continued, “One of the names, I think, is a man of a great family.”—“What is it?” I asked. She took up the note 138 again. “Boo, poo, bon—no—Boo—jo—lais—Beaujolais, I think it is. No, Pou—jo—lat; it is Poujolat.”—“Then,” interrupted I, “I guess who they are: there was a Monsieur Poujolat, who came into the Levant six or seven years ago, to make researches respecting the crusades: I saw him at Cyprus; he and Monsieur Michaud were together. They were considered men of talent, and I believe were contributors to some Paris newspaper during Charles the Tenth’s time. They had published already some volumes of their travels before I left Europe, and the greatest part of the ground was travelled over, as I surmise, in the saloons of their consuls, during the long evenings when they were shut in by the plague of 1831 and 1832; for they speak of many places where they could hardly have gone. But this is not unusual,” I added, “with some writers; for Monsieur Chaboçeau, a French doctor at Damascus, told me, in 1813, when I was staying in his house, that Monsieur de Volney never went to Palmyra, although he leads one to suppose he had been there; for, owing to a great fall of snow just at the period when he projected that journey, he was compelled to relinquish the attempt. Monsieur Chaboçeau, an octogenarian, had known him, and entertained him as his guest in his house; and he answered me, when I reiterated the question, that Volney never saw Palmyra.”

139 “Oh! if they have written about the crusades,” said Lady Hester, paying no attention to what I said about Volney, “tell them that all the crusaders are not dead, but that some of them are asleep only; asleep in the same arms and the same dress they wore on the field of battle, and will awake at the first resurrection. Mind you say the first resurrection; for I suppose you know there are to be two, one a partial one, and the last a general one.[15]

“But there, doctor, I must not detain you. Now, just listen to what you have got to do. Mohammed 140 shall take to them two bottles of red wine, and two bottles of vino d’oro” (ding, ding.) “Zezefôon, tell Mohammed to get out four bottles of wine, two of each sort; of my wine—you understand—and he is to put them in a basket, and be ready to go with the doctor to Jôon.” Then, addressing herself again to me, “You must say to them that I am very sorry I can’t see them, but that I am not very well, and that I beg their acceptance of a little wine, which, perhaps, they might not find where they sleep to-night. Say to them, I should be very much pleased to talk over their journey to Palmyra with them; and add that the respect I bear to all the French makes me always happy to meet with one of their nation. Say that the wine is not so good as I could wish it to be, but that, since Ibrahim Pasha and his soldiers have been in the country, they have drunk up all the good, and it is now very difficult to procure any. If they talk about Ibrahim Pasha, say that I admire his courage, but cannot respect him; that I am a faithful subject of the Sultan, and shall always be so, and that I do not like servants that rise against their masters; for whether Cromwells, or Buonapartes, or people in these countries, it never succeeds. If they allude to the horrors of the recruiting service, and to the nizàm troops, tell them that I never interfere in matters like that; but that, when heads were to be saved and the 141 wounded and houseless to be succoured, as after the siege of Acre, then I was not afraid of Ibrahim Pasha, or any of them. Well, I think that’s all:” then, musing a little while, she added, “I ought, perhaps, to ask them to pass the night here; but, if I did, it would be all confusion: no dinner ready for them—and, before it could be, it would be midnight, for I must have a sheep killed: besides, it would be setting a bad example. There would be others then coming just at nightfall to get a supper and be off in the morning, as has happened more than once already. So now go, doctor, and” (ding, ding) “Fatôom! who is that woman that lodges strangers sometimes at Jôon?”—“Werdy, Sytty, the midwife.”—“Ah! so; very well. Tell them, doctor, that they had better not think of going to Sayda to-night, as the gates will be shut; and that they will be nowhere better off for sleeping in all the village than at Werdy, the midwife’s: for she has good beds and clean counterpanes: so now go.”

I half rose to go, still hanging back, as knowing her ladyship would, as usual, have much more to say. “Oh! by the bye,” she resumed, “if they inquire about me, and ask any questions, you may say that sometimes I am a great talker when subjects please me, and sometimes say very little if they do not. I am a character: what I do, or intend to do, nobody 142 knows beforehand; and, when done, people don’t always know why, until the proper time, and then it comes out.” Here she paused a little, and then resumed. “I dare say they came here to have something to put in their book, so mind you tell them about the crusaders; for it is true, doctor. You recollect I told you the story, and how these sleeping crusaders had been seen by several persons; and I don’t suppose those persons would lie more than other people; why should they?”—“Why should they indeed?” I answered. “They were martyrs,” resumed her ladyship, “and those who sleep are not only of the Christians who fought, but of the Saracens also; men, that is, who felt from their souls the justice of the cause they fought for. As for yourself, if you don’t believe it, you may add you know nothing about it; for you are lately come into the country, and all these are things which are become known to me during my long residence here.”

At last I went, mounted my horse, and rode out of the gate, Mohammed following with the basket of wine. But, instead of having to go to the village, I found the strangers waiting on their mules about two or three hundred yards from the porter’s lodge. My horse, taken from his feed, for it was near sunset, and seeing the mules, jumped and pranced so that I was obliged to dismount before I could approach them. I 143 delivered Lady Hester’s message to them, and in answer they expressed, in polite terms, their regret at not seeing her, and their still greater regret that the reason was from her ill state of health. Unlike what some Englishmen have done on similar occasions, they uttered not the slightest murmur about her want of hospitality, nor the least doubt of the veracity of the excuse; but, as soon as they found that they should not be admitted, they cut short all further conversation; lamenting, as night was fast approaching, that they could not stop, and that they were under the necessity of bending their way somewhere as fast as possible to get a night’s lodging. I pointed to the village, recommended them to go there, and repeated Werdy, the midwife’s name, two or three times, as a cottage where they would be comfortably lodged. But, yielding to the advice of their servant, who, as is the case with all travellers ignorant of the language in a strange country, seemed to lead his masters pretty much where he liked, they were induced to set off for Sayda, where they could not arrive in less than three hours, instead of passing the night at Jôon, where they would have been housed in ten minutes. So, presenting them with the wine, and having informed them of the name of the French consular agent at Sayda, where they would do well to demand a lodging, I wished them good night, and took my leave. They 144 mounted their mules, and descended the bank by the narrow path that led under the hill to the Sayda road; when, as I was going back to the house, I heard one of the gentlemen calling out to me, “But the empty bottles?” Now the interview had been conducted, on my part, with all the etiquette I was master of, and on theirs, up to the moment of saying good night, with the politeness so natural to the French nation. But the exclamation, “What’s to be done with the empty bottles? you gave us the wine, but did you give us the bottles too?” sounded so comic, and in the vicinity of that residence too, where it was customary to give in a princely way, that the speaker fell a degree in the scale of my estimation on the score of breeding, how much soever he might be commended for his intended exactitude and probity.

I returned to Lady Hester. During my short absence, one of her maids had informed her that the Franks, although they had made a show of going to Jôon when first they passed the gate, had in fact only retired into the valley between the two hills, where they had unpacked their saddle-bags and shifted themselves, in order to make a decent appearance before her. This increased her regret at the trouble they had so uselessly put themselves to. The rain came on soon after, and their unpleasant situation was the subject of conversation for a good half hour. The 145 name of the other gentleman who accompanied Monsier Poujolat was Boutés.

Much has been said of Lady Hester Stanhope’s rudeness to her countrymen and others in refusing them admittance when at the door, and probably Messrs. Poujolat and Boutés might have complained at Sayda of her inhospitable conduct: but it is scarcely necessary for me to say that her real motives for acting as she did were not from a dislike to see people, since nobody enjoyed half-a-day’s conversation with a stranger more than she did. A few days after,

December 2.—I had taken a long ride in the morning, and had seen a frigate under her studding sails running towards Sayda. The arrival of a ship of war was always an event to set the house in commotion; for it was very well known that, if her colours were English or French, the chances were ten to one that either the captain or some of the officers would come up to Jôon. Accordingly, on returning home at about 4 o’clock, I told Lady Hester Stanhope of it: but she was not well, had passed the night badly, and all she said was,—“Well, if they come, I shall not see any of them.” Now, it is not improbable, if any of the officers had presented themselves, and had been told that her ladyship was unable to receive them, owing to the state of her health, that they would have gone away discontented, and disposed to attribute her 146 refusal to any other cause than the real one: but let any one, who reads what follows, say if she was in a fit state to hold conversation with strangers.

Her health was still very far from good, and this day was a day of sorrow. Her maids had been sulky and impertinent, and her forlorn and deserted situation came so forcibly across her mind, that she raised up her hands to heaven, and wept. “Oh!” said she, “if these horrid servants would but do as they are told, I could get on by myself, and should not want anybody to help me: but they are like jibbing horses, and the only good horse in the team is worked to death. Were I well, I would not care for a thousand of them; I should know how to manage them: but, sick as I am, hardly able to raise my hand to ring the bell, if anything were to happen to me, I might die, and nobody would come to my assistance.”

I offered, as I had done almost daily, to have my bed removed to the room next to hers, and to sleep there, in order to be at hand if she should want my assistance: but she would not admit of it; and I could only use my best efforts to soothe her, which was no easy matter. I remained six hours with her, sitting the whole time in a constrained posture, that I might catch her words, so low was her voice. And I could not move without sensibly annoying her, as she 147 was sure to construe it into a wish to be gone, or a disregard of her situation, and to say she was neglected by everybody.

It is incredible how Lady Hester Stanhope used to torment herself about trifles. People, who never happened to meet with a person of her peculiar character, would be amazed at the precision with which she set about everything she undertook. The most trivial and fugitive affairs were transacted with quite as much pains and exactitude as she brought to bear upon the most important plans. This was, in fact, the character of her mind, exhibiting itself throughout her entire conduct. I have known her lose nearly a whole day in scolding about a nosegay of roses which she wished to send to the Pasha’s wife. For the purpose of sending nosegays safely to distant places, she had invented a sort of canister. In the bottom part was placed a tumbler full of water, in which the flower-stalks were kept moist; and the nosegay was thus carried to any distance, suspended to the mules, saddle, or in a man’s hand. The servants, who could not understand why such importance was attached to a few flowers, were remiss in keeping the canisters clean, nor would the gardener arrange the flowers as Lady Hester wished. For a matter like this she would storm and cry, and appeal to me if it was not a shame she should be so treated.

148 December 3.—To-day, a servant, who was ill, had become the object of her immediate anxiety. “As for myself,” cried she, “I care not how ragged, how neglected I am; but I am in a fever if I think a poor creature is in want of such comforts as his illness may require. Such is my despotism: and I dread every moment of the day lest his necessities should not be attended to. Who is to see his room warmed, to take care he has proper drinks, to give him his medicine? I know nobody will do it, unless I see to it myself.” I assured her he should have every attention possible.

It was in vain to expect any sentiment or feeling from servants and slaves, who had no prospect before them but one constant round of forced work, against their habits and inclinations. Although Lady Hester Stanhope had adopted almost all the customs of the East, she still retained many of her own: and to condemn the slaves to learn the usages of Franks was like obliging an English housemaid to fall into those of the Turks. Thus, the airing of linen, ironing, baking loaves of bread instead of flat cakes, cleaning knives, brightening pots, pans, and kettles, mending holes in clothes, and other domestic cleanly usages, were points of contention which were constantly fought over and over again for twenty years, with no better success at the last than at the first.

Her conversation turned one day on Sir G. H. 149 “What can be the reason?” said she, “I am now always thinking of Sir G. H. Seven years ago, when you were here, you spoke about him, and I thought no more of him than merely to make some remarks at the moment; but now I have dreamed of him two or three times, and I am sure something is going to happen to him, either very good or very bad. I have been thinking how well he would do for master of the horse to the Queen, and I have a good way of giving a hint of it through the Buckleys: for I always said that, next to Lord Chatham, nobody ever had such handsome equipages as Sir G.: nobody’s horses and carriages were so neatly picked out as theirs. Sir G. is a man, doctor, from what you tell me, that would have just suited Mr. Pitt. That polished and quiet manner which Sir G. has was what Mr. Pitt found so agreeable in Mr. Long. It is very odd—Mr. Pitt always would dress for dinner, even if we were alone. One day, I said to him, ‘You are tired, and there is no one but ourselves; why need you dress!’ He replied, ‘Why, I don’t know, Hester; but if one omits to do it to-day, we neglect it to-morrow, and so on, until one grows a pig.’”

December 7, 1837.—Poor Lady Hester’s appearance to-day would have been a piteous sight for her friends in England. I saw her about noon: she was pale, very ill, and her natural good spirits quite gone. 150 “Doctor,” said she, in a faint voice, “I am very poorly to-day, and I was still worse in the night. I was within that” (holding up her finger) “of death’s door, and I find nothing now will relieve me. A little while ago, I could depend on something or other, when seized with these spasmodic attacks; but now everything fails. How am I to get better, when I can’t have a moment’s repose from morning till night? When I was ill on former occasions, I could amuse myself with my thoughts, with cutting out in paper;—why, I have a closet full of models, in paper, of rooms, and arches, and vaults, and pavilions, and buildings, with so many plans of alterations, you can’t think. But now, if I want a pair of scissors, they can’t be found; if I want a needle and thread, there is none forthcoming; and I am wearied to death about the smallest trifles.”

She here began to cry and wring her hands, presenting a most melancholy picture of despair. When she had recovered a little, she went on: “To look upon me now, what a lesson against vanity! Look at this arm, all skin and bone, so thin, so thin, that you may see through it; and once, without exaggeration, so rounded, that you could not pinch the skin up. My neck was once so fair that a pearl necklace scarcely showed on it; and men—no fools, but sensible men—would say to me, ‘God has given you a neck you 151 really may be proud of: you are one of nature’s favourites, and one may be excused for admiring that beautiful skin.’ If they could behold me now, with my teeth all gone, and with long lines in my face—not wrinkles, for I have no wrinkles when I am left quiet, and not made angry: but my face is drawn out of its composure by these wretches. I thank God that old age has come upon me unperceived. When I used to see the painted Lady H. dressed in pink and silver, with her head shaking, and jumped by her footman into her sociable, attempting to appear young, I felt a kind of horror and disgust I can’t describe. I wonder how Lady Stafford dresses, now she is no longer young: but I can’t fancy her grown old.”

She paused, and then resumed. “I have,” she said, “been under the saw” (drawing the little finger of her right hand backward and forward across the forefinger of her left) “for many years, and not a tooth but what has told; but it is God’s will, and I do not repine: it is man’s ingratitude that wounds me most. How many harsh answers have even you given me, when I have been telling you things for your good: it is that which hurts me.”

I confessed my fault, and expressed my deep regret that I had ever caused her any pain.

She went on. “When I see people of understanding moidering away their time, losing their memory, 152 and doing nothing that is useful to mankind, I must be frank, and tell them of it. You are in darkness, and I have done my best to enlighten you: if I have not succeeded, it is not my fault. As for pleasing or displeasing me, put that out of your head: there is no more in that than in pleasing or displeasing that door. I am but a worm—a poor, miserable being—an humble instrument in the hands of God. But, if a man is benighted, and sees a light in a castle, does he go to it, or does he not? Perhaps it may be a good genius that guides him there, perhaps it may be a den of thieves: but there he goes.”

In this mournful strain Lady Hester went on for some time. Every thing around me presented so affecting a picture, that, unable to restrain my emotions, I burst into tears. She let me recover myself, and then, making me drink a finjàn of coffee, with a little orange-flower water in it, to restore my spirits, she advised me to go and take a walk.

An hour or two afterwards I saw her again. She was much better, and was sitting up in her bed, cutting out articles of clothing, and fixing on patterns for new gowns for her maids. “I hate money,” she said, “and could wish to have nothing to do with it but saying, ‘Take this, and lay it out so and so.’” Ever sanguine, she was forming plans of what she should do in the spring, when she purposed remodelling her 153 household, and replacing her present servants by a fresh set. The world was to be convulsed by revolutions, nations were to be punished by sickness and calamities; and her object was to secure, for those in whose welfare she felt interested, an asylum in the coming days of trouble.

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The Delphic priestess—Abdallah Pasha’s ingratitude—His cowardice—Lady Hester’s spies—Her emaciation—History of General Loustaunau.

December 8.—A most violent storm of rain, thunder, and lightning, kept me prisoner. The courtyards were flooded. When all the house was in confusion from the wet, and clogs were heard clattering on all sides, I entered Lady Hester’s room, and remained for about an hour, talking on indifferent subjects, without hearing from her one word in allusion to the state of the weather. At last she said, “Doctor, I find myself better from the thunder!” And when I replied that there were many persons who felt oppressed from an electric condition of the atmosphere and were relieved by its explosion, she observed, with some sharpness, “that I must be a great booby to make such a remark to her, as there was not a servant in the house who did not know that she could always 155 tell, three days beforehand, when a thunder-storm was coming on.”

In the evening I sat with her about four hours. She was up, and had placed herself in a corner of her bed-room on a low ottoman (as it is called in England), which the Syrians name terâahah. The candle was put far back in the window recess, the light being thrown on my features, whilst it left hers in obscurity. This was her custom on almost all occasions, even when she had strangers visiting her, under pretence that she could not bear the light in her eyes, but, in fact, as I have reason to believe, to watch the play of people’s countenances.

She resumed the subject of the preceding evening. I was too weary when I left her, and too busy next morning, to be able to write down her conversation, but, could I have done it, it must have left a profound impression on the reader’s mind, an idea of sublimity, whether he held her visionary opinions to be the mere rhapsodies of a disordered intellect, or the deductions of great reasoning powers, aided by remarkable foresight. Her language was so forcible and sublime, that I sometimes suspended my breath, and from time to time tried to assure myself that I was not hearkening to a superhuman voice. The smoke from our pipes by degrees filled the room, closely shut up as it was, and cast a deep gloom around us. The 156 wind howled without, with now and then occasional echoes of the thunder among the mountains: and it required no great stretch of imagination to believe one’s self listening to the inspired oracles of the Delphic priestess, as she poured forth the warnings of what seemed a preternatural insight into futurity.

December 9.—The morning was employed in writing letters, and in the evening I remained until half-past one with Lady Hester. She spoke of the alarm created in Mahomet Ali’s cabinet, by her affording protection to Abdallah Pasha’s people after the surrender of St. Jean d’Acre. “That impudent fellow C********,” said she, “sent me a packet of letters from Colonel Campbell, and told me I was to prepare a list of all the people in my house, giving their names, nation, a description of their persons, &c. I returned him the packet, and desired him to forward it to the quarter whence it came, adding, ‘These are all the commands that Lady Hester Stanhope has at present to give to Mr. C********.’ To Colonel C. I wrote ‘that it was not customary for consuls to give orders to their superiors; that, as for the English name, about which he talked so much, I made over to him all the advantage he might derive from it.’ And my letter to Boghoz was to the effect that, ‘in confessing, as he did, that I rendered the state of this country unsettled by my measures, he acknowledged 157 the weakness of his master’s cause; that I disdained all partnership in it; and that the column on which Mahomet Ali’s exaltation rested would, before long, sink beneath him, and his greatness melt like snow before the fire.’ I added, ‘there could be little honour for Mahomet Ali to make himself a gladiator before a woman;’ and here I meant that, as a gladiator was some criminal who descended into the arena to fight, so he was a malefactor too.

“As for Abdallah Pasha, he was not worth the pains I took about him; but I did it for my master, the Sultan. I kept and maintained for two years two hundred of his people, wounded, sick, and proscribed; and when I wrote to him to know what I should do with them, as the expense was too great for me, the answer of this ungrateful wretch was to ask me for a loan of twenty-five purses, and not even to send his remembrance to one of those who had bled and suffered in his cause. His ingratitude, however, has partly met with its reward: for the Sultan himself has heard of his cold-hearted conduct, and has taken away half what he allowed him. This is the man whose head I saved by my intercession with a person in power.

“He was a coward, after all. The last day of the siege of Acre he lost his senses quite. As Ibrahim Pasha had effected a breach, some of Abdallah Pasha’s officers forced him to come upon the ramparts to 158 encourage the soldiers; for he had remained during the whole time shut up in a vault under-ground with his women and boys, and had never once appeared. Well, the first thing he did was to sit down amidst the fire, quite bewildered. He then asked for an umbrella: then he called for some water; and, when they presented to him an ibryk[16] as being the only thing they had near at hand, not supposing that at such a moment he would mind what it was he drank from, he would not drink out of it?”

They fetched him a goblet, and he made them take it back, because it was a glass he drank sherbet out of, and not water. The very man who handed it to him told me the story. At last they placed him in one corner of the battery, and covered him with a cloak. All this time the bullets were flying about.[17]

159 Lady Hester continued:—“Of all those to whom I gave an asylum and bread, after the siege, I can’t say there were many who showed the least gratitude—four perhaps: the rest robbed me, and abused my goodness in every possible manner. One family alone consisted of seventeen persons. Will it be believed, that when I had new clothes made for the women for the Byrám holyday, they had the baseness to grumble at the stuff, the make, and everything, complaining they were not good enough for them? But this did not hurt me half so much as the little credit I get for everything I do among my relations and the English in general. My motives are misconstrued, or not appreciated; and, whilst a mighty fuss is made about some public subscription for people in Jamaica, Newfoundland, or God knows where, I, who, by my own individual exertions, have done the like for hundreds of wretched beings, driven out of their homes by the sabre and bayonet, am reviled and abused for every act of kindness or benevolence.

“I knew a pretty deal of what was going forward during the siege of Acre by my own spies. Hanah, your old servant—Giovanni, as he used to be called—was one of them. He carried on his trade of a barber, and was married in Acre; and, when the bombarding began, he got out somehow, and came to me. So I furnished him with a beggar’s dress. But first I 160 made him take leave of the other servants, and set off from the door. Then, hiding himself under a rock, when he was at a distance, he dressed himself as a fakýr, and, so perfect was his disguise, that, when he came back to me, I did not know him. He was a poor timid fellow, and that was the reason why I chose him as fit for my purpose. In such a nice business as that, I wanted a man that would follow my instructions exactly, and do nothing out of his own head: and Giovanni was in such a fright, that I was sure of him in that respect. Well, he succeeded perfectly well. There was a poor devil of a sacca, or water-carrier, in the camp, who used to take water to Derwish Pasha’s tents. Meanly dressed, and with his head held down, like one in misery, nobody paid any attention to him; at night he would frequently creep between the ropes of the Pasha’s tent, and seem to sleep there like an unhappy being who had no hole to put his head in. Through a slit in the tent, he could see and hear much that passed, communicating whatever information he obtained to Giovanni, who brought it at convenient opportunities to me. But when I wanted a stout-hearted fellow to carry a letter through the entrenchments to the foot of the walls, to be drawn up, then I chose a different sort of a messenger; for I had them all ready.”

December 16.—The last three days Lady Hester 161 had suffered greatly. To-day she was in very low spirits, and sobbed aloud and wrung her hands, while she bitterly deplored her deserted state. “I believe it will do me good to cry,” she said, and she gave way freely to her emotions; but her weeping was not woman-like: it had a wild howl about it, that was painful to me to hear; she seemed not to be made of stuff for tears: and, if Bellona could have ever wept, she must have wept in this way. After she had given vent to her feelings, she gradually recovered, and her natural fecundity of language returned.

December 17.—Christmas day was approaching, but the weather was of extraordinary mildness. Some idea may be formed of the climate of Syria from the circumstance that my house had no glass to the windows, and that the family sat always with the doors open. It was only during the heavy rains that the rooms felt chilly, and then a brazier, with lighted coals, was agreeable and quite sufficient to obviate the cold.

Lady Hester made me observe how thin she had become. Her bones almost protruded through her skin, and she could not lie comfortably in any posture; so that it was difficult for her to get rest. Her fretfulness had increased to such a degree as to be equally distressing to herself and to those about her: yet the vigour of her mind never forsook her for a moment when anything called for its exertion.

162 December 20.—was a rainy day, and, when I entered her ladyship’s chamber, I saw it would be a melancholy one. She was seated in the corner of the room, her features indicating great suffering. She burst into tears the moment I approached her. She had not slept the whole night, and had passed the hours, from the time I left her, in getting up and walking about supported by her women, and then lying down again, seeking relief from the feeling of suffocation and oppression which so much distressed her. The floor of the bed-room was covered with plates, pots, and pans, turnips, carrots, cabbages, knives and forks, spoons, and all other appurtenances of the table and kitchen.

I must observe that, on the preceding day, at Lady Hester’s request, I had ridden over to Mar Elias to see General Loustaunau, the decayed French officer, who had now lived on her bounty for a period of more than twenty years. And although, from being of a choleric and violent temper, he had, on more than one occasion, embroiled himself with her, yet the only difference it made in her treatment towards him was merely to keep him at a distance from herself: but she had never, for one day, ceased to occupy herself with his wants and to provide for his comforts. He was now, as I was told, eighty years old, and his mind was possessed with hallucinations, which he fell into from a belief that he could interpret the prophecies in 163 the Bible. He was constantly poring over that book, and he went very generally by the name of the Prophet: Lady Hester herself always called him so. He had a maid-servant to take care of him, a barber, on fixed days, to shave him. Lamb, mutton, or beef, flour for his bread, and wine, were sent as his consumption required, money being liberally furnished him for purchasing everything else from Sayda.

Finding that he was very much neglected by the woman who was appointed to attend him, I mentioned the fact on my return to Lady Hester, and to this communication was to be attributed the extraordinary display on the floor of her bed-room; for, from her accustomed sensibility to the sufferings of others, she had fancied that the poor man was in want of everything. “See,” she said, “what I am reduced to: ever since daylight this morning” (and it was then nearly noon) “have I been handling pots and pans to make the Prophet comfortable. For on whom can I depend?—on these cold people—a pack of stocks and stones, who rest immoveable amidst their fellow-creatures’ sufferings? Why did not you give that woman a dressing? I’ll have her turned out of the village—an impudent hussy!”

Here, from having raised her voice, she was seized with a spasm in the throat and chest, and, making a sudden start, “Some water, some water! make haste!” 164 she cried, and gasped for breath as if almost suffocated. I handed her some immediately, which she greedily drank: I then threw the window open, and she became better. “Don’t leave me, doctor: ring the bell;—I can’t bear to be left alone a moment; for, if one of these attacks were to come on, and I could not ring the bell, what could I do? You must forgive me if I fall into these violent passions; but such is my nature: I can’t help it. I am like the horse that Mr. Pitt had. Mr. Pitt used to say, ‘You must guide him with a hair; if I only move my leg, he goes on; and his pace is so easy, it’s quite charming: but, if you thwart him or contradict him, he is unmanageable;’—that’s me.”

But, to return to General Loustaunau, or the Prophet—as his name has already appeared several times, it may not be amiss to give a short outline of his life, the particulars of which he communicated to me himself. From a village in the Pyrenees, near to Tarbes, one day, a young man, about twenty-four years of age, sallied forth, he knew not whither, to seek his fortune. Sprung from a family of peasants, he had received little or no education, and had nothing to depend on but his well-knitted frame, an intelligent and handsome countenance, robust health, and activity. He directed his steps towards one of the great sea-ports of France, resolved to work his passage to America. But, when 165 walking the quays and inquiring for a vessel bound across the Atlantic, he was told there was none; there was, however, a large merchant-ship freighting for the East Indies. Learning that the country she was chartered for was still more distant than the western colonies, he concluded, in his ardent and youthful mind, that it would open to him a still greater chance of meeting with adventures and of enriching himself. He accordingly got himself rated to work his passage as a seaman, and arrived in safety at the ship’s destination.

It would be useless to occupy the reader’s time with the struggles which every man, unknown and without recommendations, has to make on a foreign shore, before he gets a footing in some shape congenial to his talents or his inclination. Natural talents Loustaunau had; for, in the space of a few months after his arrival on the Indian coast, he was spoken of as an intelligent young man to the French ambassador, Monsieur de Marigny, residing at Poonah, the Mahratta court, as far as I could understand: since it is to be borne in mind that Mr. Loustaunau, when he related all this, was eighty years old, had almost lost his memory, and was relapsing into second childhood. He soon after became an inmate of the embassy, on terms of some familiarity with Monsieur de Marigny, who discovered, in the young adventurer’s conversation, so 166 much good sense and elevation of mind, that he used to say to him, “It strikes me that you are no common man.”

It so happened that the war between the English and the Rajah of the Mahrattas brought the hostile armies into the field at no great distance from Poonah; and Mr. L. one day told the ambassador, that, as he had never seen what war was, and had not far to go to do so, he should be much obliged if he would permit him to absent himself for a short time to be spectator of the action, which, report said, must soon take place between the two armies. Monsieur de M. tried to dissuade him from it, asking him of what use it would be to risk his life for the satisfaction of an empty curiosity. Mr. L.’s reply was, “If I am killed, why then bon jour, and there will be an end of me:” M. de Marigny, therefore, complied with his wishes, and sent him with some of his own people and an introductory letter, to General Norolli, a Portuguese, who commanded the Rajah Scindeah’s artillery.

He had not to wait long for the gratification of his curiosity. An action took place: the forces were warmly engaged, and Mr. L. walked about within musket-shot distance to observe the manœuvres of the two armies. The English had planted a battery on a rocky elevation, which made much havoc among the Mahratta forces. Between this battery on its flank 167 and an opposite cliff there was a deep ravine, which rendered all access from one height to the other impracticable: but a sloping ground, by making a circuit in the rear of the Mahratta forces, afforded a practicability of bringing field-pieces to the summit of the cliff to bear on the English battery from the Mahratta side.

Mr. L. took an opportunity of addressing himself to General N., and pointed out to him the probability of silencing, or, at least, of annoying the English battery from the cliff in question; but the general treated his remark in a slighting manner, and, riding to another part of the field, took no farther notice of him. Mr. L. had seated himself on a hillock, still making his reflections, when an old Mahratta officer, who had heard the conversation between Mr. L. and the general of the artillery, and had partly understood what Mr. L. proposed should be done, approached him. “Well, sir,” said he, “what do you think of our artillery?”—“If I were a flatterer,” replied Mr. L., “I should say that it was well served; but, as I am not, you will pardon me if I think it bad.” The officer went on—“You see the day is likely to go against us—what would you do if you had the command?”—“Oh! as for the command, I don’t know,” rejoined Mr. L., “but this one thing I do know, that, if I had but two pieces of cannon, I 168 would turn the day in your master’s favour.”—“How would you do that?” asked the officer: “perhaps I could put two field-pieces at your disposal.”—“If you could,” said Mr. L., “I would plant them on yonder height” (pointing at the same time to it), “and let my head answer for my presumption, if I do not effect what I promise.”

The bearing of the Frenchman and his energetic manner of speaking, together with his evident coolness and self-possession on a field of battle, made a great impression on the Mahratta officer. “Come with me, young man,” said he, “I will conduct you to the rajah.”—“With all my heart,” replied Mr. L. When brought into his presence, Scindeah asked the officer what the stranger wanted, and the officer repeated the conversation that had just passed. “Well,” says Scindeah, “he does not ask for money, he only asks for guns: give them to him, and let them be served by some of my best gunners. The idea may be good: only be expeditious, or we may soon be where that infernal battery of the English can annoy us no longer.”

Accordingly, without a moment’s delay, two field-pieces were dragged up by the back of the cliff to the spot pointed out, Mr. L. entrusting the command of one of them to another Frenchman, whose curiosity had brought him on the field also. The very second 169 shot that was fired at the English battery blew up an artillery waggon (caisson) full of powder. The explosion dismounted some of the cannon, killed several men, and created so much confusion, that the English, in consequence of it, eventually lost the battle, and were forced to retreat. Mr. L. had two or three of his men killed. “There! you may take your cannon back,” said he, as soon as the explosion took place; “I have nothing farther to do;” and he and his brother Frenchman walked away to watch the result of the mischief they had done.

When the day was over, an officer of the rajah’s conveyed to Mr. Loustaunau his master’s request that he would attend on him at his tent. Mr. L. presented himself, and Scindeah received him with marks of great consideration. Addressing himself to Mr. L., “You have done me, sir,” said he, “a most essential service to-day; and, as a small recompense for your gallantry and the military talent you have shown, I beg your acceptance of a few presents, together with the assurance that, if you like to enter my service, you shall have the command of a company immediately.” Mr. L. thanked him in proper language, and, declining the presents offered, said, “Your highness will excuse me if I refuse your gifts: I will, however, with pleasure accept the sword which I see among them, but nothing else. The offer of a commission 170 in your army I must equally decline, as I am bound to return to our ambassador, to whom I owe too many obligations to take any step without his permission.” Scindeah could not but approve of this reply; and Mr. L., making his bow, returned towards the place where he was lodged.

When night came, and General Norolli, having made his dispositions, had also returned to his quarters, whilst yet on horseback, and, as if moved by jealousy to repress the exultation which he imagined Mr. L. might have indulged in, he called out in a loud and angry tone, “Where is Mr. Loustaunau, where is that gentleman?” Mr. L., who was standing not far off, approached, and, as the general dismounted, said, “Here I am, general, at your command.”—“I saw,” observed Mr. L. (interrupting himself whilst relating this part of his story to me) “that the general was in a rage, which appeared more plainly as he continued.”—“Who, sir, authorized you to present yourself to the rajah without my leave? don’t you know that all Europeans must be introduced by me?”—“General,” replied Mr. L., “I was summoned by his highness, and I went: if you are angry because I have done some little service to your master, I cannot help it. You are not ignorant that I pointed out to you first of all the commanding position which struck me as fitted for planting a battery: you refused to listen 171 to my suggestion; and, if it was afterward adopted by others, that is your fault, not mine.”—“Sir,” cried the general, irritated more and more by this remark, “you deserve to have this whip across your shoulders.”—“General,” retorted Mr. L., “you suffer your anger to get the better of your reason: if you have any whippings to bestow, you must keep them for your Portuguese—Frenchmen are not accustomed to take them.” The general’s fury now knew no bounds; he put his hand on one of the pistols in his girdle, intending to shoot Mr. L. “But I,” said Mr. L., “was ready; and, with my eyes fixed on him, would have seized the other, had he drawn it out, and I would have shot him; for, you know, in self-defence, one will not stand still to have a bullet through one’s body, without preventing it, if possible. However, some officers held the general’s arm, and shortly after I retired, and, remaining a day or two more in the camp, returned to the place where I had left our ambassador.

“When I told him what had happened—‘Stay with me, Loustaunau,’ said he; ‘it is my intention to raise a few troops here, and, since you seem to like fighting, you shall be employed:’ but in a few weeks the ambassador was recalled to France, and he offered to take me with him, promising to get me employment at home. However, I considered that I had 172 better chances in remaining where I was, than in going to my native country, where birth, patronage, and the usages of good society, are necessary for a man’s advancement, all which I wanted.”

Mr. Loustaunau, left to his own exertions, recollected the rajah’s offer; and on applying to him, received a commission in the Mahratta army. Eminently qualified by nature for military command, his advancement was rapid; and, after distinguishing himself in several actions, and showing likewise a very superior judgment in political affairs, he finally became general of Scindeah’s troops, although I could not ascertain in how short a time. His reputation spread rapidly through the territory, and his noble conduct and intrepidity must have been very generally known, since, on one occasion, after having been severely wounded in his left hand, two fingers of which he had lost, the commander of the English forces sent a flag of truce and his own surgeon with an offer of his professional assistance, fearing that Mr. L. might not have a European surgeon to attend him. Scindeah, in his despatches to him, styled him a lion in battle, and a lynx in council. He consulted him in difficult negociations with the East India Company’s servants; and, in acknowledgment of his services, he gave him a village as an appanage to his rank. Mr. L. married the daughter of a French 173 officer, by whom he had four or five children, one of whom is now living at Givet, in the department of the Ardennes.

Mr. L. was fearless at all times, and inimical to despotism even in the centre of its worshippers. Scindeah had unjustly imprisoned an Armenian merchant, whose wealth he intended to confiscate for his own benefit. As the oppressive act was founded on no just grounds, and application had been made to General Loustaunau for his interposition, when he found that entreaties were of no avail, “one day,” said he, “I took fifty of my men, fellows de bonne volonté, and, marching strait to the rajah’s palace at a time when I knew he was in his divan, I entered, walked up to him, and in a mild, but pretty determined tone, said, ‘Your highness, be not alarmed, I am come to ask a favour of you: you must release the Armenian merchant, as I have sworn to set him free.’ Scindeah saw that I meant not to trifle, and, assuming a friendly air, he complied with my request. The guards were astounded at my audacity, but they dared not stir, for I and my men would have sabred them instantly.”

After having covered himself with glory, as the French express it, he obtained his congé; and, being resolved to return to France, he visited some of the English settlements in his way to the place of his 174 embarkation, where he was most honourably and hospitably treated. He always spoke of this period as the happiest of his life, and mentioned the names of some English gentlemen with the highest encomiums and most pleasing reminiscences.

Having converted what property he could into money, he obtained bills on France, and set out for his native country. The revolution had broken out; and, on his arrival, his bills were all paid, but in assignats; so that in a few weeks he found himself almost penniless. Of this calamitous part of his history I could gather but few details. I have heard him say that some branch of the Orleans family assisted him. Certain it is that he had either money or friends yet left; for, with the wreck of his property, or by some other means, he established an iron-foundry near the place of his nativity. He was so close, however, to the frontiers of Spain, that, during the war with that country and France, in an incursion of the enemy, all his property was destroyed.

How he got to Mahon, or for what purpose, I am equally ignorant: but, embarking from that port, he found his way to Syria, probably intending to make his way overland to India, there to reclaim his property. But his intellects must have been already somewhat disordered: for, when we heard him first spoken of in Palestine, in 1812 or 1813, he was described 175 as a man living almost on the alms of the Europeans, and generally to be seen with a bible under his arm, negligent of his person, housed in a hovel, and going, even then, by the sobriquet of the Prophet.

At the time I am now speaking of, the bare mention of politics or catastrophes was sure to set him wandering on the prophetic writings, and then common sense was at an end. But I had known him for twenty years, when his lucid intervals were only occasionally interrupted by these hallucinations; and I had seldom met with a man who had such an independent character, such naturally noble sentiments couched in such appropriate language, and such an intuitive discernment of what was suitable in unlooked-for emergencies. He was bold as a lion; and, when in anger, had the physiognomy and expression of that noble animal. He had never served in diplomatic situations before his elevation, had never studied political economy, moral philosophy, literature, or anything else, that I could find; and yet, in all these, the innate dictates of his mind responded at once to the call, and he could see the right and wrong, the utile et decorum, the expediency and the evil, the loveliness and the ugliness of every subject presented to him. He had a strong memory, and retained many of the passages of the best French authors by heart. 176 He was handsome in his person, rather tall, and his demeanour was suitable to his station in life. In a word, he was born to “achieve greatness.”

General L. had now lived five and twenty years on Lady Hester’s bounty. His family, consisting of two or three sons and some daughters, were left with not very bright prospects in France. Lady Hester Stanhope had at different times employed persons to assist them, and, to my knowledge, had sent 1000 francs through a merchant’s hands at Marseilles, besides other sums, of which I have heard her speak. She also paid for the education of one daughter some years. In 1825, one of the sons, who had by his military services obtained the rank of captain in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, being left, by the fall of that Emperor, in inactivity, resolved to visit Syria, to see his father.

General L.’s intellects were so far weakened, that nothing which happened to him personally seemed to affect him, only as it verified some of his favourite predictions, drawn from texts in the Bible. He therefore beheld his son’s arrival with indifference, as far as paternal affection went, but discovered in it other bearings, of immense importance in the political changes that were at hand. Not so Lady Hester Stanhope: she knew that the general had a right to the revenue of a whole village in the Mahratta country, 177 which had been given to him by Scindeah; and she resolved to furnish Captain L. with money to enable him to go and recover his father’s possessions.

The captain remained at Dar Jôon for some months: he had his horse, was lodged in a pavilion in the garden, and treated with every mark of respect. Restless, hasty in his temper, overbearing, and accustomed to the blustering manners of a camp, he occasionally got into difficulties with the natives, both Mahometans and Christians. Not aware of the necessity of much precaution in shunning checks of perspiration in hot climates, he one day caught a fever, which almost brought him to his grave. He recovered, however, and was convalescent, when his imprudence caused a relapse, and he died. He was buried in Lady Hester’s garden, where his tomb, ornamented with flowering shrubs, and entirely shaded by a beautiful arbour, still remains.[18] The poor father never would believe in his death. “He is not interred,” he used to say, “but is still alive and on the earth: do not be grieved about him; in the year 1847 he will join me here. I and my lady shall then be made young again, and your little daughter is destined to be my future wife.” The poor old general, it was observed by us, seemed to have no greater pleasure than watching 178 our daughter whilst she watered her flowers or fed her bulbuls.

The way in which Lady Hester herself sometimes sought to lighten the weight of the obligations she conferred on the general will serve to show the delicacy of her feelings. At different periods, several places had been chosen for his residence, according as he grew tired of one or the other: for he was a testy old man in some respects, and seemed to forget how much it was his duty not to put her ladyship to more trouble and expense than he could help. Once, when she had had a comfortable cottage fitted up for him in a village called Aynâaty (from taking in dudgeon something that happened to him), he suddenly quitted it, and went off to Beyrout. “He went off,” said Lady Hester, “with no less than five trunks full of clothes and other things, with two watches bought with the money I had given him, and with a good bag full of piasters: for he had little occasion to spend, as I sent him every two days fresh meat of my own killing, flour for his bread when it was wanting, sugar, tea, coffee—and everything, I may say, except milk and vegetables. He went to Beyrout, and there lived and talked away largely and foolishly, and gave out that he would sooner live with the devil than with such a woman as I was. After a time, his resources failed him, his friends grew cool, and he returned to 179 Sayda, where he fastened himself on Monsieur Reynaud, who soon grew tired of keeping him, and little by little I heard he was reduced to great straits.” The fact is, he found no friend, except for an occasional invitation to dinner, and Lady Hester knew he must be in want; but she knew also, in the state of mind he was in, he would refuse assistance from her: she therefore made use of an expedient to furnish him with money.

Sending for one of the Pasha’s Tartars, and putting a bag of gold into his hand, she told him he was to ride into Sayda, and proceed strait to the gate of the French khan (where Mr. Loustaunau was), dusty and sweating, as if from a long journey. There he was to inquire if they knew anything of a Frenchman, once a general in India; and, after apparently well ascertaining it was the man he was in search of, the Tartar was to desire to speak with him, and to say—“Sir, when on my road from Damascus, a Hindu mussulman on his pilgrimage to Mecca, who once served under you in India, but is now rich and advanced in years, learning that you were in these countries, and anxious to testify the respect which the natives of Scindeah’s territories still retain for you, has commissioned me to put this into your hands.”—“Having done so,” added Lady Hester Stanhope, “you are not to give him time to see what it is, but to ride 180 away.” The vile fellow promised faithfully to execute his commission, received in advance a recompense for his trouble, and then rode off with the money, and kept it. But Lady Hester, who was careful to ascertain, by indirect means, whether a Tartar had made his appearance at the khan, on learning his perfidy, caused it to be spread among the Pasha’s and the government Tartars; and they were so indignant at his little trustworthiness, a quality on which, from the nature of their employ, they are obliged to value themselves, that they turned him out of their corps, and he never dared to show his face again.

To finish what remains to be said of this once shining character, but now the pensioner of an English woman, he had resided for the last ten years at a distance from Lady Hester Stanhope’s residence, and they had not even seen each other for five or six years. “I have been obliged to keep him at a distance,” said her ladyship, “for the last ten years, in order that people might not think I had taken care of him to make him trumpet my greatness: for you don’t know what harm that man has done me. He used to go about preaching that all the queens in Christendom were a pack of women of the town, and that I was the only real queen. He told everybody he would not change situations with the first prince in Europe; for the day would come when, through me, he should be greater than any of them.”

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Lady Hester like the first Lord Chatham—Her recollections of Chevening—Her definition of insults—Her deliberate affronts—Her warlike propensities—Earl C—— Marquis of Abercorn—Logmagi—Osman Chaôosh—Letter from Colonel Campbell—George the Third’s flattering compliment to Lady Hester—Her Majesty Queen Victoria—Lord M.—Prophecy of a welly—Lady Hester’s poignant affliction—Her intractability—Her noble and disinterested benevolence.

December 21, 1837.—I had sat up until two in the morning, despatching letters to Europe, which I had written by Lady Hester’s dictation, through the channel of M. Guys, the French consul at Beyrout, who, alone, among the Europeans there, had contrived to remain on friendly terms with her. In my letter to him, Lady Hester required that I should tell him she was in a state of convalescence. Alas! she was far from being so; for, on going to her, I found her labouring under many bad symptoms, against which she contended with a spirit that seemed to brook no control—not even from nature herself. As she could 182 not talk, I read to her, out of the Speaker, a character of the first Lord Chatham. She recognized, and so did I, so many points of resemblance between herself and her grandfather, that she said, more than once, “That’s me.” At the words, “He reigned with unbounded control over the wilderness of free minds,” I observed that there was something contradictory in control and freedom. “No, there is not,” said she. “If you are walking on the road, and you inquire the way of some person you meet, he tells you the best road is in such a direction, and then takes his leave; you turn round, every now and then, as long as the person is in sight, to look at him to see if he points to you that you are going right; but you are free to go which way you will.”

December 31.—I saw Lady Hester in the morning, after which I took a walk with my family: on my return, I went again to inquire how she was. One of her maids told me that, soon after I had left her, she suddenly burst into tears, and cried a great deal, they could not tell why; that she had called for Zezefôon to dress her, had, in a manner, rushed out of her bed-room, and had gone to the saloon, where, in consequence of her long confinement, she found all the sofa cushions piled up, and the sofa mattresses removed, so that she had not a place to sit down on; that then she had left the saloon abruptly, on seeing the state it 183 was in, and returned to her bed-room, where she gave a loose to her sorrow.

My presence being announced, I was admitted. “Doctor,” said she, “to-night in my father’s house there used to be a hundred tenants and servants sitting down to a good dinner, and dancing and making merry. I see their happy faces now before my eyes: and, when I think of that and how I am surrounded here, it is too much for me. When you left me this morning, things of former times came over my mind, and I could not bear to sit here, so I went out to break the chain of my thoughts. I would have gone into the garden, if it had not rained.”

I endeavoured to say something consolatory to her. “Everybody,” she continued, “is unkind to me. I have sought to do good to everybody, either by relieving their distresses or purifying their morals, and I get no thanks for my pains. I sometimes make reproaches to myself for having spent my money on worthless beings, and think it might have been better otherwise; but God knows best. I had hoped to find some persons whose minds might have been enlightened, and who would have felt the importance of what I tell them. But you even, of whom I had some hope, are as bad as the rest; and, if you assent to the truth of what I say, you make so many hums 184 and hahs that I don’t believe you care a farthing about it. I want nobody that has no conviction.”

“I should think it a sin if I saw people acting foolishly, not to tell them of it. It does not signify who it is, you or the stable-boy; if I can make them aware of their folly, I have done my duty. Why do I scold you so much, but because I wish you to prepare yourself for the convulsions that will shortly take place. I always acknowledge your spotless integrity, and thank you for the care you bestow on my affairs, and in keeping things a little in order; but, in these times, something more is wanting: a man must be active, and prepared for great events. People are teaching their children to read and write, when they should be teaching them to drive a mule: for of what use are your reading men, who sit poring for hours over books without an object? I have a thorough contempt for them, and for all your merchants, and your merchants’ clerks, who spend their time between the counting-house and the brothel.”

Lady Hester reverted again to Chevening, and spoke at great length of her grandmother Stanhope’s excellent management of the house, when she (Lady Hester) was a child. At all the accustomed festivals, plum puddings, that required two men to carry them, with large barons of beef, were dressed, &c., &c. All 185 the footmen were like gentlemen ushers, all the masters and mistresses like so many ambassadors and ambassadresses, such form and etiquette were preserved in all the routine of visits and parties. Every person kept his station, and precise rules were laid down for each inmate of the family. Thus, the lady’s maid was not allowed to wear white, nor curls, nor heels to her shoes, beyond a certain height; and Lady Stanhope had in her room a set of instruments and implements of punishment to enforce her orders on all occasions. There were scissors to cut off fine curls, a rod to whip with, &c., &c.

No poor woman lay-in in the neighbourhood, but two guineas in money, baby linen, a blanket, some posset, two bottles of wine, and other necessaries, were sent to her. If any one among the servants was sick, the housekeeper, with the still-room maid behind her, was seen carrying the barley-water, the gruel, the medicine, &c., to administer to the patient, according to the doctor’s orders. In the hopping time, all the vagrants and Irish hoppers were locked up every night in a barn by themselves, and suffered to have no communication with the household. A thousand pieces of dirty linen were washed every week, and the wash-house had four different stone troughs, from which the linen was handed, piece by piece, by the washerwomen from the scalder down to the rinser. In the 186 laundry a false ceiling, let down and raised by pulleys, served to air the linen after it was ironed. There was a mangle to get up the table-linen, towels, &c., and three stoves for drying on wet days. The tablecloths were of the finest damask, covered with patterns of exquisite workmanship. At set periods of the year, pedlars and merchants from Glasgow, from Dunstable, and other places, passed with their goods. The housekeeper’s room was surrounded with presses and closets, where were arranged stores and linen in the nicest order. An ox was killed every week, and a sheep every day, &c., &c. In the relation of these details, which I spare the reader, as being, probably, what he has observed in many other families, Lady Hester by degrees recovered her self-possession, whilst they only served to impress more forcibly on my mind the sad contrast which reigned in everything about her between her former and her present condition.

January 10-15, 1838.—The cough continued, attended by spasms in the limbs. Yet, although she was thus exhausted and harassed by continued suffering, the elasticity of mind she exhibited in the few intervals of ease she enjoyed was astonishing. The moment she had a respite from actual pain, she immediately set about some labour for the benefit of others; and the room was again strewed over with bundles 187 and boxes. But, in spite of these delusive appearances, I could not conceal from myself that a hectic spot occasionally marked the inroads which disease was now making on her lungs.

January 17, 1838.—What a day of anxiety and sorrow for me, and of anguish for Lady Hester! From morning until midnight to see a melancholy picture of a never-dying spirit, in an exhausted frame, wrestling with its enemy, and daring even to set the heaviest infirmities of nature at defiance. Yet, who does not bend under the power of disease? Lady Hester held out as long as a human being could do; but at last her anguish showed that, like Prometheus bound, she was compelled to acknowledge the weight of a superior hand, and that resistance was vain.

The reflections she made on her abandoned situation, neglected by her friends and left to die without one relation near her, were full of the bitterness of grief. In these moments, as if the excess of her indignation must have some object to waste itself upon, she would launch out into the most fierce invectives against me, and tell me I was a cannibal and a vulture that tore her heart by my insensibility.

A day or two before, in defending myself against the accusation of coldness and want of feeling, I had inadvertently said that it was an insult to a person, whose intentions she could not but know were well 188 meaning, to heap so much abuse on him. To this her ladyship said nothing at the time; but to-day, being in a state of excitement, the word insult recurred to her recollection. “Do you not know,” she asked, “that people of my rank and spirit are incapable of insults towards their friends: it is only the vulgar who are always fancying themselves insulted. If a man treads on another’s toe in good society, do you think it is taken as an insult? It is only people like —— and —— who take such things into their heads. I never have hurt a person’s feelings in my life intentionally, except, perhaps, by my wit. But if people expect that I should not tell them the truth to their face, they are much mistaken; and if you or anybody else act like a fool, I must say so. Such people as Lord Melville and Mr. Pitt would stop, perhaps, until a person was gone out of the room to say, ‘That man is the most egregious ass I ever saw;’ but I, were he a king, must say it to his face. I might, if I chose, flatter and deceive you and a hundred others. There is no one whom I could not lead by the nose, if I chose to do it; I know every man’s price, and how to buy him: but I will not stoop to the baseness of making you run your head through a wall, even though I saw some advantage for myself on the other side. As for your saying, that’s your character, and that you can’t bear to be spoken to as I speak to you, what do you 189 talk to me of character for? Everybody has a character, and so they have a behind: but they don’t go about showing the one any more than the other. Fools are always crying out, ‘That’s my disposition;’ but what’s their disposition to other people more than their anything else?

“Let us have no more of that stuff; for, though not a man, I shall no more put up with it than if I were; and I warn you that, if you repeat that word, you stand a chance of having something at your head.”

Let not the reader imagine that this was all, or even one half of what her ladyship said on this occasion: it is only a tissue of the most striking sentences. Never had I seen her so irritated as that one expression of mine had made her. She went on in this merciless way for four hours; and, although I frequently attempted to soothe her by assurances and explanations, she continued in the same strain until evening, when she subsided into a gentler tone. Being now restored to a calmer temper, she seemed desirous to atone by kindness for the wound she had inflicted on my feelings, and wanted, amongst other things, to get ponies for my children to ride. The generosity of her nature was obvious in all this, and I resolved, whatever language she might make use of in future, never to take the slightest notice of it.

190 This haughty assumption of superiority over others on almost all occasions was a salient feature in her character. It must have created her a host of enemies, during the period when she exercised so much power in Mr. Pitt’s time; and probably those persons were not sorry afterwards to witness her humiliation and downfall.

Once, at Walmer Castle, the colonel of the regiment stationed there thought himself privileged to take his wife occasionally to walk on the ramparts of the castle. I do not know the localities, and am ignorant how far, in so doing, these two persons might infringe on the privacy of Mr. Pitt and Lady Hester Stanhope: but, without intimating by a note or a message that such a thing was disagreeable, she gave orders to the sentry to stop them when they came, and tell them they were not to walk there. Let any one put himself in the place of Colonel W., and fancy how such an affront must have wounded his pride.

Mr. B., a Frenchman, who for many years had been her secretary, and who afterwards held the post of French vice-consul at Damascus, paid her a visit at Jôon, and, in the leisure of the morning, took his gun and went out partridge-shooting. On his return to the house, he gave the birds he had shot to the cook, desiring they might be dressed for Lady Hester’s 191 dinner; but, when they were served up, to his astonishment, she ordered them to be thrown out of the window; observing that it was strange he should presume to do that in Syria which he would not dare to do in his native country; for she thought that, at the restoration of the Bourbons, all the ancient game-laws were revived. She had a secretary afterwards who was an Englishman, who also went out shooting, and to whom she expressed her notions in much the same way, and wondered where he got his licence to carry a gun. Yet in Syria, every person, from the European stranger to the lowest Mahometan slave, is at liberty to go after the game wherever he likes.

If any one expected from her the common courtesies of life, as they are generally understood, he would be greatly disappointed. In her own way, she would show them, that is, mixed up with so many humiliations, and with such an assumption of personal and mental superiority in herself, that much was to be borne from her, if one wished to live amicably with her. Her delight was to tutor others until she could bring them to think that nobody was worthy of any favour but by her sufferance. Where she had the means, she would assume the authority of controlling even thought. Her daily question to her dependants was—“What business have you to suppose? what right have you to think? I pay people for their hands, and not their stupid ideas.” 192 She would say—“What business have people to introduce their surmises, and their ‘probably this,’ and ‘probably that,’ and ‘Lady Hester Stanhope, no doubt, in so doing,’ and ‘the Pasha, as I conjecture, had this in view?’ how do they know what I intended, or what the Pasha thought? I know that newspapers every day take such liberties, and give their opinions on what ministers and kings intend to do; but nobody shall take such a liberty with me without my calling them out. My name is everything to me, and nobody shall say he presumes this was what I had in my mind, or that was what I intended to do. At least, if people must pick pockets, let them pick it of a clean pocket-handkerchief, and not of a dirty one. Others are not to be made responsible for their dirty opinions.”

From her manner towards people, it would have seemed that she was the only person in creation privileged to abuse and to command: others had nothing else to do but to obey, and not to think. She was haughty and overbearing, impatient of control, born to rule, and more at her ease when she had a hundred persons to govern than when she had only ten. She would often mention Mr. Pitt’s opinion of her fitness for military command. Had she been a man and a soldier, she would have been what the French call a sabreur; for never was any one so fond of wielding weapons, and of boasting of her capability 193 of using them upon a fit occasion, as she was. In her bed-room, or on her divàn, she always had a mace, which was spiked round the head, a steel battle-axe, and a dagger; but her favourite weapon was the mace. When she took it up, which sometimes was the case if vociferating to the men-servants, I have seen them flinch and draw back to be out of the reach of her arm; and, on one occasion, a powerful Turk, a man about forty, of great muscular strength, and with a remarkable black beard, on her making a gesture as if to strike him, flew back so suddenly that he knocked down another who was behind him, and fell himself. But, though fearless and unruffled in every danger, Lady Hester Stanhope was magnanimous, gentle to an enemy in her power, and ever mindful of those who had done her any service. Her martial spirit would have made a hero, and she had all the materials of one in her composition.

Two more anecdotes may serve to show how she sometimes rendered herself disliked. Once, at a cabinet dinner, Lady Hester Stanhope entered the room in a way so as to pass the Earl C. who was ushered in just at the same moment; and, as she did not bow or speak to him, Mr. Pitt said, “Hester, don’t you see Lord C.?” Lady Hester replied, “No, I saw a great chameleon as I came in, all in pigeon-breasted colours, if that was Lord C;” this was because he was 194 dressed in a pigeon-breasted coloured court-dress. “And,” she added, as she related the story, “I gave it him prettily once: I said his red face came from the reflection of red boxes; for, when at breakfast and dinner, he was always calling for his despatch-boxes, and pretending mysterious political affairs, although they were no more than an invitation to a party, or a present of a little Tokay, or something equally trivial. Lord C. had learned his manners, I suppose, from Lord Chesterfield, or some book or another. He attempted being pompous with his large stomach, and his garter on a bad leg, and his great whiskers sticking out as far as this,” (here Lady Hester put her fore-fingers indexwise to her cheeks to show how far) “and a forehead quite flat like the Bourbons. He would talk very loud in the lobby as he came in, or contrive to have his red box brought to him, as if he had papers of great importance in it.”

“One day, at court,” continued Lady Hester, “I was talking to the Duke of Cumberland of Lord Abercorn’s going over to Addington, and saying I would give it to him for it, when Lord Abercorn happened to approach us. The prince, who dearly enjoyed such things, immediately cried out—‘Now, little bulldog, have at him.’ This was uttered at the moment I advanced towards him. You know, doctor, he had asked for the Garter just before Mr. Pitt went out, 195 and, not having obtained it, had toadied Addington, and got it. I thought it so mean of him, after the numberless favours he had received from Mr. Pitt, to go over to Addington, that I was determined to pay him off. So, when I was close to him, looking down at the garter round his leg, I said—‘What’s that you have got there, my lord?’ and before he could answer, I continued—‘I suppose it’s a bandage for your broken legs:’ for Lord Abercorn had once had both his legs broken, and the remark applied doubly, inasmuch as it hit hard on Addington’s father’s profession. Lord Abercorn never forgot this: he and I had been very great friends; but he never liked me afterwards.”

Tuesday, January 23, 1838.—I found Lady Hester to-day out of bed, seated on the ottoman. She wished me to talk or to read to her, so that she might not be forced to speak herself; but her cough, which was incessant, precluded the possibility of doing either. The accumulation of phlegm in her chest made her restless to a painful degree. Shortly afterwards, her spasms began, which caused her arms and sometimes her head to be thrown from side to side with jerks. Her irritability was excessive. Without consulting me, she had been bled the preceding night by a Turkish barber. Her conversation the day before had turned in a general manner on bleeding; and having ascertained my opinion that bleeding would not 196 be proper for her, she said no more, but took the opposite course.

The fear of remaining in a recumbent posture made her get up from her bed, and her figure, as she stalked about the room in a flannel dress, having thrown off her pelisse and abah, was strange and singular, but curiously characteristic of her independence.

The only newspaper she received was “Galignani’s Messenger,” which, whether I was in Syria or in Europe, I had for some years caused to be sent to her from Marseilles, and a file generally came by every merchant-vessel that sailed for Beyrout, which, on an average, was about once a month. Sometimes there was much irregularity in the departure of vessels, as in the winter season, and then, in the solitude of Mount Lebanon, one might remain ignorant of every event in Europe for six weeks and even two months together.

She had latterly shown a particular desire to have those passages read to her which related to the Queen, either as describing her court, her rides, or any other circumstance, however trivial, of a personal nature.

Wednesday, January 24.—Lady Hester sent to me to say that she could see nobody, and requested that I would do nothing, as the day was an unlucky one.

January 25.—Although suffering in a manner that 197 would have incapacitated any other person from undertaking any occupation, Lady Hester was busily employed in making up a mule-load of presents for Logmagi. “You see, doctor,” said she, “how I act towards those who serve me: this man neglects his business in town for me, and I, in return, try to make him comfortable. I have packed up a few coloured glass ornaments to stick up in his cupboards, and some preserves and sweetmeats to treat his old messmates with, who would eat him out of house and home, I believe, if I did not take care of him. Only think, too, how he beat his breast and cried, and what signs of sorrow he showed at my illness, the last time I saw him!

“I must have that stupid fellow, Osman, in, to talk to him about new roofing the dairy, but I shall stick him behind the curtain. Poor man, his mother is very ill, and I think I must let him go to Sayda. He, Mahjoob, and Seyd Ahmed, may have asses when they go to town, but all those other lazy fellows shall walk: I won’t have one of them ride, unless they have more than eight or ten rotoles in weight to bring back, idle beasts as they are!”

Now Osman’s mother might be ill, and no doubt she was; the dairy, too, might be the ostensible cause of his being called in; but it is also more than probable that, besides all this, she wanted Osman for other 198 purposes. The truth was, he was no stupid fellow, but a wily knave and a clever spy, and Lady Hester was often in the habit of employing him on secret missions—to find out the reason of any movement of the pasha’s troops for instance, or to get a clue to some intrigue of the Emir Beshýr’s. But she would say, “Osman is gone to town to see his sick mother;” and nobody dared to say otherwise.

January 27.—To-day the secretary requested me to acquaint Lady Hester that he wished to see her on important business. He was admitted, and showed a letter from his father, the English consular agent at Sayda,[19] signifying that, in the course of the day, he should be the bearer of a letter to Lady Hester Stanhope, which had been sent by Mr. Moore, Her Britannic Majesty’s consul at Beyrout, which he was charged to deliver into her ladyship’s own hands himself. I had retired when the secretary entered; but, when he was gone, Lady Hester sent for me, and I found her in a violent passion. “There is that man, the old Maltese,” said she, “coming to pester me with his impertinence, but I have sent off his son to meet him 199 on the road, and drive him back. If anything in the shape of a consul sets his foot within my doors, I’ll have him shot; and, if nobody else will do it, I’ll do it myself. See that he sets off this very instant, and tell him to return with the letter, without stopping.”

I did so, and returned to Lady Hester. Conceiving that this letter was an answer she was expecting to one she had written to Sir Francis Burdett, about the property supposed to have been left her, her agitation and impatience rose to such a degree, that I thought she would have gone frantic, or that her violence would have ended in suffocation. She complained she could not breathe. “It’s here, it’s here,” she cried in extreme agitation, taking me by the throat to show me where, and giving me such a squeeze, that now, when I am writing, twenty-four hours after, I feel it still. I tried in vain to calm her impatience. I sent off a servant on horseback to hurry the secretary back, but he did not appear, and the day, until about four o’clock, was passed in this manner.

To account for this extraordinary agitation, it must again be observed that, at the recurrence of the period of each steamboat’s arrival at Beyrout, Lady Hester anxiously expected an answer to her letter to Sir Francis Burdett; for it was on the strength of this property supposed to have been left her that she had 200 intimated to some of her creditors her expectation of being soon enabled to satisfy all their demands. It was in reliance on this, too, that she had invited me to come over. And not doubting in the least the truth of the information secretly conveyed to her by some one of her friends, it may be supposed that a packet to be delivered into nobody’s hands but her own was readily conjectured to relate to this business.

About four o’clock, Mr. Abella, the English agent, his son, and the servant, made their appearance. The secretary was called in. “Tell your father I shall not see him; and, doctor, go and take the letter, and bring it to me,” was Lady Hester’s exclamation. I went to Mr. Abella, but found him determined not to part with it, unless he gave it into Lady Hester’s own hand. I urged upon him the impossibility of his doing so, as she had seen nobody for some weeks; at last, on his still persisting, we became somewhat warm on the matter. This was better than going to Lady Hester to ask her what was to be done; for her answer probably would have been to desire two of her stoutest Turks to go with sticks, and take it from him by force. At last, Mr. Abella gave up his trust, upon condition that I would write a paper representing that he had done it forcibly; in such a fright was he lest Mr. Moore should turn him out of his place.

Instead of being an answer from Sir Francis Burdett, 201 the letter was from Colonel Campbell, signifying that, in consequence of an application made to the English government, by Mâalem Homsy, one of Lady Hester Stanhope’s creditors, an order had come from Lord Palmerston to stop her pension, unless the debt was paid.

It might have been supposed that the double disappointment of not hearing from Sir Francis Burdett and of receiving such a missive from Colonel Campbell would have considerably increased her anger: but, on the contrary, she grew apparently quite calm, gently placed the letter on the bed, and read the contents:—

Colonel P. Campbell, Her Majesty’s Consul-general for
Egypt and Syria, to Lady Hester Stanhope.

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When she had finished, she began to reason on the enormity of the Queen’s and her Minister’s conduct. “My grandfather and Mr. Pitt,” said she, “did something, I think, to keep the Brunswick family on the 204 throne, and yet the grand-daughter of the old king, without hearing the circumstances of my getting into debt, or whether the story is true (for it might be false), sends to deprive me of my pension in a foreign country, where I may remain and starve. If it had not been for my brother Charles and General Barnard, the only two who knew what they were about when the mutiny took place against the Duke of Kent at Gibraltar, she would not be where she is now; for her father would have been killed to a certainty.”

She mused for some time, and then went on. “Perhaps it is better for me that this should have happened: it brings me at once before the world, and let them judge the matter. It would have looked too much like shucklabán” (the Arabic for charlatanism—and Lady Hester was accustomed now to interlard her conversation with many Arabic words) “if I had to go and tell everybody my own story, without a reason for it: but now, since they have chosen to make a bankrupt of me, I shall out with a few things that will make them ashamed. The old king[21] wrote down on the paper, ‘Let her have the greatest pension that can be granted to a woman:’—if he were to rise from his grave, and see me now!”

“Did I ever tell you what he said to Mr. Pitt one 205 day, on Windsor Terrace? The king and all the princes and princesses were walking, and he turned round to him—‘Pitt,’ says he, ‘I have got a new minister in your room.’ Mr. Pitt immediately replied—‘At your majesty’s pleasure; and I shall be happy that your majesty has found one to relieve me from the burden of affairs: a little retirement and fresh air will do me good.’ The king went on, as if finishing his sentence, and without heeding what Mr. Pitt had said—‘a minister better than yourself.’ Mr. Pitt rejoined—‘your majesty’s choice cannot be but a wise one.’ The king resumed—‘I tell you, Pitt, I shall have a better minister than you, and, moreover, I shall have a good general.’ The raillery began to grow puzzling, and Mr. Pitt, with all his courtly manners, was at a loss to know what it meant. So he said, ‘Do, pray, condescend to tell me who this unknown and remarkable person is, that I may pay him the respect due to his great talents and your majesty’s choice.’ The king relieved him from his embarrassment: ‘There is my new minister,’ said he, pointing to me, whom Mr. Pitt had under his arm. ‘There is not a man in my kingdom who is a better politician than Lady Hester: and’ (assuming an air of seriousness, which his manner made quite touching) ‘I have great pleasure in saying, too, there is not a woman who adorns her sex more than she does. And, let 206 me say, Mr. Pitt, you have not reason to be proud that you are a minister, for there have been many before you, and will be many after you; but you have reason to be proud of her, who unites everything that is great in man and woman.’ Doctor, the tears came in Mr. Pitt’s eyes, and how the court ladies did bite their lips!

“The what what what? certainly did the old king harm, in point of dignity, when no subject of conversation interested him; but he sometimes was more serious, and could assume a manner and a tone befitting a king. A peer, who had never known the Duke of Cambridge, told me that, on the return of the Duke from the continent, the king presented him to H.R.H. with this short but fine compliment—‘This is my son, my lord, who has his first fault to commit.’ How fond the king was of him and the Duke of York![22] He was a fine man, and with a person so strong, that I don’t think there was another like him in England.

207 “The king liked me personally. I recollect once, at court, when we were standing, as he passed round the circle, he stopped at Harriet E., my cousin, and said to her something about her dress; and then, coming to me, he remarked how well I dressed myself, and told me to teach H. E. a little. She was so vexed that she cried: but it was her own fault; for, with a good person, good fortune, and fine dresses, she never could get a husband.

“I suppose the Queen is a good-natured German girl. Did you ever see Lord M——? he has got fine eyes; and, if he is fattened out, with a sleek skin and good complexion, he may be a man like Sir Gilbert, and about his age: such men are sometimes still loveable. He used to be a prodigious favourite with some of the handsomest women in London: so that his friends used to say, when he married Lady M., though she was not a bad-looking woman—‘Poor fellow! what will he do? you know he can’t like her long?’ I recollect seeing her and Lady —— sitting at a party on the top of the stairs, like two figures in a pocket-book—both little creatures; those that you call delicate.

“Lord M. is a very handsome man. His eyes are beautiful, and he has spent forty years of his life in endeavouring to please the women. I recollect, the last time I saw him, he was behind Sir G. H., as 208 they came into Lord Stafford’s. I had dined there, en famille, and there was a party in the evening. I was in the second room, and the Prince was standing by the fire, showing his behind, as usual, to everybody, and there was Lord M., always looking about after somebody whom he did not find perhaps for three or four hours. They say he is filled out: he was slim when I knew him. Doctor, he is a very handsome man; but he must be sixty, or more.”

Ever and anon, Lady Hester Stanhope would revert to Colonel Campbell’s letter. “Yes,” she said; “if he feels regret at being obliged to write it, I will say to him, ‘No doubt, he feels pain at having to do with one of the most blackguard transactions I ever knew;’ but I dare say he feels nothing of the sort.” Then, after a pause, she added, “I think I shall take the bull by the horns, and send a letter to the Queen. If getting into debt is such a crime, I should like to know how the Duchess of K—— got into debt.

“Doctor, would you believe it? a welly” (in Arabic, a sort of soothsayer) “foretold what has happened to me now so exactly, that I must relate the story to you. He was sitting in a coffee-house one day, with one of my people, and had taken from the waiter a cup of coffee; but, in carrying it to his mouth, to drink it, his hand stopped midway, and his eyes were fixed for some time on the surface of the liquor in 209 silence. ‘Your coffee will get cold,’ said my servant:—the welly heaved a deep sigh. ‘Alas!’ said he, ‘I was reading on the surface of that cup of coffee the fate of your lady, the meleky. There will rise up evil tongues against her, and a sovereign will try to put her down; but the voice of the people will cry aloud, and nations will assemble to protect her.’ Now, doctor,” said Lady Hester, “does not that mean just what has happened? Is not the Queen trying to put me down, and going to deprive me of my pension?—and you will see, when I have written my letter, how many persons will turn on my side. But isn’t it very extraordinary how that man in a coffee-house knew what was going to happen?—yet so it is: they have secret communications with spirits. A glass, or something, is held before their eyes, which nobody else can see; and, whether they can read and write or not, they see future events painted on it.”

January 30, 1838.—Lady Hester was still very ill; the convulsive attacks returning now regularly every day. She began to be sensible that fits of passion, however slight, did her injury, and she was more calm for a continuation than I had ever known her to remain since I had been here. But a fresh occurrence, trifling in its nature, although she gave much importance to it, excited her anger considerably to-day, and did her mischief in proportion. She had reason 210 to suspect that her secretary had been endeavouring to ascertain whether she was consumptive, and how long she was likely to live. To dispel such a suspicion, she made a great effort, got up, and went and sat in the garden. Before she left her room, her wailings were for some moments heart-rending. “Oh, God, have mercy! oh, God, have mercy!” she cried; “only keep those beasts away: who is to take care of me, surrounded as I am with those horrible servants?—only take care they don’t rob me.”

While she remained in the garden, her chamber was put to rights (a process which it much required, in consequence of her long confinement); and, at her earnest request, I superintended the performance. “Overlook them,” she said, “or they will rob me.” But oh! what a sight!—such dust, such confusion, such cobwebs! Never was a lady’s room seen before in such a condition: bundles, phials, linen, calico, silk, gallipots, clothes, étuis, papers, were all lying about on the floor, and in the corners, and behind and under the scanty furniture; for all this while she had been afraid to get the chamber put into order, lest her servants should take advantage of the opportunity to plunder her.

When she returned to her room from the garden, she was raving. “You had better leave me to die,” she cried, “if I am to die; and, if I am not, oh! 211 God, only let me crawl to my own country” (by her own country she meant Arabia, among the Koreýsh), “and there, with not a rag on me, I may be fed by some good-natured soul, and not such cannibals as these servants! What are they good for? I will be obeyed; and you are not a man, to see me treated in this manner.”

Thus she went on, walking up and down her room, until she worked herself up into a state of madness. I was afraid she would rupture a blood-vessel. All my attempts to pacify her were in vain—indeed they only excited her the more. Seeing her in this way, I left the room, and sent Fatôom to her; but, before Fatôom could get there, she rang her bell violently, and I heard her say, “Where’s the doctor?—where’s the doctor?” so I returned again to her. “Don’t leave me;” she cried; and she expressed her sorrow for the excess of her passion. “I am much obliged to you, very much obliged to you, for the trouble you take on my account; but you must not be angry with me. Perhaps, if I get worse, I shall ask you to let Mrs. M. come and sit with me.” Soon after, as if her very violence had relieved her, she grew calmer.

Up to this time she had never seen my wife, since her second visit to Syria; nor my daughter nor the governess at all. I had, since her illness, said more than once that they would be happy to come and sit 212 with her by day or by night, to relieve the tedium of her solitary situation. But her dismantled room, her ragged clothes, her altered appearance—and, above all, her pride, compromised as it was by these unfortunate circumstances—always made her turn off the subject, although her secret feelings must have often prompted her to avail herself of the solace thus frankly and cordially offered to her. The exclamation by which she usually evaded the proposal was, “Oh! how I hate everything Frankified! how I hate everything Frankified!” or, “I must not see them until I get into my saloon.” After about half an hour I left her. “I must see nobody this evening,” she added; “so good bye!”

I went home, and, for the first time, told my family how ill Lady Hester was. Alas! I had not dared to do so before: she had enjoined me not. “To say I am ill,” she would observe, “would be bringing a host of creditors upon me, and I should not be able to get food to eat.” Consequently, I had kept them and everybody, as much as I could, in ignorance of the real state of her health; indeed, there was too much truth in what she said not to make me see the mischief such a disclosure would entail. She had now only twenty pounds left in the house to provide for the consumption of two months; and, as her pension was stopped, there was every probability she would be 213 left penniless, with the exception of a few dollars which I had by me. Yet, in spite of all this, she commissioned me, a day or two before, to give 150 piasters to a leper, 150 to a distressed shopkeeper, and some other small benefactions to other pensioners on her inexhaustible bounty.

It may be said that any one, like myself, might have represented, from time to time, the necessity of a little more economy—I did so once: but I received such a peremptory injunction never to give my advice on that subject again, that I took good care how I committed myself a second time. She fired up, and said, “You will give me leave to judge what I ought to do with my own money. There are various ways of spending: you may think it best to be just before being generous; but I, with my character and views, must be even munificent, and trust to God, as I have hitherto done, for helping me on in my difficulties. Never touch on that subject again: I will have no human being interfere with me as to what I am to do with my money.”

All I can say is that, like her grandfather, she was so intractable, that I never yet saw the mortal who could turn her an inch from her determinations. It was easy to lead the current of her bounty into one’s own pocket; for I believe any person who knew her foibles might have kept it flowing in that direction 214 until he had enriched himself. It was only necessary to encourage her dreams of future greatness, to say the world was talking of her, to consider her as the associate of the Mahedi, the Messiah of nations, to profess a belief in visions, in aërial beings, in astrology, in witchcraft, and to bear witness to apparitions in which her coming grandeur was prognosticated, and then she would refuse nothing: but that was not my forte, and I never did so. I went to her with a small patrimony; was with her, off and on, for thirty years; and left her somewhat poorer than I went.

But it is not to be supposed that knaves, such as some I have alluded to above, were the only objects of her bounty. No; the widow, the orphan, the aged, the proscribed, the sick, the wounded, and the houseless, were those she sought out in preference: and time will show, when gratitude can speak out, the immeasurable benevolence of her nature.

It may not be useless to observe here that many stories have been circulated of Lady Hester’s harshness to petitioners who presented themselves at her door, which, if explained, would wear a very different aspect. Sometimes a suppliant, apparently unworthy of her commiseration, would gain admittance to her presence, and be dismissed with a handful of piasters; and sometimes another, known to be a fit object of 215 benevolence, would receive nothing but a rude repulse. Lady Hester said to me, “Do you suppose, doctor, I don’t know that many people think I fool away my money in giving it to adventurers? that others say I am capricious? that some call me mad? Why, let them: I am not bound to give reasons for what I do to anybody. The good I do, first of all, I don’t wish to be known: and, again, many times the publicity of an act of charity would be injurious to him it was intended to serve. I’ll give you an instance. There was a merchant at Acre, who was avanized[23] by Abdallah Pasha, to whom he was obnoxious, until all his property was squeezed out of him, and nothing was left but a house, of which he was not generally known to be the proprietor—for, had it been known that the house was his, the Pasha, who fancied he had reduced him to beggary, would have persecuted him until he had got that also. The man wished to sell his house, and then to retire into Egypt; he therefore came to me, and told me his story, begging my assistance. As I was obliged to use an interpreter, who, I feared, would talk of any act of kindness of mine for the man, it appeared to me that the best thing I could do was to turn the applicant roughly out of doors, 216 which I did at once, bawling out as he went, that I did not want to be pestered with beggars. Well, my strange harshness, of course, was talked of, and of course was repeated to the Pasha, who, thinking the object of his oppression was now an object of contempt also, was perfectly satisfied, and left the man, as he supposed, to utter ruin and degradation. But, after a few days, I privately sent to the poor distressed merchant, provided a purchaser for his house, smoothed the difficulties in the way of the sale, and, furnishing him from my own purse with a sum of money sufficient to begin the world with again, I shipped him off with his family to Egypt.”

Lady Hester was indeed generous and charitable, giving with a large hand, as Eastern kings are represented to have given. She would send whole suits of clothes, furnish rooms, order camels and mules to convey two or three quarters of wheat at a time to a necessitous family, and pay carpenters and masons to build a poor man’s house: she had a munificence about her that would have required the revenue of a kingdom to gratify. Hence, too, sprung that insatiable disposition to hoard—not money, but what money could buy: she seemed to wish to have stores of whatever articles were necessary for the apparel, food, and convenience of man. Beds, counterpanes, cushions, carpets, and such like furniture, lay rotting in her 217 store-rooms. Utensils grew rusty, wine spoiled; reams of paper were eaten by the mice, or mildewed by the damp; carpenters’ work lay unserviceable from an over-supply; mats rotted; candles, almonds, raisins, dried figs, cocoa, honey, cheese—no matter what—all was laid by in destructive profusion; and every year half was consumed by rats, ants, and other vermin, or otherwise spoiled. One store-room, which was filled with locked-up trunks, full of what was most valuable, had not been entered for three years: and, oh! what ruin and waste did I not discover!

When I told her of all this, and suggested that it would be better to give them to her poor pensioners, she said—“Such things never cause me a moment’s thought: I would rather they should have been used to some good purpose; but, if I have got such rascals about me, why, let the things all rot, sooner than that they should profit by them. Money can replace all that; and, if God sends me money, I will do so; if he does not, he knows best what should be: and it would not give me a moment’s sorrow to lie down in a cottage with only rags enough to keep me warm. I would not, even then, change places with Lord Grosvenor, the Duke of Devonshire, the Duke of Buckingham, or any of them: they can’t do what I can; so of what use are all their riches? I have seen some of them make such a fuss about the 218 loss of a ten guinea ring or some such bauble:—not that they cared for it, but they could not bear to lose it. But if I want to know what is passing at Constantinople, or London, or anywhere, I have nothing to do but to turn my thoughts that way, and in a quarter of an hour I have it all before me, just as it is; so true, doctor, that if it is not actually passing, it will be in a month, in three months—so true: isn’t it extraordinary?”...

Upon some occasions, her munificence wore the appearance of ostentation. She would bestow on strangers, like dervises, sheykhs, and fakyrs, large sums of money, and yet drive hard bargains with those about her neighbourhood; and would sometimes make presents, apparently not so much to comfort those who received them as to display her own superiority and greatness over others.

I have said, in a preceding chapter, that she used to give new suits of clothes to her people on Byràm day, and at Easter, according to their religion: but it should be mentioned that, on those days, every servant was called in, and received forty piasters; and one thousand piasters were divided by Logmagi among the persons in Sayda who in any way were occasionally useful to her or her people. These were the porter of the French khan and the janissary there; the porters of the town-gate; the harbour-master; the gardener 219 who supplied vegetables; the fisherman who sent her choice fish, &c. Two hundred piasters were paid annually to old Jacob, a tailor; fifty here and there to the imàms of particular mosques; as much to the mistress of the bath to which she sent her maids to be washed. Mr. Loustaunau generally had about five hundred piasters a quarter. Of many of her benefactions I never knew anything. Had I kept a list of the sums which, besides these customary donations, she gave to the distressed, few would wonder that she was so beloved and so generally lamented. Thus, when the ferdy and miri, two onerous taxes, fell due, she commonly paid them for such of her servants as were burdened with families, or whose means were scanty: she did the same when unusual contributions were levied, as during the conscription. On the 8th of December, I find a note that I gave fifty piasters and a counterpane to a poor shepherd boy, labouring under anasarca from an indurated spleen, a most common complaint in the country, the effect of protracted agues; and eighty to an old man, who had some years before been her asackjee. To Logmagi mostly fell the distribution of all these sums, and it was only occasionally that I was the almoner to this truly noble and disinterested woman; else I should have been able to have cited more examples.

January 31.—Being Wednesday, it was a rule with 220 Lady Hester Stanhope to shut herself up from Tuesday at sunset until the sunset of Wednesday, during which time she saw nobody, if she could avoid it, did no business, and always enjoined me to meddle in no affairs of hers during these twenty-four hours. Wednesday was an unlucky day with her, a dies nefastus. After sunset, I waited on her, and found her languid, moaning, and still visibly suffering from her yesterday’s exertion; for it appeared, although I had not seen her, that she had walked about her garden, forcing her strength so far as to deceive the gardeners, who had given out that she would soon be as well as ever; and this was what, no doubt, she aimed at, for the purpose of confounding the secretary.

Reminding her of the wish she had expressed to have Mrs. M.’s company, I now proposed that she, my daughter, and the governess, should sit with her by turns, suggesting that, by this means, much of the disagreeable service of the maids, whom she constantly complained of, might be dispensed with. But to this she answered, “No, doctor, it will not do: you must tell them how very much obliged to them I am for their kind offers and intentions, but that their presence will only be an embarrassment to me. You don’t consider the matter in its true point of view, as you never do anything. In the first place, it kills 221 me to talk; I can’t fatigue myself by giving them information about the country, and be a Pococke: and, as for giving them good advice, the world is so turned topsy-turvy, that everything one says is lost on everybody. Then, as for being of any use to me, they could be of none: if I wanted anything, they don’t know where it is; and how are they to tell the nasty wretches, who only speak Arabic? Besides, I am not sure their nijems would suit me; and then they would do me more harm than good. Poor little Eugenia! I had thought that I might derive some consolation from looking on her innocent face whilst she sat working at my bedside; but some one told me her star perhaps would not agree with mine: is it so, doctor? I am like Mr. Pitt: he used to say, ‘I hear that man’s footsteps in the passage—I can’t bear it; do send him away to town, or to Putney:’ so it is with me. There was my grandfather, too—how he felt the effect of the peculiar star of those people who did not suit him!—he could bear nobody near him, when he was ill, but Lady Chatham, and an old woman who had been a sort of woman of the town: he sent all his children to Lyme Regis; and even his tutor, Mr. Wilson, he could not bear. I know the reason of it now, from my recollection of them, but I did not at the time. My grandfather was born 222 under Mars and Venus; Lady Chatham was born under Venus, and so was the old woman, but both in different burges [houses]: and that is why their sympathies were the same.”

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Lady Hester’s system of astrology—Sympathies and antipathies—People’s nijems or stars—Mesmerism explained—Lord Suffolk—Lady Hester’s own star—Letter to the Queen—Letter to Mr. Speaker Abercrombie—Messieurs Beck and Moore—Letter to Colonel Campbell—The Ides of March—Lady Hester’s reflections on the Queen’s conduct to her—Letter to Sir Edward Sugden—What peers are—Junius’s Letters—Spies employed by the first Lord Chatham—Mr. Pitt’s opinion of the Duke of Wellington—Lady Hester’s letter to his Grace, &c.

In order to render intelligible to the reader many passages which have occurred, and will occur again, in Lady Hester’s conversations, respecting what she called people’s nijems or stars, it may not be amiss to give an outline of her system of astrology, and of the supposed influence that the position of the stars in the heavens at our nativity has on our future fate and on our sympathies. I must preface what follows by observing that she had a remarkable talent for divining characters by the make of a person. This 224 every traveller will testify who has visited her in Syria; for it was after she went to live in solitude that her penetration became so extraordinary. It was founded both on the features of the face and on the shape of the head, body, and limbs. Some indications she went by were taken from a resemblance to animals; and, wherever such indications existed, she inferred that the dispositions peculiar to those animals were to be found in the person. But, independent of all this, her doctrine was, that every creature is governed by the star under whose influence it was born.

Every star has attached to it two aërial beings, two animals, two trees, two flowers, &c.; that is, a couple of all the grand classes in creation, animal, vegetable, mineral, or etherial, whose antipathies and sympathies become congenial with the being born under the same star. She would say, “My brother Charles vomited if he ate three strawberries only: other people, born under the same star as his, may not have such an insurmountable antipathy as his was, because their star may be imperfect, whilst his was pure; but they will have it, more or less. Some persons again will have as much delight in the smell of particular flowers as cats have in the smell of valerian, when they sit and purr round it.

“The stars under which men are born may be one 225 or more. Thus Mr. H*****, an English traveller, who came to see me, was born under four stars, all tending to beauty, but of no good in other respects. His forehead was as white as snow; his mouth” (I think she said) “was good, with a handsome small black beard; but his stars were otherwise dull: for you know the stars in the heavens are not always bright and twinkling, but sometimes heavy and clouded. It is like engravings—some of them are proofs, and those are perfect. Some persons may have a good star, but it may be cracked like a glass, and then, you know, it can’t hold water.

“The influence of stars depends, likewise, on whether they are rising, or in their zenith, or setting; and the angle at which they are must be determined by calculations, which good astrologers make very readily. But a clever man will, from his knowledge of the stars, look even at a child and say, ‘That child will have such and such diseases, such and such virtues, such and such vices;’ and this I can do: nay, what is more, I can give a description of the features of any person I have never seen, if his character is described to me, and vice versa. There is a learned man at Damascus, who possesses the same faculty in an extraordinary degree. He knew nothing of me but by report, and had never seen me: but a friend of his, having given him a description of my person and 226 features, he noted down my virtues, vices, and qualities so exactly, that he even said in what part of my body I had got a mole, and mentioned the small mark on my shoulder, where Mr. Cline removed a tumour. There’s for you? do you believe these things, or do you not?

“A man’s destiny may be considered as a graduated scale, of which the summit is the star that presided over his birth. In the next degree comes the good angel[24] attached to that star; then the herb and the flower beneficial to his health and agreeable to his smell; then the mineral, then the tree, and such other things as contribute to his good; then the man himself: below him comes the evil spirit, then the venomous reptile or animal, the plant, and so on; things inimical to him. Where the particular tree that is beneficial or pleasurable to him flourishes naturally, or the mineral is found, there the soil and air are salubrious to that individual; and a physician who understood my doctrines, how easily could he treat his patients!—for, by merely knowing the star of a person, the simples and compounds most beneficial to him in medicine would be known also.

227 “How great the sympathies and antipathies are in stars that are the same or opposite I have told you before in my grandfather’s case, in Mr. Pitt’s, and in my own. Lord Chatham, when on a sick bed, could bear three people only to wait on him—Lady Chatham, Sarah Booby, and somebody else. My grandmamma’s star and Sarah Booby’s star were the same—both Venus—only grandmamma’s was more moderate; she could keep it down. Mr. Pitt, when he was ill at Putney, had such an aversion to one of the footmen, that he was nervous when he heard his step; for you know people, when they are sick, can hear a pin drop: he said to me, ‘Hester, do send that fellow to town.’ I did not let him know why he was sent to town, but I got him off as quickly as possible: he was, notwithstanding, a good servant, clean, and had otherwise good qualities; but Mr. Pitt’s and his star were different. As to myself, since I have been here, I had a professed French cook, called François—the people named him Fransees el Franjy. His skill was undoubted; yet, whenever he dressed my dinner, I was always sending for him to complain, and sometimes threw the dish in his face: a sweetmeat from his hand turned bitter in my mouth. But, what is most extraordinary of all, Miss Williams’s star was so disagreeable to me that I could not bear her to be near me when I was ill:—if I was in a perspiration, it would 228 stop the moment she came into the room. You know how many good qualities she had, and how attached she was to me, and I to her: well, I always kept her out of my sight as much as I could, when anything was the matter with me.

“Such is the sympathy of persons born under the same star, that, although living apart in distant places, they will still be sensible of each other’s sufferings. When the Duke of York died, at the very hour, a cold sweat and a kind of fainting came over me, that I can’t describe. I was ill beyond measure, and I said to Miss Williams, ‘Somebody is dying somewhere, and I am sure it is one of my friends: so I made her write it down. Some time after, when she was poking over a set of newspapers, she came to me, and said, ‘It’s very singular, my lady; but, the time you were so very ill, and could not account for it, corresponds exactly with the date of the Duke of York’s death—the hour, too, just the same!’ Now, doctor, wasn’t it extraordinary? You drawl out ‘Y—e—s,’ just as if you thought I told lies: oh, Lord! oh, Lord! what a cold man!

“The proof of sympathy between the stars of two persons, or, in other words, of the star of another being good for you, is, when a person puts his finger on you and you don’t feel it. Zezefôon, when Mademoiselle Longchamp touches her with her fingers in 229 examining the Turkish dress, shudders all over: that is a proof that her star is not good for her, and yet Miss L. uses more kind expressions to her than anybody; but that makes no difference; there is no sympathy in their stars.

“Animal magnetism is nothing but the sympathy of our stars. Those fools who go about magnetizing indifferently one person and another, why do they sometimes succeed, and sometimes fail?—because, if they meet with those of the same star with themselves, their results will be satisfactory, but with opposite stars they can do nothing. Some people you may magnetize, some you cannot; and so far will the want of sympathy act in some, that there are persons whom it would be impossible to put in certain attitudes: they might be mechanically placed there, but their posture never would be natural; whilst others, from their particular star, would readily fall into them. Oh! if I had your friend, Mr. Green,[25] here, I could give him some useful hints on choosing models for his lectures.

“There are animals, too, under the same star with human beings. I had a mule whose star was the same as mine; and, at the time of my severe illness, this mule showed as much sensibility about me, and more, than some of the beasts who wait on me. When that 230 mule was first foaled, I had given orders to sell the foal and its mother; but, happening to see it, I countermanded the order immediately. It received a hurt in its eye, and when, with my hand, I applied some eye-water with camphor in it, which, of course, made the eye smart, it never once turned its head away, or showed the least impatience of what I was doing. When this mule was dying some years afterwards, she lay twenty-four hours, every minute seeming to be going to breathe her last; but still life would not depart. They told me of this, and I went to the stable. The moment she saw me, she turned her eyes on me, gave an expressive look, and expired. All the servants said she would not die until my star, which was hers, had come to take her breath: isn’t it very extraordinary? Serpents never die, whatever you can do to them, until their star rises above the horizon.[26]

“Some can do well only when under the guidance of another person’s star. What was Lord Grenville 231 without Mr. Pitt? with him to guide him he did pretty well; but, as soon as Mr. Pitt was dead, he sunk into obscurity: who ever heard of Lord Grenville afterwards? So again Sir Francis Burdett has never been good for anything since Horne Tooke’s death. So long as Napoleon had Josephine by his side he was lucky: but, when he cast her off, his good fortune left him. You know you sent me her portrait: well, it was a good engraving, and I have no doubt was a likeness. I observed in her face indications of much falsity, and a depth of cunning exceedingly great: it was her sâad (luck) that held him up. You may see so many examples of such good fortune depending on men’s wives. Mahomet Ali owes all to his wife—a woman without a nose. What saved the Shaykh Beshýr but the sâad of the Syt Haboos? Hamâady told the Emir Beshýr, ‘You will never do anything with the Shaykh Beshýr until you get rid of her, and then the Shaykh is in your power.’ So what did he do? he sent his son—the little Emir Beshýr, as they call him—who surrounded her palace with twenty horsemen, and, when she attempted to escape, drove her into her own courtyard, and stabbed her: her body was cut in pieces, and given to the dogs to eat.

“What is to account for some people’s good fortune but their star? There was Lord Suffolk, an ensign in a marching regiment, and thirteenth remove 232 from the title—see what an example he was! It was predestined that he should arrive at greatness, although, when the news was brought him that he was come to the title, he had not money enough to pay for a post-chaise: but nothing could hinder what his good star was to bring him. Lady Suffolk, the daughter of a clergyman of a hundred a-year, was a very clever, shrewd woman, and filled her elevated station admirably.”

I have embodied thus much in Lady Hester Stanhope’s own words of what may give a tolerable idea of her notion of planetary influence. What her own star was may be gathered from what she said one day, when, having dwelt a long time on this, her favourite subject, she got up from the sofa, and, approaching the window, she called me to her—“Look,” said she, “at the pupil of my eyes; there! my star is the sun—all sun—it is in my eyes: when the sun is a person’s star, it attracts everything.” I looked, and replied that I saw a rim of yellow round the pupil.—“A rim!” cried she; “it isn’t a rim—it’s a sun; there’s a disk, and from it go rays all round: ’tis no more a rim than you are. Nobody has got eyes like mine.”[27]

233 Lady Hester Stanhope, in a letter she wrote to Prince Pückler Muskau, describes her system briefly as follows; and she desired me to keep a copy of it, 234 that I might not, as she said, substitute my own ideas for hers.

“Every man, born under a given star, has his aërial spirit, his animal, his bird, his fruit-tree, his flower, his medicinal herb, and his dæmon. Beings born under any given star may be of four different qualities and forms, just as there may be four different qualities of cherries, having little resemblance one to another, but being nevertheless all cherries. Added to this, there may be varieties in the same star, occasioned by the influence of other stars, which were above the horizon in particular positions at the hour of a man’s birth: just as you may say that a ship is more or less baffled by certain winds, though she is standing her course. Again, a man being born under the same star with another man, whilst that star is in one sign of the zodiac, changes somewhat the character and appearance when in another sign of the zodiac: just as two plants which are alike, when one grows where there is always shade and the other where there is constantly sunshine, although precisely of one and the same kind, will differ slightly in appearance, odour, and taste.

“A man born under a certain star will have, from nature, certain qualities, certain virtues and vices, certain talents, diseases, and tastes. All that education can do is merely artificial: leave him to himself, 235 and he returns to his natural character and his original tastes. If this were better known, young people would not be made to waste their time uselessly in fitting them for what they never can be.

“I have learned to know a man’s star by his face, but not by astrological calculations, as perhaps you fancy; of that trade I have no knowledge. I have been told that the faculty which I possess is much more vague than the astrological art, and I believe it: but mine is good for a great deal, though not for calculating the exact epoch of a man’s maladies or death.

“You will ask me how it is possible to know mankind by looking at their features and persons; and so thoroughly too. I answer—a gardener, when he sees twenty bulbs of twenty different flowers on the table before him, will he not tell you that one will remain so many days under ground before it sprouts, then it will grow little by little, very slowly, and in so many days or weeks will flower, and its flowers will have such a smell, such a colour, and such virtues: after so many days more, it will begin to droop and fade, and in ten days will wither: that other, as soon as it is out of the ground, will grow an inch and a half in every twenty-four hours: its flowers will be brilliant, but will have a disagreeable smell; it will bloom for a long time, and then will wither altogether in a day 236 and why may not I, looking on men, pronounce on their virtues, qualities, and duration in the same way? This may not be well explained, but a clever person will divine what I mean.”

Such were, in the main, the opinions of Lady Hester on astrology, to which several travellers have alluded, but which, from defective information, they have hitherto misrepresented. It will be seen that there was at least method in her belief. We will now return from this digression.

Our narrative broke off in the middle of a conversation on the evening of January 31, 1838.

Tea was ordered; but so simple a process as getting tea ready was now a painful business. If it did not come immediately, Lady Hester grew so impatient, that it was distressing to see her agitation. She would then ring for a pipe, and perhaps send it back to be fresh filled or changed four or five times in succession, each one being, for some trifling reason, rejected. Alas! it was not the tea nor the pipes that were in fault; it was Colonel Campbell’s letter that had given a stab to her heart, from which she never recovered; and, in proportion to the apparent calm which she endeavoured to assume, when speaking on that subject, did the feeling of the supposed indignity which she had received prey on her spirits and on her pride.

237 She reverted to the letter. “The thing to be considered,” she said, “is whether I shall write a letter to the Queen, and ask the Duke of Wellington to give it to her, or whether I shall put it in the newspapers: for I am afraid, if I send it to him, he will not give it to her; or, if he does, they will say nothing about it. I should like to ask for a public inquiry into my debts, and for what I have contracted them. Let them compare the good I have done in the cause of humanity and science with the D——s of K——’s debts. When I am better, I’ll set all this to rights. I wonder if Lord Palmerston is the man I recollect—a young man just come from College, that was hanging about, waiting to be introduced to Mr. Pitt. Mr. Pitt used to say, ‘Ah! very well; we will ask him some day to dinner.’ Perhaps it is an old grudge that makes him vent his spite. He is an Irishman, I think.”

February 1.—To-day Lady Hester was much the same as on the preceding days: her pulse was low; her lungs were loaded with phlegm; aphthæ had shown themselves on her tongue; her nails were cracked from the contraction of the surrounding integuments; the tips of her fingers were cold; her back, as she sat up in bed, was bent; her bones almost protruded through the skin, from being obliged to lie always on one side. Speaking of her inability to 238 sleep, except in some particular position, she observed that she was like those little figures of tumblers; place her as you would, she rolled over to the left side, as if there was a weight of lead there.

After the usual preliminaries of smoking a pipe and a little conversation, she dictated her letter to the Queen and to Mr. Abercrombie, speaker of the House of Commons.

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Lady Hester Stanhope to the Queen.

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Lady Hester Stanhope to Mr. Speaker Abercrombie.

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241 Friday, February 2.—To-day, I found her ladyship busied in sorting out certain articles of apparel, which had just before been brought home for herself: they had been made by the wife of Lufloofy, the person at Sayda who generally lodged English travellers. As the fair sex may like to know what the texture of ladies’ under-garments is in the East, these were made of half cotton and half silk, and, to the appearance and touch, not unlike crape. Some women have them all silk. Either kind is favourable for absorbing perspiration, and, under any circumstances, never strikes cold to the body.[29]

There had arrived, also, from Marseilles six cases of claret, two of brandy, one of rum, twelve baskets of champagne, one case of Kirsch water; and from Leghorn six cases of Genoese pâte, two Parmesan cheeses, some Bologna sausages, pots of preserve, one barrel of salmon and tunny, one ditto of anchovies, brooms, scuppets, perfumery, two chests of tea, and numberless 242 other good things, to meet the wants of her expected guest, the Baroness de Fériat, who was coming from the United States. It was sad enough that Lady Hester herself, with abundance of choice provisions and wines, was unable to partake of any. However, when samples of them were brought in, as the cases were opened one after another, to be shown her, her usual (what shall I call it?) greediness of manner manifested itself. She tasted everything, and swallowed a great deal: the natural consequence of which was that she threw herself back in her bed, gasping for breath, and suffering horribly. On these occasions, her favourite plan was to relieve the succession of momentary symptoms by a host of palliatives, never leaving her stomach empty or her digestive organs at rest, and always fancying that it was want of nourishment that generated uneasiness or caused the oppression on her chest, from both of which she never was free; nor would she listen to any arguments that tended to show she was in error.

February 4, Sunday.—This morning it was discovered in my house that a silver spoon had been lost. I had a man-servant and a boy, the former a Greek, the latter a Mahometan. The Greek had one of the most sinister countenances I ever beheld: he was the same man who had accompanied Mr. Moore and Mr. 243 Beck to the Dead Sea,[30] and had been sent to me from Beyrout by the innkeeper there: he was a knave, a drunkard, and a liar. Suspicion fell on him, and he, to throw it on others, first accused the milk-girl, and then the water-carrier.

Theft, in houses in Turkey, where many are suspected, generally leads to the punishing of them all; and Logmagi suggested that he should apply the korbàsh to all three, to elicit the truth. However, I thought it more just to resort to the European way, saying if the spoon were not found, the two servants must pay for it, not doubting the innocence of the 244 water-carrier, a hard-working fellow of good repute. Logmagi objected to this. “You must flog that Greek,” said he, “or you will lose, one by one, everything of value you possess.”

Here the matter rested, as the morning had been fixed for answering Colonel Campbell’s letter: so I wrote from her ladyship’s dictation the following laconic epistle to him, and the friendly one to Mr. Moore, British consul at Beyrout. When I had finished them, I asked Lady Hester what she would have me put at the close, and how she chose to subscribe herself. “Say nothing,” replied she: “how many times I have said I could never call myself the humble servant of any body. I hate and detest all those compliments so unmeaning and so false: but to Mr. Moore you may express my esteem and regard. I know I shall have a great liking for Mrs. Moore, if ever I see her: is she so very handsome as they say? When you go to Beyrout, you must tell her that I consider it a duty to like her: she does not know why, no more do you.”

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Lady Hester Stanhope to Colonel Campbell.

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Lady Hester Stanhope to Mr. Moore, British Consul at
Beyrout.

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Besides these letters, I wrote others for England and for Beyrout—in all about a dozen. What with waiting and listening to her conversation, I was with her five hours before dinner and five hours after. I had to seal and put covers to all these; and just at the moment when I was about to retire to my study, a little room set apart for me in her house, to do this, Lady Hester stopped me, and returned to the subject of the silver spoon. After some consideration, she recommended also the use of the korbàsh.[31]

“How am I to live,” cried she, “with thirty servants in my house, and such a man as you are that can’t say boh! to a goose? How do you expect they 247 will mind me, if you don’t keep them under? Hamâady is coming to-morrow to Jôon: he must be sent for, and shall interrogate the rascal; I warrant you, he’ll soon bring it to light.”

When I left her for dinner, she had said to me, “Send me word a quarter of an hour before you return to say you are coming.” This, in my hurry to get through so much writing for her, I had neglected to do; and it, therefore, served now as the text for a new grievance. “Didn’t I say,” she asked me, “let me know a quarter of an hour beforehand when you are ready to come to me? that quarter of an hour was everything to me: I wished to have more candles brought in on account of your eyes, to have the paper and ink got ready, and to collect my thoughts; but no! everybody must do as they like, and poor I be made the sacrifice.—I will live by the rule of grandeur.”

Then she called her maids in, one after another, poured on them a torrent of abuse for their laziness, dirt, and insolence. My heart sickened to think what would be the consequence of all this to herself; for I knew very well that her whole frame, the next morning, would be debilitated from such excitement: yet all this time her passion was sublimely eloquent, and, sick though she was, terrible. Her maids tumbled over each other from fright, and the thunder that 248 rolled in the sky (for a storm was raging at the time) was but a faint likeness of her paroxysm. When it was over, we drank tea, and at half-past one separated for the night.

February 5. The weather was still stormy. Snow fell in abundance on the higher chains of Mount Lebanon, where it lay apparently very thick.

When I paid my morning visit, Lady Hester held out her hand to me the moment I approached her bedside. “I said too much last night,” she observed; “think no more about it, doctor; but you know my irritability, and you must bear with it.” She was pale, languid, and extenuated: her hands and arms were jerked in convulsive flings. Strong electrical shocks could not have shaken her so much. Alas! I sympathised too deeply with her wrongs not to forget all her ebullitions of anger the moment they were over.

When she found herself a little easier, she asked me to explain to her Julius Cæsar’s calendar, which she had on some occasion lighted on in Ainsworth’s dictionary. “When I was a girl,” said she, “I knew all the constellations in the heavens, and was so quick at astronomy, that they took my books and maps away, fearing I should give myself up to it, to the neglect of my other studies. I had it all before my eyes, just like a pocket-handkerchief. What day are 249 the ides of March?” I told her. “I think,” she continued, “the word Ides must be derived from âayd, [Arabic: عيد].” I guessed at once what was passing in her mind. It was an illusion with her that her destiny and Cæsar’s, or her character and his, had some resemblance: and, when she mentioned Brutus-wigs in her letter to Colonel Campbell, it had a reference to the stabs they were giving her from England in depriving her of her pension, and putting insults upon her.

She was deeply wounded in her pride by the treatment she had received from home. “The Queen,” she would say, “should have desired her ministers to write to me, and say, ‘It grieves me that you should have exceeded your income, and incurred debts, which you know, when complaints are made to me, I cannot countenance; endeavour to pay them by instalments, and all may yet be well,’ or something to that effect— *   *   *   *   *   * But no! she shall have my pension, and, if they make me a bankrupt, why, let them pay the usurers themselves.”

February 9.—I did not see Lady Hester the whole of the preceding day: she had sent me a message to say she did not wish to trouble me. I attributed this to the state of the weather; for the wind was high, the atmosphere wet and cold, and everything about the residence uncomfortable. To go from my house 250 to Lady Hester’s, I was obliged to wear high wooden clogs and a thick Greek capote with a hood to it. Umbrellas, from the gusts of wind, were out of the question. The ground was like soap. But it was not the weather that made her decline my visit: she had been closeted with a doctor of the country from Dayr el Kamar, the son of that Metta of whom mention has been made in a former part of these pages as having bequeathed his family as a legacy to her. He was come, as it was supposed, to give his opinion on her case. I took no umbrage at this. Lady Hester and I differed toto cœlo on medical points; and she told me very often, after discussions of this sort, that she had invited me to come this time, not as her physician, but as a friend; one in whom she had confidence to settle her debts.

The muleteers had been sent on the 7th of February to Mar Elias, to bring away the effects which had been lying there, rotting and spoiling, since Miss Williams’s death. I accompanied them to superintend the moving, as also to pay a visit to General Loustaunau. Heavens! what waste was I witness to! In one closet was a beautiful wax miniature of Mr. Pitt, a portrait of the Duke of York, some other pictures, stationery, glass, china, medicines, &c., enough for a family. In one room were carpets, cushions, counterpanes, mattresses, pillows, all completely destroyed by mould and damp. In a store-room were large japan canisters with tea, 251 preserves, sugar, wine, lamps, &c. From another room, (the roof of which had fallen in at the time of the great earthquake,) had disappeared, according to Lady Hester’s account, 3 cwt. of copper utensils, in cauldrons, boilers, saucepans, kettles, round platters, called sennéyah, and many other things. A leather portmanteau lay with the lock cut out; a trunk had its hinges wrenched off; and both were emptied of their contents. Everywhere proofs of pillage were manifest, and the village of Abra was notoriously thriving by it. For ten years this plundering system had been going on, and yet what still remained would have almost filled a house. Among other things were papers and boxes of seeds, roots, dried plants, and a variety of such matters, which Lady Hester had collected: “for,” she would say, “the importance of people’s pursuits is judged in a different way by different individuals. For example, Sir Joseph Banks would think I had done wonders if I found a spider that had two more joints than another in his hind-leg; and Sir Abraham Hume would embrace me if I had got a coin not in his collection; but I have hoarded up something for everybody. And yet, whether I have done good for humanity or for science, those English give me credit for nothing, and never even once ask how I got into debt.”

February 10.—I spent four hours with Lady Hester 252 Stanhope this evening. She was very ill, and greatly convulsed during the greater part of the time:—she moaned a good deal—yet, in the intervals of ease that she got, she had two baskets of good things packed up as a present to an old French widow, and two for an infirm old man, her pensioner, residing at Sayda.

Monday, February 13.—Lady Hester to-day dictated the following letter to Sir Edward Sugden:—

Lady Hester Stanhope to Sir Edward Sugden.

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258 I was much exhausted to-day. I had written six hours to her dictation the preceding day, and now sat talking until midnight; but, from the late hour at which I left her, it was as usual impossible for me to note down even a hundredth part of what she said. For example, it is now nearly one o’clock in the morning; and much as I could wish, whilst my recollection is fresh, to make a few memorandums of the many things she has been saying, my eyelids droop, and I am forced to lay down my pen: yet one anecdote I must try to commit to paper. In reading over the letter to Sir Edward Sugden, she made the following remark: “The peers in England may be compared to doctors who have made their fortunes: if they continue to practise, they do it out of regard to some particular families, or from humane motives. They know better than those who are sick what is good for them, because they have had long practice; and, if their sons are no doctors, they have heard so much talk about the matter, that they sit in a corner, and watch the effect of the medicine.”

I was struck with the resemblance of Lady Hester’s style to Junius’s in her letter to Sir Edward. This led me to reflect, as I had observed on many occasions, that Lady Hester’s language was the counterpart of her grandfather’s, whether Lord Chatham might not have been the author of Junius’s Letters; but it has 259 since been suggested to me that there would be an absurdity in such a supposition (for I had no opportunity of consulting books where I was), because some of the most eloquent passages of Junius are his panegyrics on Lord Chatham, and it is not likely that he would have been guilty of writing a eulogium on himself; however, I mentioned it to her. She answered, “My grandfather was perfectly capable and likely to write and do things which no human being would dream came from his hands. I once met with one of his spies,” continued she, “a woman of the common class, who had passed her life dressed in man’s clothes: in this way she went, as a sailor, to America, and used to write him letters as if to a sweetheart, giving an account of the enemy’s ships and plans in a most masterly way, in the description of a box of tools, or in something so unlike the thing in question that no suspicion could be had of the meaning of the contents. This woman by accident passed me at a watering-place, whilst I was sitting near the sea-side talking to my brother, and stopped short on hearing the sound of my voice, which was so much like my grandfather’s that it struck her—and there is nothing extraordinary in this: I have known a horse do the same thing. My father had two piebald horses: they were very vicious, and hated one of the grooms so, that, one day, whilst he was taking them out for 260 exercise, one threw him, and the other flew at him, and attempted to strike him with his fore-feet; but, as he could not succeed, the other, that had run off, turned back, seized the groom with his teeth, and bit him and shook him: that very horse went blind, and got into an innkeeper’s hands, who made a post-horse of him. One day, on the high road, I saw him, and made an exclamation to somebody who was with me. The horse, although blind, knew my voice, and stopped short, just like the woman. I too was struck with the woman’s manner; and, without saying anything, went next morning at daylight, before anybody was about, to the same spot, and, finding the woman there again, inquired who and what she was. A conversation ensued, and the woman was delighted, she said, to behold once again something that reminded her of her old employer. As for the ministers of the present day, she observed, they are good for nothing: when I went to prefer my claim for a pension, one called me Goody-two-shoes, and told me to go about my business.

“A government should never employ spies of the description generally chosen—men of a certain appearance and information, who may be enabled to mix in genteel society: they are always known or suspected. My grandfather pursued quite a different plan. His spies were among such people as Logmagi* 261 *—a hardy sailor, who would get at any risk into a port, to see how many ships there were, and how many effective men—or a pedlar, to enter a camp—and the like. This was the way he got information as to the state of the armament at Toulon: and such a one was the woman I have just told you about, who knew me by the sound of my voice.

“There were two hairdressers in London, the best spies Buonaparte had. A hairdresser, generally speaking, must be a man of talent—so must a cook; for a cook must know such a variety of things, about which no settled rules can be laid down, and he must have great judgment.

“Do you think I did not immediately perceive that those four Germans we met at —— were spies?—directly. I never told B**** and Lord S**** because they would have let it out again: François was the only one who knew it besides myself. He took an opportunity one day of saying to me, when nobody was by, ‘My lady, one of those Germans....’—‘Yes, yes, François, I understand you,’ answered I, before he had said three words: ‘you need not put me on my guard, but I am much obliged to you.’—‘Why, my lady,’ said François, ‘when I was one day standing sentry at Buonaparte’s tent, there was one of those very gentlemen I have seen go in and out: I recollect his face perfectly.’ François was right, doctor: there 262 they were—there was the sick one, and the learned one, and the musician, and the officer—for all sorts of persons.

“You recollect, when we were at Constantinople, one day I went to meet the Count de la Tour Maubourg on the banks of the Bosphorus, and he intimated to me that I had kept him waiting. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘there was a spy following my boat: I knew him directly, and wanted to prevent his dogging me.’ ‘Pooh! nonsense,’ replied Mr. de la T. M.: but we had not talked for half an hour, when, lo! there he was, taking a look at us. Next day, when I saw Mr. Canning, ‘Oh! Lady Hester,’ said he, ‘how did you spend your day yesterday?’—‘Why,’ answered I, ‘your spy did not spoil it.’—‘Ah!’ rejoined he, laughing—for he perceived at once it was of no use to make a mystery of what he had done—‘you should not do such things—I must write it home to government.’—‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I’ll write a letter, too, in this way:—My lord, your excellent young minister, to show his gallantry, has begun his diplomatic career by watching ladies in their assignations, &c., &c.’ and then I laughed at him, and then I talked seriously with him, till I worked on his feelings in a way you can’t think!

“Spies, as I said before, should never be what are called gentlemen, or have the appearance of such; for, 263 however well they may be paid, somebody else will always pay them better;—unless fortune should throw in your way a man of integrity, who, from loyalty or a love of his country, will adventure everything for the cause he is engaged in: such a man is another sort of a thing!”

February 14.—Being Wednesday, I was, as usual, deprived of the honour of seeing Lady Hester until night; I therefore remained with my family, and, having recovered the lost spoon, which my servant produced out of fear of Hamâady’s examination, pretending to have found it, I took the opportunity of settling his wages and turned him away.

After sunset I waited on her. She was in low spirits. “I am very weak,” said she. “Look at my veins—they did not use to be so: look at my arms, too—mere skin and bone.” She pointed to the state of her room: “See how filthy it is again already,” she observed; “and if I say a word, those wretches seem not to mind me—they snub me, doctor.”

She attempted to dictate the letter she proposed writing to the Duke of Wellington, but was unable. We drank tea. “Do you know,” she said, “when old Malti” (this was the name Mr. Abella, the English agent, was generally designated by) “came in such a hurry, the other day, with Colonel Campbell’s letter, and made such a fuss about delivering it 264 with his own hand, people fancied I was going to die, and that he was come up to seal my effects the moment the breath should be out of my body. But, if I do die, they sha’n’t seal anything of mine, I’ll take care of that; for I am no longer an English subject, and therefore they have nothing to do with me.”

Again she asked me to take my pen and paper, and returned to the Duke of Wellington’s letter. “I can’t collect my ideas,” she said: “one while I am thinking of what Mr. Pitt said of him; then of the letter he wrote when invited down to the country ball; then of what he is now: so put down your paper, and ring for a pipe. The duke is a man self-taught, for he was always in dissipation. I recollect, one day, Mr. Pitt came into the drawing-room to me—‘Oh!’ said he, ‘how I have been bored by Sir Sydney coming with his box full of papers, and keeping me for a couple of hours, when I had so much to do!’ I observed to him that heroes were generally vain: ‘Lord Nelson is so.’ ‘So he is,’ replied Mr. Pitt; ‘but not like Sir Sydney: and how different is Arthur Wellesley, who has just quitted me! He has given me details so clear upon affairs in India! and he talked of them, too, as if he had been a surgeon of a regiment, and had nothing to do with them; so that I know not which to admire most, his modesty or his talents: and yet the fate of India depends upon them.’ 265 Then, doctor, when I recollect the letter he wrote to Edward Bouverie, in which he said that he could not come down to the ball which Bouverie had invited him to, for that his only corbeau coat was so bad he was ashamed to appear in it, I reflect what a rise he has had in the world. Bouverie said—‘You would like to dance with him amazingly, Lady Hester: he is a good fellow.’

“He was at first, doctor, nothing but what hundreds of others are in a country town—a man who danced, and drank hard. His star has done every thing for him; for he is not a great general.[32] He is no tactician, nor has he any of those great qualities that make a Cæsar, or a Pompey, or even a Buonaparte. As for the battle of Waterloo, both French and English have told me that it was a lucky battle for him, but nothing more. I don’t think he acted well at Paris: nor did the soldiers like him.”

266 Thursday, February 15.—This morning, the letter to the Duke of Wellington was written.

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Lady Hester Stanhope to the Duke of Wellington.

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At eleven at night I joined her at tea in her bed-room. She then asked me to read all the letters over, to see if anything wanted correction. After that, calling for her old parchment-covered blotting-book, she took them one by one, and folded them herself, “in order,” as she said, “to give me instructions on that head.” Generally speaking, she never seemed more happy than when she had a huge packet of despatches to put up: I dare say it reminded her of former times.

She began—“Now, doctor, a letter to a great man should fold over exactly to the middle—thus. Lord! what counting-house paper have you got here?—this will never do” (it was the thin paper common in France as letter-paper). I told her it was the very best there was in the house, and added, to quiet her, 271 that thick paper, when fumigated in quarantine, as this must be, generally seemed to me to suffer more than thin; which is the fact. “Humph—ah! well, it is too late now to alter it; so it must go as it is.” She then folded the cover with great exactitude; but, looking round her, she cried, “There, now, that black beast has not given me the seal!” (ding, ding). “Zezefôon, where’s the seal?” Zezefôon was the only servant who was permitted to touch the seal, and she always had orders to put it away carefully, so that the other maids should not know where it was, for fear they should lend it to some rascal, (like Girius Gemmel, she would say,) who would put her signature to some forged letter or paper: and Zezefôon, as is customary with uneducated persons, hid it very often so carefully that she could not find it herself. After turning books and papers upside down, at last she produced it.

Whilst melting the wax in the candle, Lady Hester went on:—“Doctor, you never now can seal a letter decently: you once used to do it tolerably well, but now you have lost your memory and all your faculties, from talking nothing but rubbish and empty nonsense to those nasty women; and that’s the reason why you never listen to anything one says, and answer ‘yes,’ and ‘no,’ without knowing to what.”

272 I gave her the letters in succession to seal, until exhausted by the effort—for now the least thing was too much for her—she fell back in her bed. She roused herself again, and said, “Now let’s direct them: where is the one to the Queen? Write Victoria Regina—nothing else—in the middle ... that will do very well. Whose is that?—the Speaker’s: very well. I wonder if it is the brother I used to play driving horses with; for there were several brothers. Now, look for his address—James—ah! that’s him: direct ‘To the Right Hon. Speaker’ ... no, stop: put ‘To the Right Hon. James Abercrombie, with three et ceteras, Carlton Gardens.’”

The next letter was the Duke of Wellington’s. Lady Hester said, “Let me see—he’s a field marshal—ah, never mind: you must begin—‘To His Grace the Duke of Wellington, K.G.’” I accordingly did so, and, not knowing how much more was coming to complete the superscription, I put it all, for fear of wanting room, into one line. Her eye was on me as I wrote. “What’s that?—show it me?” she cried out; and, taking the letter in her hands, she put on her spectacles. What an exclamation burst from her! “Good God, doctor! are you mad?—what can you mean?—what is this vulgar ignorance, not to know that ‘His Grace’ should be in one line, and ‘The 273 Duke of Wellington, K.G.’ in the other: what people will he fancy I am got among! why, the lowest clerk in the Foreign Office would not have made such a blunder: this is your fine Oxford education!” and then she gave a deep sigh, as if in utter despair, to think that a letter should go forth from her hands so different in paper, seal, and address, from those of her early days, when she reigned in Downing Street, co-equal with Mr. Pitt. Now it was a rickety old card-table, a rush-bottomed chair, a white pipe-clay inkstand, wax that would not be used in a counting-house in Cheapside; and both the Sultaness and her vizir (for so I shall presume to style her and myself), fitting their spectacles on their noses, equally blind, equally old, and almost equally ailing.

I finished the address to the Duke. “How many et ceteras have you put?” asked Lady Hester:—“what! only two? I suppose you think he’s a nobody!” The remaining letters were directed without farther trouble, but, by some unaccountable blunder, Sir Edward Sugden was made a Sir Charles of. A long deliberation ensued, whether the letter to Her Majesty should be enclosed in a cover to Lord Palmerston, or whether it should be left to be seen by the English consul at Beyrout, to frighten him.

It was now three o’clock in the morning. I quitted Lady Hester, and had Ali Hayshem, the confidential 274 messenger, called out of his bed. I repeated to him Lady Hester’s instructions as follows:—“You are to take this packet, and start at sunrise precisely—not before, and not after—and to take care you deliver the letters into M. Guys’s hands before sunset: for it is Friday, and Friday is an auspicious day. There are ten piasters for your two days’ keep, and let no one know where you are going, nor for what.”

Ali was accustomed to this business—laid his hand on his head to signify that should answer for his fidelity—made a low salàam—went to the cook for his five bread-cakes—turned in again upon his libàd—pulled his counterpane over his body, face and all, and, I dare say, was punctual to his hour and his instructions. Men of this sort, who are generally chosen from the peasantry, are invaluable as foot-messengers. With a naboot or small bludgeon, well knobbed at one end, and with a few bread-cakes in their girdle, they will set off at any hour, in any weather, for any place, and go as quick as a horseman. They sleep anywhere and anyhow, and deliver their messages and letters with exceeding punctuality. Ali was a handsome fellow, the picture of health, fearless of danger, and a great favourite with Lady Hester, to whose service he was devoted; therefore, at every Byràm, Ali was sure to be seen in a new suit of clothes, the envy of the men, and the admiration of all the girls of 275 Jôon: but he knew how to make a proper use of his money. Already he had begun to trade with some success in silk, advancing small sums in the winter to the poor women who breed silkworms, for which he received silk in payment: this he resold in the city; and those who may chance to meet with Ali ten years hence might find in him a warm tradesman, smoking his pipe in the midst of his obsequious dependants, and dignified with the title of Shaykh or Maalem.

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Lady Hester in an alcove in her garden—Lucky days observed by her—Consuls’ rights—Mischief caused by Sir F. B.’s neglect in answering Lady Hester’s Letters—Rashes common in Syria—Visit of an unknown Englishman—Story of Hanah Messâad—Lady Hester’s love of truth—Report of her death—Michael Tutungi—Visit from the Chevalier Guys—His reception at Dayr el Mkhallas—Punishment of the shepherd, Câasem—Holyday of the Korbàn Byràm—Fatôon’s accouchement—Lady Hester’s aversion to consular interference—Evenings at Jôon—Old Pierre—Saady.

Friday, February 16, 1838.—About two in the afternoon, on going to pay my visit to Lady Hester Stanhope, I proceeded to her bed-room, thinking, as usual, to find her there, but was told by her maids she was gone into the garden. The day was overcast, and there was every appearance of rain. I found her standing in one of the garden-walks, leaning on her stick (such as those which elderly ladies were accustomed formerly to use in England, and perhaps may now), and pale as a ghost. “Doctor,” said she, “I 277 have got out of my room that those beasts may clean it? but, if you don’t go to them, they’ll steal everything.” After expressing my fears that she had chosen a bad day to come out, I left her. I saw her room put into as much order as the confusion in it would admit of. It was crowded with bundles one upon another, as before, which she dared not put into any other part of the house, lest they should be stolen.

Independent of her desire to be more clean and comfortable, I guessed at once why she had left her bed-room to go into the garden. It was the struggle which the sick often make—the resolution of an unsubdued spirit, that finds corporeal ailments weighing down the body, whilst the mind is yet unsubdued. It was Friday too, the day in all the week she held as most auspicious.

When I returned into the garden, I found her lying on a sofa, in a beautiful alcove, one of three or four that embellished her garden, and an attendant standing with his hands folded across his breast, in an attitude of respect before her. At these moments, she always wore the air of a Sultaness. In this very alcove, how often had she acted the queen, issued her orders, summoned delinquents before her, and enjoyed the semblance of that absolute power, which was the latent ambition of her heart! Hence it was that 278 she at last got rid of all European servants, because they would not submit to arbitrary punishments, but would persist in raising their voices in self-justification. With the Turks it was not so. Accustomed, in the courts of governors and Pashas, to implicit obedience and submission, they resigned themselves to her rule as a matter of course. In transferring, however, their servility to her, as their mistress, they also transferred the vices and dangers which servility engenders: namely, lying, theft, sycophancy, intrigue, and treachery.

Saturday, February 17.—During the whole of this day I did not see Lady Hester, and I was not sorry for it. Her thoughts were now constantly running on the inexplicable silence of Sir Francis Burdett. “He is a man of honour,” she would say. “I suppose he has to write to Ireland, and to the right and left about my property; or perhaps they have got hold of him, too;—who knows? I am sure something must have happened.” As each succeeding steamboat arrived, a messenger was sent to Beyrout, but still no answer. Then she reflected what she should do, if Sir Francis at last should furnish her with proofs that no property had been left her:—beggary stared her in the face. In the mean time she had no means of raising a single farthing before the first of March, when she could draw for £300. But of this sum £200 279 were due to Mr. Dromacaiti, a Greek merchant at Beyrout, who had lent her money at an exorbitant interest, but on her word, and this, therefore, she would pay, I knew, if possible. During all this time, my family remained in almost total ignorance of what was going on within Lady Hester’s walls as much as if they had been living in China. I was also, as I have said above, obliged to conceal, in a great measure, her illness from them. They rode and walked out on the mountains, fed their bulbuls, enjoyed the fine climate, and wondered what made me look so thin and careworn: for thought and care preyed on my spirits, and I wasted away almost as perceptibly as Lady Hester herself.

Sunday, February 18.—To-day Lady Hester was sitting up in the corner of her bed-room. Her look was deadly pale, and her head was wrapped up in flannels, just like her grandfather the last day he appeared in the House of Lords. Without intending it, everything she did bore a resemblance to that great man.

Ali had returned from Beyrout without a letter. “Did Ali Hayshem,” she asked me, “set off at sunrise on Friday? I am glad he did. Do you know, I once sent Butrus to Beyrout to fetch money; and I said to him, ‘If you get in on Monday night, don’t come away on Tuesday or Wednesday; for those are 280 unlucky days; loiter away those two days, and be here on Thursday night. However, he paid no attention to my instructions, and on Wednesday evening he made his appearance. ‘Why did you come before Thursday?’ I asked him. He answered, ‘That the bag of money having been delivered to him, he had brought it immediately, and you see, Mylady, here it is: nobody, thank God! has robbed me.’—‘That does not signify,’ I told him; ‘you will see there is no bereky [blessing] in it.’ Do you know, doctor, I paid the people’s wages immediately, and it was well I did; for some ten or twelve thousand piasters, chest and all, disappeared the next day. ‘There, look!’ said I to him; ‘I told you that money never would turn to account.’”

The conversation reverted to Colonel Campbell’s letter. “I have told the secretary,” said she, “to tell his father, that, if he dares make his appearance here again, I’ll send a bullet through his body. Not one of them shall lay their vile hands on me or mine. I have strength enough to strangle him, and I would do it, though it should cost me my life. As for Mr. Moore, he may perhaps have a habeas corpus by him; but it is good for twenty-four hours only, and I should know how to manage. Consuls have no right over nobility; they may have over merchants, and such people: but they never shall come near me, and I 281 would shoot the first that dared to do it. The English are a set of intermeddling, nasty, vulgar, odious people, and I hate them all. The very Turks laugh at them. Out of ridicule, they told one, if he was so clever, to straiten a dog’s tail. Yes, he might straiten and straiten, but it would soon bend again; and they may bend me and bend me, if they can, but I fancy they will find it a difficult matter: for you may tell them that, when I have made up my mind to a thing, no earthly being can alter my determination. If they want a devil, let them try me, and they shall have enough of it.

“When the steamboat came, and brought no letter to-day from Sir Francis Burdett, you thought I should be ill on receiving the news: but I am not a fool. I suppose he is occupied with his daughter’s legacy, or with parliamentary business.”

I had received a letter from a lady, which I had occasion to read to her. When I had done, and she had expressed her thanks for the flower-seeds sent her, she added, “What I do not like in Mrs. U.’s letter is that foolish way of making a preamble about her not liking to leave so much white paper in all its purity, and all those turns and phrases which people use. That was very well for a Swift or a Pope, who, having promised to write to somebody once a fortnight, and having nothing to say, made a great number 282 of points to fill up the paper; but a letter that has matter in it should be written with a distinct narration of the business, and that’s all. Do you think such people as Mr. Pitt or Lord Chatham, my grandfather, liked those nonsensical phrases? No, they threw the letter aside, or else cast their eyes over it to see if, on the other page, there was anything to answer about.”

February 19.—I was riding this morning with my family beyond the village, which is separated by a deep valley from Lady Hester’s residence, when I saw two servants on the verge of the opposite hill, vociferating—“Come directly, come instantly!” and waving their white turbans. I reflected that, if I put my horse into a gallop, the people of the village would immediately conclude that Lady Hester was dying; and the news (as news always gains by distance) would be the next day at Sayda that she was dead: I therefore continued the same pace; and, although the servants redoubled their signs and cries, I steadily retraced my steps. When I had dismounted, I was told her ladyship was in a deplorable way, unlike any thing they had ever seen. I hurried to her bed-room. She was sitting on the side of her bed, weeping and uttering those extraordinary cries, which I have before compared to something hardly human. She clasped her hands and exclaimed repeatedly, “Oh God! oh, God! what 283 misery! what misery!” When she was a little calmed, and I could collect from her what was the matter, she told me that, having fallen into a doze, she awoke with a sense of suffocation from tightness across her chest, and, being unable to ring or call, she thought she should have died: “thus,” said she, “am I treated like a dog, with nobody to administer to my wants;” and so she went on in the usual strain. I was suffering at this time from the nettlerash, but treated it lightly, and thought Lady Hester would do so too: until, having unluckily alluded to it, a fresh source of uneasiness was inadvertently started. “Good God, doctor!” she cried, “to come out of doors with a nettlerash on you! go to your house immediately; get to bed, keep yourself warm, and remain there until it is cured. After four or five days, take such and such things; then go to the bath, then take some bark, &c., &c. How many persons have I known go mad and die from it! You treat it as nothing? why, you will drive me crazy. In God’s name, never mind me; only go and take care of yourself. You will act in your own usual inconsiderate manner, and I shall have to bury another in this house. Oh, God! oh, God! what am I doomed to!” and then followed fresh cries and fresh lamentations.

Could Sir Francis Burdett have seen all this, and have known that five words of a letter, sent a month 284 or two sooner, in answer to her inquiries about the property she thought was left her, would have probably saved all this excitement, he would have found reason to reproach himself for his long silence. I knew the workings of her mind full well, and that her proud spirit, wounded by the general neglect she met with, vented itself in tears, seemingly, for other causes than the real ones. I recollected a succession of similar scenes about twenty years before at Mar Elias, when she was expecting letters from the Duke of Buckingham; but then she was sounder in bodily health, and could better bear such convulsive paroxysms of grief: now, she was labouring under pulmonary disease, was old, was in distress, and the consequences might prove fatal.

I left her before dinner. “Good by, doctor!” she said, in a kind tone: “I cannot tell you how much I am obliged to you for everything you do for me; and send me a servant twice a day to let me know how you are. I shall be uneasy about you: I can’t help it: from my childhood I have been so. How many times in my life have I spent days and days in trying to make others comfortable! I have been the slave of others, and never got any thanks for it.”

I went to my house, collected all the money that remained, which was about eleven pounds, and sent it to her to meet the current expenses of the household: 285 for so she wished, that I might not be annoyed, she said, and have the rash driven in on my brain.

I experienced no ill effects from the nettlerash. Few persons, new to the climate of Syria, escape a rash of some description, sometimes pustular, sometimes miliary, but most frequently in the form called prickly heat, which generally attacks them in summer or autumn, and is truly distressing by the pricking sensation it produces on the skin, as if thousands of needle-points were penetrating the cuticle. Little is required in such cases but cool diet, fruit, and diluents. I performed my quarantine of four days, in compliance with Lady Hester’s wishes, and then returned to my customary mode of life.

Saturday, February 24.—As I had anticipated, a report had become very general in Beyrout and in the Mountain that Lady Hester was dead, and I received a letter from M. Guys acquainting me with it. This report was confirmed by an English gentleman, who presented himself at my gate this day after breakfast. I was carpentering at the time, and went down the yard to him with my hatchet and chisel in my hand. He seemed not to know what to make of me, dressed as I was in Turkish clothes, with a beard, and with my sleeves turned up like a mechanic. He held out a letter to me, addressed in a fair hand to Lady Hester: I told him this was not her gate, and that a little 286 beyond he would find it. He said he had heard she was dead: I assured him that was not the case, but that she was greatly indisposed. I regretted to myself that I could not ask him in, or enter into conversation with him; but Lady Hester had exacted from me a solemn promise that I never would hold any parley with English travellers, until I had first conferred with her on the subject, and had described them, so that she might obtain the necessary indications to enable her to guess what their business was, or until she had read their letter of introduction, if they bore one. So he quitted me, first asking whether I was an Englishman; to which I answered that I left him to judge. He appeared to be about twenty-one years of age: he had with him for his servant a Ragusan, whom my servant knew, and who, he assured me, was a drunken reprobate. Short as the stop at the gate was, the Ragusan found time to tell the other that he had famous wages: I think it was eight dollars a month. Now I gave mine, who was also a European, four, which was considered good pay, the rate being, in Lady Hester’s house, from one to three. Europeans, however, always get more than people of the country, and have more wants to satisfy. How many travellers are obliged, on their landing in these countries, to take fellows into their service without a character, outcasts of society, and who in England 287 would hardly be allowed to see the outside of a gaol!

Of this English gentleman Lady Hester never spoke to me, nor did she ever even allude to his visit: he did not see her, and, I presume, continued his road; but, if these pages ever meet his eye, he may be assured that he would have met with a hospitable reception, had she been well enough to receive him, or had I been at liberty to entertain him.

Whilst at dinner, a servant came to say Lady Hester would be glad to see me in the evening. I found her weak and wan: her cheeks were sunken, and her voice was less distinct than usual; for never was there a person who spoke generally with so clear an enunciation. Logmagi was with her. Instead of receiving her welcome, and those obliging expressions which she usually employed even after the most trifling ailment, she addressed me harshly, and seemed to take pains to mortify me by using slighting expressions in Arabic that Logmagi might understand what she said. The theme of her conversation was the debasement of men who suffered themselves to be controlled by their wives. Although to mortify people was one of her constant practices through life, whether in action, correspondence, or conversation, yet it never was done to gratify any malignant feelings of her own, but from a fearless disregard of the conventional rules 288 of civilized society, where she hoped to rescue an individual from debasement, or counteract the machinations of designing and wicked men. On this principle it is true, likewise, that she would deliberately inflict those incurable insults which cover a man with a sort of shame for life; as may be shown, for example, by the case of Mr. Hanah Messâad, the son of the British agent at Beyrout, one of whose whiskers and eyebrows was shaved off before the whole village, for having made an assertion then supposed to be false, but which was afterwards, by her own confession to me, admitted to be true.

Hanah, or John Messâad, a handsome young man, a native of Beyrout, and the son of a former English vice-consul, was interpreter and secretary to Lady Hester for some time, and her ladyship has since bestowed great praise, in my presence, on his capacity, usefulness, and knowledge of languages. There was in her service also Michael Tutungi, son of an Armenian, who had been under-dragoman, as I understood, to the English embassy at Constantinople. Messâad, it was thought, was jealous of Michael.

It was reported in the family that Michael had been seen under a tree in very close conversation with a peasant girl, and the report was traced to Messâad. Now, the Emir Beshýr affected, or really felt, a great horror of all licentiousness, and never failed to bastinado 289 severely every man detected, in his principality, in any such conduct. Lady Hester knew what imputations might be cast on her establishment, if such things were left unnoticed; and, fearing that Messâad’s intrigues (of which she thought this report but a link) might injure Michael’s character, and destroy his prospects of getting a place in the English embassy at Constantinople, to which he had some pretensions from his father’s services, she resolved to save him by making a signal example of Messâad.

She, therefore, ordered all the villagers from Jôon to be assembled on the green in front of her house, and sent for Mustafa, the barber, from Sayda, with two or three other tradesmen to be witnesses. Seating herself on a temporary divan, with all the assembly in a circle around her, not a soul dreaming what was going to take place, and Michael and Messâad standing in respectful attitudes, with their arms crossed, and covered, down to the fingers’ ends,[34] with their benyshes, by her side, she began: “That young man,” said she, pointing to Michael, “is accused of irregularities with” (here she mentioned the girl’s 290 name, and the place and time of the meeting). “Now, if any one of you knows him to have been guilty of similar actions, or if, from his general conduct, under similar circumstances, any one of you thinks the thing probable, speak out, for I wish to do justice. Messâad is his accuser: they are both my people, and equally entitled to impartiality.” As nobody answered, she appealed to them all again, and all replied they did not believe it.

She then turned to Messâad, and said: “Sir, you have accused this young man, who is about to be launched into the world, and has only his good name to help him on, of abominable things: where are your witnesses?” Messâad, frightened out of his senses, replied, “that he had no witnesses; that he had seen, with his own eyes, what he had asserted, and, therefore, knew it to be so: but, as he was alone, it must rest on his own word.” Her ladyship told him his word would not do against the concurring testimony of all the servants, and of a whole village; and she added, in a judge-like tone, “As your mouth and your eye have offended, the stigma shall remain on them. Servants, seize and hold him; and, barber, shave off one side of his mustachios and one eyebrow.”

This was done. Michael was kept about a month or two, in order that the protection he enjoyed might seal his unblemished reputation, and then was packed 291 off to Constantinople. “Thus,” said Lady Hester, “I saved a young man from destruction. Messâad has now a good place under the Sardinian consul at Beyrout; his eyebrows and mustachios are grown again; he has married, and has a family; and I dare say the Sardinian consul, if he knows anything of the story, thinks not a bit the worse of him.”

The above are the words in which Lady Hester, on the 20th of January, 1831, related this singular punishment, inflicted with the best intentions on poor Messâad. One evening, in 1837, when writing a letter to the same Messâad, for certain commissions which he had to execute for her ladyship, who was in the habit of employing him to buy pipes, cloth, and sundry other articles found in the shops at Beyrout, she spoke to me as follows. “You know, doctor, all that affair about Michael and Messâad, and how I had one side of his face shaved. Well, I found out afterwards that what Messâad had said was every bit of it true. I have made it up to him since as well as I could: he does not want abilities, and kept my house in excellent order whilst he was with me.”

But this was not the first time Lady Hester had resorted to this singular mode of punishment; some years before, a chastisement for similar frailties, not unlike that which Messâad underwent, as far as regarded the eyebrows, fell to the lot of a peasant girl 292 in her ladyship’s service at a village called Mushmôoshy. This was in the year 1813. How fallible are the most clearsighted persons is the only comment which can be made on such unintentional errors!

For those who were not exempt from the common weaknesses of our nature she was a dangerous person to hold intercourse with. “Live at a distance from my lady,” General Loustaunau used to say to Mrs. M. (when she wanted to remove from Mar Elias to Dar Jôon, in order to be near me); “live at a distance, or you will find, to your cost, that her neighbourhood is a hell.” But be it said, to her honour, that it was from an unfeigned horror of everything mean, dishonest, or vicious, she so resolutely refused to keep terms with people who suffered themselves to be led into the commission of such acts; and her indignation descended with equal impartiality on friends and foes when they happened to deserve it. Her disposition to utter the truth, whether painful or disagreeable, overruled all other considerations.

Few people conversed with her, or received a letter from her, without being sensible of some expression or innuendo, which they were obliged to treat as a joke at the moment, but which was sure to leave its sting behind. Of upwards of a hundred letters which I have penned for her at her dictation to correspondents of every rank in life, there were few which did not contain some touch of merited sarcasm or reproof; 293 except those which were expressly written to alleviate distress, or encourage the hopeful efforts of modest worth. Never was there so inflexible a judge, or one who would do what she thought right, come what would of it. Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum, might have been written on her escutcheon.

Sunday, February 25.—Having recovered her tranquillity, she was to-day all kindness. I mentioned to her the report rife in Beyrout respecting her death, as M. Guys had written it. She observed on it, “If I do die, those consuls, thank God, can have nothing to do with me! I am no English subject, and they have no right to seal up my effects. Why do I keep some of my servants, although I know them to be desperate rascals, but because they have one or two qualities useful to me? It would not do for every one to run the risk, but it will for me, who know how to manage them. For example: I have got two that I can depend upon for shooting a man, or giving a consul a good blow, if he dares to set his foot within my doors, so as to prevent his ever coming again; and such are what I want just now.”

She turned over in her mind how she could raise a little money, and bethought herself of Mr. Michael Tutungi, the Armenian, of Constantinople, who had formerly served her in the capacity of dragoman. To him she had written in 1836, offering him the same 294 situation he had held before, and, on his promise to come, had forwarded to him 500 dollars for the expenses of his journey and for some commissions: but he subsequently declined the engagement, neither had he executed the commissions. She therefore desired me to draw a bill on him, payable to M. Guys’s order, and to request M. Guys to discount it; for, during my nettlerash, Lady Hester had given away the greatest part of the 1,190 piasters to a family ruined by the earthquake. It was in vain to represent to her that she was in want of the money herself: “I can’t help it,” she would say; “I am not mistress of myself on such occasions.”

Tuesday, February 27.—Lady Hester got up, went into her garden, and felt better. She had at last found out that repletion, arising even from what would be called small quantities of food and drink in health, was very injurious in sickness; and she had grown more moderate in her diet, not swallowing one liquid upon another, nor eating four or five times a day. Honey and butter mixed was now what she derived most benefit from, and spermaceti linctuses. The moment she found anything soothed her cough, she immediately sent off an order to Beyrout for an immense quantity of it, or to Europe, if at Beyrout it was not to be had: she was never satisfied that her medicine-chest was full enough. It will hardly be credited that of Epsom salts she had a cask full, of 295 the size of a firkin. She masticated aniseeds as a remedy against dyspepsia, and smoked them sprinkled on the tobacco of her pipe: of course, they were very injurious to her, but it was idle to remonstrate.

February 29.—Lady Hester’s first topic of conversation to-day was her maids. “What a hywán [beast] is that Sâady!” she said: “when she awakes in the morning, she crawls on all-fours exactly like an animal. I am convinced she is nothing more: her back is only fit to carry a pair of panniers.” I agreed with her ladyship, and told her what I had seen her do the day before. With one springing lift she raised from the floor to her head a circular mankàl or chafingdish, two feet in diameter, and piled up with live coals—and, without holding it, but merely balancing it on her head, she stooped perpendicularly, and seized with her two hands another mankàl of baked earth of equal size, filled with live coals also, and, lifting it, carried them both at once into the drawing-room to warm the apartment. These are the feats of dexterity and strength in which Syrian women excel, and in which they far surpass all European maids.

March 1.—Monsieur Henry Guys, the French consul, having been advanced to the superior situation of Aleppo, and being about to quit our part of the country, arrived unexpectedly at Jôon to take his leave. It was Tuesday, and just after sunset, when 296 he entered the gate. Lady Hester had, about a quarter of an hour before, hurried me away from her, as the sun was going to set, and it would have been unlucky, had I left her a minute after the sun was down. “I shall not see you to-morrow,” said she, “as it will be Wednesday:” therefore, when she was told that Monsieur Guys was come, it discomposed her very much, and she sent word that, whatever his business was, she could not see him until after sunset next day.

As M. Guys was thus transferred to me for twenty-four hours, I took the opportunity of letting him know how disquieted I felt at having such great responsibility on my shoulders, whilst Lady Hester was so ill, and surrounded by a set of servants whom I considered as so many cut-throats.

My position was extremely uncomfortable. Should Lady Hester die, I foresaw that I should be exposed, alone as I was, to many difficulties and dangers. The Druze insurrection afforded every facility to an assassin or robber for putting himself beyond the reach of justice: since, in about five or six hours, he could find a sure refuge from capture. He revived my spirits by assuring me I need be under no alarm. “All of them are known,” said he, “and have their families and relations hereabouts: that one circumstance must always be a check upon them. If they 297 were not natives of the province, then I should say you were not safe among them. As for Lady Hester, you know her determined character—if she is resolved to keep them, you cannot help it. There is one,” added he, “whom I could wish not to be here; I thought him gone a year ago:” this was the one whom Lady Hester relied on for sending a bullet through the consul’s body.

There is a large stone edifice of great extent, distant about three-quarters of a mile, as the crow flies, from the village of Jôon, more like a fortress than the peaceable habitation of cenobites. It is the monastery of Dayr el Mkhallas, or the Saviour, and contains about fifty friars of the Greek Catholic church, which repudiates the pope, recognizing as its spiritual head its own patriarch. M. Guys enjoyed the unlimited confidence of these people as the well-tried and efficient friend of the Catholic church throughout Syria; and it was no sooner known that he was in the neighbourhood, than the superior of the monastery gave him to understand that a visit from him would be received as a great honour by the monks. M. Guys devoted the morning to this gratifying object, and his reception was in the highest degree flattering. When he arrived at the foot of the Mount, on the summit of which the monastery stands, he was saluted by a merry chime of church-bells, and then the whole body of the friars, 298 with the cross borne before them, came out in procession to meet him. The greatest ceremony was observed on the occasion, and sherbet, coffee, pipes, aspersion of rose-water, and homage, were lavished on him, not less in the hope of securing a continuation of his good offices, than as expressive of gratitude for past kindnesses: for no man holding official rank in Syria has ever enjoyed more popularity, or obtained more general consideration, than the Chevalier Guys. Descended from an ancient family of Provence, in which the consular rank may be almost said to have become hereditary, the Levant saw, at the beginning of the present century, the rare occurrence of three brothers holding consulships at the same time.

After dinner, M. Guys was summoned by Lady Hester Stanhope, and I availed myself of the opportunity it afforded me of remaining at home for the evening. The next morning he departed before I was up; but, being anxious to ascertain his opinions of Lady Hester’s situation, I mounted my horse, and, by taking a short but somewhat dangerous path down the mountains, I overtook him. Nothing particular, however, had transpired in their conversation, which lasted for four hours; but he told me that he was shocked to find her so much altered, and that he had never heard such a hollow sepulchral cough. He added that, frequently during the time he was with 299 her, she fell back on the sofa from exhaustion. She spoke, too, a good deal, and in rather an odd way, of extraordinary sights she had seen, of two apparitions that had appeared to her, and of serpents near Tarsûs, which go in troops devouring all before them, and with a tone of conviction as if she believed it all. “What does it mean,” he asked me—“and why do you let her smoke so much?”

March 2.—Lady Hester was now getting better slowly, but, as usual, her strength no sooner began to return than it brought out all the unmanageable points of her character in full relief. Something happened in the house which ruffled her, and produced a discussion between us, I hardly know how; but it ended by her calling me a crabbed old fool: upon which I observed, that I never heard such expressions from the lips of ladies before. This set her off upon her inexhaustible theme of fearless speaking. “If you were a duke,” said she, “I would use exactly the same expressions.”—“Your ladyship’s talents,” I ventured to observe again, “are inexpressibly great, but, without questioning that, I only lament the intemperate use of them.” Taking up this observation, she dwelt at great length upon the “sweetness of her temper,” and I made my peace at last, by saying that a physician should be the last person to complain of the irritability of his patients. Apophthegms of this 300 submissive character were never lost upon her, provided they were true, as well as apologetic; so pipes were ordered, and we entered into an armistice for the rest of the evening.

A curious but characteristic incident occurred about this time. In the ravines of the mountains, where the few living creatures that are to be found may be supposed to be drawn into closer communion by a common sense of loneliness, a shepherd named Câasem, who was nearly fifty years old, formed a liaison with a village girl, whose occupation consisted in leading a cow about in the solitary green nooks where any scanty herbage was to be secured. The circumstance reached Lady Hester’s ears before it was known to anybody else, and she immediately ordered the man to be flogged at break of day, with instructions that nobody should tell him why or wherefore. “He will know what it is for,” she exclaimed; then turning reproachfully to Logmagi, to whom the execution of the order was entrusted, she added:—“How is it you leave me to be the first to discover these disgraceful acts, giving the Emir Beshýr an excuse to say that I encourage depravity in my servants, when it is your duty to know everything that passes about my premises?” Logmagi went, gave the shepherd a beating, and sent him about his business. Lady Hester used to justify severities of this description on the ground that it prevented 301 the recurrence of similar licentiousness, and “kept the fellows in order.”

March 5.—This being the vigil of the Korbàn Byràm, or the Mahometan Easter, which is their great holyday, Lady Hester, who had previously given her orders to a person who had some reputation as a pastrycook, despatched at twelve at night three servants, each with a sennýah, or round tray, on which they were to bring back from Sayda by daylight the baklâawy, mamool, and karýby, three delicious sorts of sweet cakes, which are scarcely exceeded in delicacy by the choicest pastry of Europe.

At noon, the servants, dressed in all their new finery, sat down to a copious dinner composed of the most luxurious Eastern dishes. But there was no wine; for, whatever transgressions these people may commit in that way in private, they never touch wine in public. Logmagi and some others were known not to be much troubled with such scruples, when they could indulge themselves in secret: but Logmagi always excused himself on the score of being a Freemason, which is held in Turkey to be equivalent to a jovial fellow who does not care much what he does. The women, also, had their own feast, and a piece of gold the value of twenty piasters was presented to each of the servants. The day was literally abandoned to pleasure; but what a contrast do the sober manners of 302 Mahometans form to those of Europeans? Gambling and noisy revels are out of the question in the tranquil and easy delights in this simple race. Dancing is generally confined to the boys, or to some buffoon who gets up and wriggles about to the music of a small tambourine, beaten with a single stick and producing a dull sound, which they consider musical, and which habit renders not disagreeable even to European ears. Every man smokes his pipe; and a good story-teller (for such a one is rarely wanting in a party of a dozen,) relates some traditionary tale, which absorbs for the time all the faculties of his hearers. The cook was one of this sort, a Christian of the village of Abra, a shrewd fellow, who went by the name of Dyk, or the Cock, from his rather strutting air, or from the vigorous exercise of his authority over his wife, whom he beat every now and then to keep her in proper discipline—a redeeming quality in the eyes of Lady Hester, who otherwise would have dismissed him from her service.

Lady Hester’s astrological powers were put to a practical test to-day. Fatôom, one of her maid servants, whose name has frequently occurred in these pages, required my medical services, under the following circumstances. About six years before, having, in league with Zeyneb, a black girl, and some men of the village, robbed her mistress of several valuable effects, 303 she was turned away: but, upon exhibiting great repentance, she was taken back again. Lady Hester found no difficulty, as may be supposed, in extracting from her a confession of the system of plunder that had been carried on, and the names of her accomplices. “I could hang them all,” was her constant expression in speaking of them. Fatôom had been in her ladyship’s service ten or eleven years, and was not yet twenty; and, being very pretty, and decked out in the finery to which she was enabled to help herself by her share of the plunder, she had vanity enough, when she was turned away, to hope that she should get at least an aga for a husband: but she was disappointed, and was obliged to put up with a small farmer. She consequently came back a married woman, in poor plight as to circumstances, with the prospect of having her difficulties aggravated by a speedy increase to her cares. On this day, 5th March, Fatôom complained of pains. There was not a moment to be lost: the midwife was instantly sent for; Fatôom was hurried away to her mother’s in the village, and, before the expiration of a quarter of an hour, she gave birth to a boy.

As soon as Lady Hester learned the result, she requested me to go and see her. I found Fatôom sitting on a mattress on the floor (for nobody in the East has a bedstead) with from fifteen to twenty 304 women squatted around her, the midwife supporting her back, and the child lying by her, covered with a corner of the quilt. Fatôom, very yellow, looked as if she had been in a great fright, and was astonished there was so little in it. After feeling her pulse, and delivering to her mother a basket of good things, such as lump sugar, six or eight sorts of spices, &c., with which it is customary to make the caudle upon these occasions, as also a new counterpane, and two silk pillows, for her lying-in present, I took a glance at the village gossips. There they were, holding forth much in the same way as the peasantry in other countries, with this difference, that here my presence was no restraint, and the minutest details of the recent event were discussed with as little reserve as if they had been talking of the ordinary incidents of the day.

Having returned to Lady Hester with an account of what I had seen, she immediately set about casting the infant’s nativity, first ascertaining accurately the hour at which he was born—a quarter before two. “He will have,” said she, “arched eyebrows, rolling eyes, and a nose so and so: he will be a devil, violent in his passions, but soon pacified: his fingers will be long and taper, without being skinny and bony:” and thus she went on, in a manner so impressed with faith and earnestness, that it is not to be wondered at how persons of good judgment have lent their ears to 305 astrologers, where the study has been fortified by a previous knowledge of man, his temperaments, and the innate and external characteristics of passions, of virtue, and of vice. She gave him the name of Selim, and sent word to say his star agreed with hers very well. This was good news for Fatôom, as it was equivalent to Lady Hester’s taking charge of the infant.

The cradle had already been prepared: it was of wood, painted green, something like a trough, and perforated at the bottom, as is usual in the East. A tube of wood with a bowl to it, exactly of the form of a tobacco-pipe, is tied to the child’s waist, a rude but ingenious contrivance to save trouble to the nurse, the bowl serving as the immediate recipient, and the tube passing through the side of the cradle.[35]

March 7.—This being Wednesday, Lady Hester, as usual, was invisible. What she did on these mysterious 306 days I never heard: for a person once away from her might as well divine how the man in the moon was employed as guess how she was passing her time.

Thursday, March 8.—I saw Lady Hester about four o’clock: she was in a very irritable state: she complained bitterly, as usual, of her servants—of their neglect, ignorance, and heartlessness: she said she would rather be surrounded by robbers; for there is some principle amongst thieves. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “that I could find one human being who knew his Creator!”

She went on:—“I have had a very bad night, and whether I shall live or die, I don’t know: but this I tell you beforehand, that, if I do die, I wish to be buried, like a dog, in a bit of earth just big enough to hold this miserable skin, or else to be burnt, or thrown into the sea. And, as I am no longer an English subject, no consuls, nor any English of any sort, shall approach me in my last moments; for, if they do, I will have them shot. Therefore, the day before I die, if I know it, I shall order you away, and not only you, but everything English; and if you don’t go, I warn you beforehand, you must take the consequences. Let me be scorched by the burning sun[36]—frozen by the 307 cold blast—let my ashes fly in the air—let the wolves and jackals devour my carcase;—let”—here the agitation she was in, and which had kept increasing, brought on a severe fit of coughing, and it was a quarter of an hour before she could recover strength enough to speak again. Her exhaustion reduced her to a little calm.

After dinner I saw her again, but now her irritability had passed away. “Take your chair,” said she, “here by the bed—turn your back to the window to save your poor eyes from the light—never mind me: there—I am afraid I have overworked them by so much writing. But I know, if you did not write for me, you would be writing or reading for yourself: you are just like my sister Griselda.”

She went on:—“You are angry with me, I dare say, because I told you I would not have you near me when I am dying: but I suppose I may do as I please. No English consul shall touch me or my effects: no: when I was going, sooner than that, I will call in all the thieves and robbers I can find, and set them to plunder and destroy everything. But I shall not die so:—I shall die as St. Elias and Isaac did; and, before that, I shall have to wade through blood up to here” (and she drew her hand across her neck), “nor will a spark of commiseration move me. The bab el tobi [gate of pardon] will then be shut; for neither 308 king, nor priest, nor peasant, shall enter when that hour comes. You and others will then repent of not having listened to my words.”

Saturday, March 10.—Let us take this night as a sample of many others, to show sometimes what was doing in a solitary residence on Mount Lebanon, in which the vivid fancies of European writers had conjured up an imaginary mode of existence wholly different from the sad reality. From eight o’clock at night until one in the morning, Lady Hester Stanhope had kept the house in commotion, upon matters which would seem so foreign to her rank, her fortune, and her supposed occupations, that, when enumerated, they will hardly be believed. First, there was a deliberation of half an hour to decide whether it would be best to send the mules on the next day or the day after for wheat: then several servants were to be questioned, one after another, in order to compare their conflicting testimony, whether her fields of barley had come up, and how high, and what crops they promised; next, whether the oranges, now fit to be gathered, should be put under the gardener’s care, or into a store-room in the house. Then ensued a conversation with me, whether Fatôom was not playing some deep game in pretending to be separated from her husband; and so on, with a score of other topics equally unimportant, but with all of which she worried 309 herself so effectively, that it seemed as if she wilfully sought refuge in such petty annoyances, for the sake of escaping from secret heart-burnings, which she did not choose to betray. In this way she had the secretary called up twice from his bed, and the bailiff once, keeping the rest of the servants in continual motion, whilst I was obliged, in civility, to sit and listen to it all.

Old Pierre had been sent for from Dayr el Kamar. As a person who figures occasionally in these domestic scenes, I must make the reader a little acquainted with his history. In the year 1812, when Lady Hester was travelling from Jerusalem along the coast towards Damascus, we reached Dayr el Kamar, where Pierre came and offered himself to me as a servant. I took him; but his various talents as a cook, a guide, and an interpreter, and most of all as an adventurer, who had an extraordinary fund of anecdotes to relate, soon brought him into notice with Lady Hester, and she asked him of me for her own service. He accompanied us to Palmyra and through different parts of Syria, resided with her at Latakia and Mar Elias, and remained in her service many years. Having amassed a little money, he obtained permission to retire to Dayr el Kamar, where he kept a cook’s-shop, or, if you will, a tavern.

But Lady Hester never lost sight of him. From 310 time to time, when any traveller left her house to traverse Mount Lebanon, or to journey to Damascus and Aleppo, or even to Palmyra, Pierre was recommended as interpreter and guide, and, I understand, always discharged his duties to the satisfaction of his employers. He is known to many Englishmen, among the rest to the Rev. Mr. Way, who seems to have been very good to him; and Pierre, on his side, retains a most grateful remembrance of that gentleman’s bounty.

Pierre springs from a good family, by the name of Marquis or Marquise, originally of Marseilles, and afterwards established as merchants in Syria. When he was a boy, he accompanied an uncle to France, who took him to Paris. The uncle wore the Levantine dress; and, having some business to transact connected with government, was on one occasion summoned to Versailles, where the court was. Chance or design threw Pierre in the way of the king, Louis XVI., who talked to him about the Levant, as did also Monsieur, afterwards Louis XVIII. Of this conversation Pierre never failed to make considerable boast.

On his return to Syria, Pierre lived with his relations, until Buonaparte laid siege to Acre, where his knowledge of the French language recommended him to the notice of that general. He bore a commission in his army; and, on the retreat of the French into 311 Egypt, accompanied them, and remained there until the final evacuation, when he obtained a pension; but of which, he declared, he had never touched a sou, in consequence of residing abroad.

Mons. Urbain, a contributor to the Temps, happening to meet with Pierre when he was travelling in Syria, was so highly diverted with his anecdotes, that, on his return to France, he wrote no less than three feuilletons, or notices on Le Vieux Pierre; at least, so I was informed by Monsieur Guys.

Pierre had been sent for by Lady Hester Stanhope, and she assigned him a room close to the doors of her own quadrangle, that he might be always within call. Pierre was a man exceedingly thin, with an aquiline nose, and a steady eye, full of gasconade to be mistaken for courage, wonderfully loquacious, and deeply imbued with all the mystic doctrines that Lady Hester sometimes preached about. But Pierre’s chief merit lay in his star, which, she assured me, was so propitious to her, that it could calm her convulsions, and lay her to sleep, when books, narcotics, and everything else failed.

Glancing in these desultory memorials from one person to another, I may here mention, that one of the maids, named Sâady, incurred the particular aversion of Lady Hester, just as strongly as Pierre was favoured with her partiality. Poor Sâady never 312 entered her presence without being saluted by some epithet of disgust or opprobium: yet Sâady worked from morning till night, and seldom got to bed until three, four, or five o’clock in the morning. But Lady Hester insisted on the necessity of treating her servants in this way for the purpose of keeping them on the alert; and she would frequently quote her grandfather’s example to prove how powerful particular aversions were in people of exalted minds—such as hers and his. In this way she kept herself in a state of constant irritation, as if she were determined obstinately to oppose the inroads of disease by increased exertion, exactly in proportion as her physical strength became more and more weakened and reduced.

Monday, March 12.—Two servant boys were flogged by Logmagi for having quitted the courtyard both at the same time, when one at least was wanted to carry messages from the inner to the outer courts. These punishments were inflicted by making the delinquent lie at his full length flat on the ground, his head being held by one servant, and his feet by another while the stripes were administered. My disposition revolted at these whippings; although perhaps they were necessary, as Lady Hester said. The servants would not have borne them, but that they had in fact no choice, knowing well that they must either remain and be flogged, or be sent to the Nizàm, where they would 313 be flogged twice as much, with the risk of being killed to boot.

Wednesday, March 14.—Lady Hester was in very low spirits this evening, and, as night advanced, she had a paroxysm of grief, which quite terrified me. With a ghastly and frenzied look, she kept crying until my heart was rent with her wretchedness. When I left her for the night, although she was somewhat composed, her image haunted me, even when sleep had closed my eyes.

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Visit of Mr. Vesey Forster and Mr. Knox—Lady S. N.’s pension and Mr. H.—Lady Hester undeservedly censured by English travellers—Mr. Anson and Mr. Strangways—Mr. B. and Mr. C.—Captain Pechell—Captain Yorke—Colonel Howard Vyse—Lord B.

Mr. Forster and Mr. Knox, two English gentlemen, came up to Jôon this morning to pay a visit to Lady Hester. To my great surprise, I found them seated at the porter’s lodge among the servants, who were standing around them; a situation to which they accommodated themselves with the good sense of men of the world. They had sent in a message that two Franks were at the gate, having a letter for the Syt Mylady, and were patiently awaiting the result.

I took the liberty of inquiring their names, and hastened to her ladyship; whilst orders were given to conduct them immediately to the strangers’ room. Lady Hester, who had got their letter in her hand, 315 told me one was a relation of Sir Augustus Forster, our ambassador at Turin. “Go instantly to them,” said she, “for Sir Augustus is an old friend of mine, and be particularly attentive to Mr. Forster—indeed, to both of them. Tell them, I am very sorry I can’t see them; for, when I get into conversation, I become animated, and then I feel the effects of it afterwards; but assure them that they are welcome to make their home of their present lodging for a couple of days or a couple of hours, or as long as they like. Do they look gentlemanlike?” she asked. “Ah!” continued she, “what a charm good-breeding gives to mankind, and how odious vulgarity is after it! Only reflect! I, who have been all my life accustomed to the most refined society, what I must feel sometimes to have nothing to do but with beasts. But go, go! and make them as comfortable as you can.”

They were in the strangers’ room, which stood in a small garden, ornamented with a few rose-bushes, pomegranate and olive-trees, and some flowering plants. It was a little enclosure, which had by no means a disagreeable aspect, surrounded by a wall topped with prickly thorn-bushes. Once inside this place, the new comer could know nothing of what was passing without. Such were Lady Hester’s contrivances: everything about her must wear an air of mystery.

316 I lost no time in conveying Lady Hester’s message to them, and, for the short hour I enjoyed the pleasure of their conversation, had every reason to rejoice in the opportunity of making their acquaintance. As this visit of two travellers may serve as a specimen of what occurred, with slight variations, on every similar occasion, when Englishmen came to her house, who were little aware how much trouble their unexpected arrival sometimes caused her, I shall detail what passed as minutely as I can.

I had hardly paid my compliments to them, and inquired whether they would take an English breakfast or something more solid, when a message came from Lady Hester to say she wanted to see me for a moment. This was always her way. The ruling passion of ordering what was to be done and what was to be said on all occasions made her impatient about things passing out of her sight.

“Well, doctor,” cried Lady Hester, “what age do they appear to be, and where do they come from?” Having satisfied her on the first head, I told her they were last from the Emir’s palace at Btedýn: then, after some trifling observation, I added, the Emir complained to them that M. Lamartine, in his recent work on Syria, had greatly compromised him with Ibrahim Pasha, in having said that he, the Emir, had entertained the most friendly dispositions 317 towards Buonaparte and the French during the siege of Acre. This the Emir denied, and averred that his great friend was Sir Sydney Smith: meaning, probably, as I observed from myself, to compliment his present guests at the expense of the absent French. “He was very civil to the two travellers,” I added, “and, understanding they were going to see your ladyship, he sent his compliments to you.”—“Ah!” replied she, “that looks as if he were fishing for friends, in case he should shortly have to fly; for they say that Sherýf Pasha has been defeated in the Horàn, and the Emir begins to tremble; for the Druzes will not spare him.”

I then told Lady Hester they had refused tea or coffee, but, as they were come from a distance, would probably like something more substantial: they had expressed, too, a wish for a glass of lemonade. Here Lady Hester, suddenly raising herself in her bed, interrupted me with “Good God!—lemonade! why, the maid said that the secretary had been to ask for some violet syrup for them: now, which is it they want? Can nobody ever take upon them to direct the simplest thing but they must blunder? must everything fall upon me?”—“Well, but,” observed I, “lemonade, or violet syrup, it does not much matter which!”—“Not matter!—there it is again: and then who is there can make lemonade?—not a soul 318 but myself in the whole house: and poor I am obliged to wear my little strength out in doing the most trivial offices. Here I am; I wanted to write another letter to go by the steamboat, and now all my thoughts are driven out of my head. Zezefôon!” (ding, ding, ding, went the bell) “Zezefôon! order the gardener to bring me four or five of the finest lemons on the tree next the alley of roses—you know where I mean—and prepare a tray with glasses.” This was accordingly done, and Lady Hester, sitting up in bed, went to work squeezing lemons and making lemonade.

In my way to her ladyship’s room from the strangers’, I had called the cook, and directed him to dress a mutton-chop, to make a vermicelli soup, a dish of spinach and eggs, a little tunny-fish salad, and with a cold rice pudding (which I recollected and sent for from my house), and some Parmesan cheese, I trusted there would be enough for a hasty meal. Whilst making the lemonade, the following conversation went on. “Now, doctor, what can be got for their déjeûner à la fourchette? for there is nothing whatever in the house.” I mentioned what I had ordered. “Ah! yes,” resumed Lady Hester, “let me see:—there is a stew of yesterday’s, that I did not touch, that may be warmed up again, and some potatoes may be added; and then you must taste that wine that 319 came yesterday from Garýfy, to see if you think they will like it. The spinach my maid must do. Dyk” (the cook) “does not know how to dress spinach, but I have taught Zezefôon to do it very well.” (Ding, ding, ding.) “Zezefôon, you know how to boil spinach in milk, and you must garnish it with five eggs, one in each corner, and one in the centre.”—“Yes, Sytty.”—“And, Zezefôon, send the yackney” (stew) “to Dyk, and let it be warmed up for the strangers. They must have some of my butter and some of my bread. Likewise give out the silver spoons and knives and forks; they are under that cushion on the ottoman, there; and mind you count them when you give them to Mohammed, or they will steal one, and dispute with you afterwards about the number:—a pack of thieves! And let the cook send in the dishes necessary: for I will not have any of mine go out.

“You must tell the travellers, doctor, and especially Mr. Forster, for he is an Irishman, that I have a great deal of Irish and Scotch blood in me, and no English. Tell him I have made great investigations on the subject of the origin of the Scotch, and could prove to him that they came originally from this country. Tell him how beautiful the Irish women are, and that I, having had opportunities of seeing some of the finest Circassians and Georgians of the 320 harýms of great Turks here and at Constantinople, think there are none like Irish women.

“If Mr. Forster asks you anything about the Druzes (as he seems to interest himself concerning the religion of that people), say to him that the Druzes, the Ansàries, the Ishmäelites—all these sects—must and will remain a mystery to strangers. There was Monsieur Reynaud, one of the forty savants who wrote the great book on Egypt, and was afterwards consul at Sayda—if any body could comprehend the secret, he could; yet, although he had four of the Druze books in his possession, and five learned persons of this country to assist him in translating and explaining them through a whole winter, he could make out nothing: because, even if you understand the text, you are still not a bit the wiser. Suppose, for example, you open a page, and you find these words—‘Do you use senna leaves?’ which is one of their questions of recognition, like similar apparently vague questions in freemasonry: what do you know about that? You may understand the answer clearly enough, so far as mere words go; but it is useless unless you understand the thing of which the words are a symbol; for they are all symbolical. You must know that it refers to an insurgent, who, in the cause of their faith, raised the standard of revolt, centuries ago, in the land where senna grows, and that it implies, ‘Do you 321 adopt his tenets?’ and so of other passages. The chiefs of their religion cannot make any disclosures; for, if they did, their lives would be the forfeit. Tell him they are a bold, sanguinary race, who will cut a man in pieces themselves, or see it done by others, and never change colour. Why, one of them, not long since, killed or wounded with his own hands five of Ibrahim Pasha’s soldiers, who were sent to seize him as a refractory recruit.”

Here Lady Hester, having finished making the lemonade, stopped for a moment to desire Zezefôon to take it out and send it to the strangers’ room. She then resumed, “Tell them, doctor, that no people will bear a flogging like the Druzes. The Spartans were nothing to them: isn’t it the Spartans that were such floggers? for I am such a dunce that I never can recollect some things which every schoolboy knows; and I always said I was a dunce in some things, although Mr. Pitt used to say, ‘Hester, if you would but keep your own counsel, nobody could detect it.’ But it is the truth, and when you talk to me of paper money and the funds (although I may understand for the moment what you try to explain to me), I forget it all the next morning: yet, on subjects which my inclination leads me to investigate, nobody has a better judgment. My father, with all his mathematical knowledge, used to say I could split a hair. Talk to 322 the point, was his cry: and I could bring truth to a point as sharp as a needle. I divested a subject of all extraneous matter, and there it was—you might turn and twist it as you would, but you must always come back to that.

“The Druzes like me, and all the Emir Beshýr’s hatred of me arose from my friendship for the Shaykh Beshýr.[37] After you left me, I went to stay with him at Makhtâra, where he assigned me a wing of the palace to live in. He was a clever man, and afterwards, in his troubles, came to me for advice and succour: he offered me a third of his treasures, but I refused them. When he fled, the Emir Beshýr got about a third of them; an equal portion they say is buried: and 323 the remainder was carried off by his wife, but afterwards lost. Poor woman! she is dead now. It was the attempt to relieve her, amongst other causes, that drew me into embarrassments. She had fled—her husband was a captive at Acre—and the Emir was pursuing her in every direction to take her life. The snow was thick on the ground. She had with her a child at the breast, one two years old, and another: two were with the father in prison. I despatched people with clothes and money to relieve her immediate wants; they found her in the Horàn, where she had taken refuge with an old servant. Her daughter also applied to me for assistance, but I was penniless, and could do nothing for her. Poor girl! she was afterwards married, but Ibrahim Pasha cut off her husband’s head, and she went raving mad. To complete the tragedy, Hanah Abôod, one of those I sent to look after her, fell asleep out of weariness, after having returned home on foot through the snow, and got an inflammation in his eyes, which ended in total blindness. The journey back occupied I think forty hours. I have been obliged partially to maintain the poor fellow and Werdy, his wife, ever since.

“Perhaps, doctor, Mr. Forster and Mr. Knox may have heard of the extraordinary conduct of the English government towards me; so let them know that I am not low-spirited about it; and, although the Queen may 324 think herself justified in taking away my pension, I would not, even if I were a beggar, change places with her. As for the Queen’s interfering in my affairs, she might just as well go and stop Sir Augustus Forster’s salary, on the plea that he had left his tailor’s bill unpaid. My debts were incurred very often for things I did not care about for myself. For example, what are books to me, who never look into them? If I had been like you doctors, who tell your patients to take turtle soup, and then contrive to be asked to dinner, it were another thing: but my researches were for the good of others, and for no advantage of my own.

“When I think what I have done, and what I could have done if I had had more money! There was a book came into my hands, which the owner, not knowing its value, offered for my acceptance as you would offer an old brass candlestick. I consulted several persons about it; and, when all assured me it was a valuable manuscript, I scorned to take advantage of the man’s ignorance, and returned it to him, telling him when I was rich enough I would buy it of him. Ought not a person to act so?” “Undoubtedly,” I replied, “a person of principle would not act otherwise.” “Principle!” she exclaimed; “what do you mean by principle?—I am a Pitt.”

As I did not understand precisely why a Pitt should 325 be above principle, although it would seem there is a species of integrity higher than principle itself, I held my tongue, and Lady Hester went on. “I know where to find a book that contains the language spoken by Adam and Eve:[38] the letters are a span high. Such things have fallen into my hands as have fallen into nobody’s else. I know where the serpent is that has the head of a man, like the one that tempted Eve. The cave still exists not far from Tarsûs; and the villages all about are exempted from the miri in consideration of feeding the serpents. Everybody in that neighbourhood knows it: isn’t it extraordinary? why don’t you answer? is it, or is it not? Good God! I should go mad if I were obliged to remain three whole days together in your society—I’m sure I should. Such a cold man I never saw; there is no getting an answer from you: however, think as you like. These serpents will march through the country to fight for the Messiah, and will devour everything before them.” Here she paused for about a minute, and then added, “I think you had better not tell them anything about the serpents; perhaps their minds are not prepared for matters of this sort.”

I have already observed that Monsieur Guys had mentioned, with some surprise, the serious manner in 326 which Lady Hester spoke of these serpents; and, although he did not express it, yet he half intimated that he thought her intellects a little disordered: we shall see hereafter if they were so.

Lady Hester resumed: “But now, doctor, if you can spare a minute, you must write a line by the messenger to Monsieur Guys, and tell him I had begun a letter to him, but that the arrival of two English travellers, one of whom revived a number of recollections, had obliged me to stop short, and I could write no more. Doctor, this Mr. Forster must be one of the children of the Irish Speaker. He was left with ten; and I remember very well one day that H******** was standing before me at a party, making a number of bows and scrapes, turning up his eyes, and cringing before me so, that when we got home, Mr. Pitt said to me, ‘Hester, if I am not too curious, what could H******** have to say that animated him so much: what could he be making such fine speeches about: what could call forth such an exuberance of eloquence in him?’—‘Oh! it was nothing,’ answered I; ‘he was telling me that all the power of the Treasury was at my service—that he would take care that Lady S**** N*****’s pension should be got through the different offices immediately—that he had nothing so much at heart as to execute my orders—that he would see all that was necessary should be done according 327 to my wishes, and so on; but, as I despise the man, I only laughed at him and turned my back on him; for I drink at the fountain head.’

“‘Now, this is really too good a thing,’ interrupted Mr. Pitt, lifting up his eyes in astonishment. ‘It was but this very day, at three o’clock, that he was urging me not to let this very pension be given, or at least to prolong the business for a year, if it were possible; till, by tiring her patience, the thing might be dropped, or something turn up to set it aside; adding, that it would be opening the door to abuses, and, if I granted this too readily, I should have Forster’s ten children to provide for.’”

Lady Hester went on: “From that day, I knew my man. I then said to Mr. Pitt, ‘Let me show him who he has to deal with; do give your orders that the thing may be done immediately.’—‘Oh! but it is too late to-night,’ said Mr. Pitt. ‘No, it is not,’ I cried; ‘for I see a light in the Treasury.’ So I rang, and sent for” (here her ladyship mentioned a name which I could not catch, but I think it was Mr. Chinnery)—. When he came, I said to him, ‘Will you be so good, sir, the first thing in the morning, to see that all the signatures are put to Lady S. N.’s paper: there is Mr. Pitt; ask him if it is so or not.’ Mr. Pitt of course assented, and there the matter ended. Doctor, I had a great deal of trouble 328 with those sort of people, like H——. Now, if Mr. Forster is about thirty-five years old, he must be one of that family.[39]

“Do tell Mr. Forster what a pack of beasts those servants are. Ask him if he ever heard of women throwing themselves down to sleep in the middle of a courtyard, or on the floor of a kitchen, dragging their quilt after them from place to place: tell him that is what mine do, and that I am obliged to wait a quarter of an hour for a glass of water.

“You may talk to them a little about stars, but I dare say you will commit some horrible blunder, as you always do, and that is what makes me so afraid of your having to say anything that concerns me. Tell Mr. Forster that in people’s stars lie their abilities, and that you may bring up a hundred men to be generals and another hundred to be lawyers, but out of these perhaps four or five only will turn out good for anything. When a grand Llama is to be chosen, why do they go about until they have found a particular boy with certain marks, known to the learned of that country—a child born under a certain star? It is because, when they have found such a 329 one, he has no occasion for instruction; he is born the man for their purpose.

“Thus, the Duke of Wellington is not a general by trade—I mean by instruction; for, if examined before a court-martial on all the branches of military tactics, perhaps he would be found deficient. Hundreds may know more of them than he does: but he is a general by his star. He acts under a certain impulse, which makes him hit on the stratagem he ought to practise, and, without the help of previous study or even the suggestions of experience, he knows that his manœuvre is right. It was thus with me when I was young. People might preach and talk; but, when I saw them doing things or reasoning about them, I could at once distinguish the things that were right from the things that were wrong; but I could not say why or wherefore. My father said I was the best logician he ever saw—I could split a hair. The last time he saw me, he repeated the same words, and said I had but one fault, which was being too fond of royalty.”

I observed here to Lady Hester, that in many things she reminded me of the ancient philosophers, to whom she bore a strong resemblance on most points; but that in this one particular she differed from them widely, as most of them were strenuously opposed to royalty and monarchical power. “My 330 liking for royalty,” she answered, “is not, indiscriminate, but I believe in the divine right of kings; for I have found it out. And you may ask Mr. Forster also why the bottle of oil came from India to anoint the kings of France. I dare say they never heard of Melek es Sayf, a hero whose exploits and name are hardly inferior in the East to those of Solomon. Is it not extraordinary, that in Europe they know nothing of those people—of him and his forty sons, all of whom were men of note in their time? This must be so; for some of the gates of Cairo are named after them.

“If you happen to speak about the Albanians and the other soldiers that I had here, tell them I did not see them all; I only saw the most desperate, and those whose violence was to be kept under. When I admitted them to my presence, I was always alone, and they always wore their arms; but I never feared them.”

Thus Lady Hester went on talking: the dish of potatoes, the dessert, and several other things were forgotten. So, reminding her that Mr. Forster and Mr. Knox must be all this time marvelling what could have detained me, I at last made my escape. In the mean while, the breakfast had been served up as well as the resources of the place would admit. The scene must have been highly curious to her ladyship’s guests, who could not fail to be amused as well 331 as surprised at the sight of a deal table, rush-bottomed chairs, cheese put on first and a pudding in a copper dish after it, with other anomalies that would have made even a third-rate Brummell shudder. But the occasions for eating in the European way in Lady Hester’s house occurred very rarely, and the servants, who were habituated to Turkish usages or to the mongrel service of some Levantine dragoman, had no notions of the regulations of an English table. In my own house, I had two tolerably well-trained boys; but there was an interdict against their ever crossing the threshold of Lady Hester’s gate, in order that no information of what was going on within her walls should be carried out to the female part of my family. In the most common concerns, Lady Hester’s servants made much bustle and did little. They ran in different directions, jostled and crossed each other half a dozen at a time for the same thing, entirely reversing one of her favourite maxims, that everything in a great person’s house should be done as if by magic, and nobody should know who it was set it a going. These servants had but one spring of action, and that was the bakshysh, or present, which they all looked for on the departure of a stranger. It was a painful thought to me, as these gentlemen left the gate, that, when they were about to mount their horses, the mercenary spirit of such a set of varlets might be charged to the connivance of the mistress. 332

The two travellers made a miserable repast, and, when it was over, signified their desire to take leave. It seems they had taken Lady Hester’s invitation “to make the place their home for two hours or two days” in its literal acceptation; and it is scarcely necessary to say that there was no time for me to enter into an explanation on the subject, nor, indeed, to deliver a tenth part of the discursive matter with which Lady Hester had charged me. It was from these gentlemen I learned, for the first time, that a committee had been appointed, on the motion of Mr. D. W. Harvey, for inquiring into the pensions on the civil list. It had so happened that no newspapers had reached us for a long time, and, consequently, this was the first intimation her ladyship had received of a measure in which it might be supposed she felt no inconsiderable interest, although in reality she did not.

As Mr. Forster and his friend had to cross a deep valley and mount a steep ascent before they could take the road to Beyrout, to which town they were now going, I sent Ali Hayshem, the messenger, to put them on their way. He returned in the course of an hour or two, and was despatched the same evening on foot, with letters to Beyrout, where he arrived next day before Messieurs Knox and Forster. He told me, on his return, that their surprise was very great on finding him at the inn, knowing that they had left him behind them, the morning before, up the mountain. 333 Ali’s account of Mr. Forster’s regimentals, in which he saw him dressed at Beyrout, was very flaming: and from that day, in speaking of the two, he always distinguished him from Mr. Knox by the title of ‘the general.’

Lady Hester deeply regretted that she was not able to see these gentlemen. “Ah!” said she, “how many times have I been abused by the English when I did not deserve it, and for nothing so much as for not seeing people, when perhaps it was quite out of my power! There was Mr. Anson and Mr. Strangways, who, because I refused to see them, sat down under a tree, and wrote me such a note! Little did they know that I had not a bit of barley in the house for their horses, and nothing for their dinner. I could not tell them so; but they might have had feeling enough to suppose it was not without some good reason that I declined their visit. Many a pang has their ill-nature given me, as well as that of others. I have got the note[40] still somewhere.

334 “Among the visitors I have had was the duchess of Gontaut’s brother, she that brought up the Duke of Bordeaux. I supposed she must have talked of me to her brother, whom I never recollect: however, he came with his two sons; but I would not see him. It was that time when Monsieur Guys, after sitting and staring at me some minutes, exclaimed—‘Madam, when I see you dressed in that abah’ (the Bedouin cloak), ‘in that keffiah’ (the Bedouin vizor), ‘and when I think you are that Lady Hester Stanhope, qui faisoit la pluie et le beau temps à Londres, I am lost in wonder how you could have come and fixed yourself in these desolate mountains.’

“Another of Charles the Tenth’s courtiers came here, but a higher personage, whom I also refused to see: he was dreadfully savage about it too. I fancy Charles the Tenth had a secret intention of resigning the crown, and of coming to this country to finish his days in the Holy Land like another St. Louis? and I think this man had something to ask me about it: 335 however, I refused to see him. But it was not caprice, nor, as this proves, was it Englishmen alone I denied myself to. Sometimes I was not well enough to sustain a conversation—sometimes I had no provisions in the house, perhaps no servant who knew how to set a table; but travellers never fancied that there could be any other reason for my refusal, but the determination to affront them. God knows, when I could, I was willing to receive anybody.

“Once I had a visit from two persons whom we will call Mr. A. and Mr. B., or Mr. B. and Mr. C.—what letter you like. I thought Mr. B. very stupid, but, good God! doctor, there never was anything so vulgar as Mr. C. When I got his note to ask leave to come, the name deceived me; I thought he might be a son of Admiral C. But when he came into the room with his great thighs and pantaloons so tight that he could hardly sit down, I thought he was more like a butcher than anything else. He was a man entirely without breeding, with his Ma’ams and ladyships. I asked him a few questions, as—‘Pray, sir, will you allow me to ask if you are a relation of Admiral C’s.?’—‘No, ma’am, I am no relation at all.’—‘Will you permit me to inquire what is the motive of your visit to me?’—‘Only to see your ladyship, ma’am.’—‘Do you come to this country with any particular object?’—‘To be a merchant.’—‘You are 336 probably conversant in mercantile affairs?’—‘No, ma’am, I am come to learn,’—and so on. After some time, I told them that I never saw people in the morning, and would take my leave of them, as they probably would wish to set off early; and I desired them to order what they liked for their breakfast. Next morning, when I thought, as a matter of course, they were gone, in came a note from them to say, they were not going till next day, and then another to say they did not know, and then a third to say that, as they expected ships, and God knows what, they must go.—Good God! they might go to the devil for me: I had taken my leave of them, and there was an end of it. Mr. C. was a downright vulgar merchant’s clerk, come to Syria, I suppose, to set up for himself. Lord St. Asaph said to me—‘Lady Hester, you really should consider who you are, and not allow people of that description to pay visits to you.’

“There was a man who bore a great resemblance to the Duke of Cambridge and the Duke of Clarence, but something between both, who passed two or three years in this neighbourhood and sometimes came to see me; he was good-natured, and I liked him. He went about with a sort of pedlar’s box, full of trinkets and gewgaws to show to the peasant woman, thus bringing the whole population of the village out of 337 their houses: and then giving away beads and earrings to get the young girls around him.

“Of the English, who have visited me here, I liked Captain Pechell and Captain Yorke very much, and thought them both clever men.

“Colonel Howard Vyse one day came up to the village and wrote me a note, and did everything he could to see me. He was an old Coldstream:—it broke my heart not to see him; but it would have revived too many melancholy reflections. Poor man! I believe he was very much hurt; but I could not help it.

“A man came here—I believe the only one who was saved out of a party that was killed going across the Desert—and asked me for a letter to the Arabs. I sent him away, telling him that he might just as well come and ask me for a pot of beer. What had I to do with their schemes and their navigation of the Euphrates? Yet, for this, this officer wrote verses upon the wall of the room against me.

“Then Mr. Croix de la Barre came, but I could not see him. He said he wanted to talk politics with me, and learn the customs and manners of the natives. I should tire you, doctor, if I were to tell you how many have come. I saw Lord B******, when he was travelling, at the baths of Tiberias, where Abdallah Pasha happened to be. Lord B. 338 proposed calling on the pasha, and equipped himself for that purpose with a pair of pistols and a yatagàn in his girdle, after the fashion of a Turkish subaltern; for the Franks, who surrounded him as dragomans and menials, had taught him to adopt what accorded with their ideas of finery, and not what was suitable to his rank. Luckily, he mentioned his intention the day before to me, and I told him that there was a full dress of ceremony in Turkey as well as in Europe, and I lent him the most essential part of it, a benýsh,[41] with which he presented himself. At first there was some hesitation, on his entering the room with his people, as to which was the great Mylord; for his lordship’s doctor, who sat down close by him, and poked his head forward with an air of great attention to what the pasha said, made him doubt whether the doctor was not the chief personage; it being a part of Oriental etiquette that no dependant should obtrude himself into the least notice in his superior’s presence: nay, generally speaking, it is required that doctors, secretaries, dragomans, and the like, should remain standing during such interviews. This difficulty being 339 got over, the pasha, after some questions about Lord B.’s health, asked him what brought him to Tiberias, a part of his province the least beautiful and most barren. The question would have led most persons to say that, knowing the pasha was there, he seized the opportunity of paying his respects to him, or some such complimentary speech. But Lord B., with a naïveté somewhat plebeian, replied, that he came to see the baths. The pasha coldly desired that proper persons should show them to him, and soon after broke up the interview. The very attendants of his Highness were struck with the incivility and want of tact which Lord B. showed, and it was one of them who told me the story. But this was not all: the pasha, who is fond of consulting European doctors, requested Lord B., who was to depart next day, to leave his doctor behind for twenty-four hours; which request Lord B. refused. After he was gone, the pasha sent me a pelisse of considerable value, with a request that I should present it in his name to Lord B., but I returned it, saying Lord B. was gone; for I did not think his incivility deserved it. So much for English breeding! and then let them go and call the Turks barbarians.

“Mr. Elliot came to see me from Constantinople, in order to make the pashas and governors of the neighbouring provinces treat me well. He fell ill, and I 340 sent for the doctor of a frigate that was on the coast for him—a man who could kick his forehead with his toe. I quizzed Mr. Elliot a great deal.

“But now, doctor, what did Mr. Forster say about the Scotch? If he agrees with me that they sprang from hereabouts, I might have given him some useful hints on that subject: but we will write him a letter[42] about it.”

341 When I told her that Mr. Forster had spoken of a work of Sir Jonah Barrington’s on Ireland, in which it was said that Mr. Pitt got up the Irish rebellion in order to make the necessity of the Union more palatable to parliament, she observed that, if she met him, she would settle his business for him. “Mr. Pitt liked the Irish,” said she. “There were some fools who thought to pay their court by abusing them, and would talk of men’s legs like Irish porters, or some such stuff: but I always answered, they would be very much pleased to have their own so, which was much better than having them like a pair of tongs: and I was certain to observe a little smile of approbation in Mr. Pitt’s eyes, at what I had said.”

In this way her ladyship would run on from topic to topic—with a rapidity and fluency which frequently rendered it difficult to preserve notes of even the heads of her discourse. Her health was slightly improved: she attended a little more closely to my advice, but still would never allow me to see her until her coughing fit was over, which usually lasted for about a 342 couple of hours. Notwithstanding this, her pulse maintained a degree of vigour which was very extraordinary, considering the state of attenuation to which she was reduced. She had a great reluctance in touching on her bad symptoms, but dwelt readily on such as were favourable. “I certainly have got small abscesses,” she answered to me, “but it is not consumption: because there are hours in the day when my lungs are perfectly free, as there are others when I can hardly breathe. Sometimes, doctor, my pulse is entirely gone, or so thin—so thin!—as to be but just perceptible, and no more. You pretend to find it very readily and tell me it is not bad: but Zezefôon can’t feel it, and Sàada can’t feel it, and old Pierre has tried, and says the same. I think, too,” continued she, “I was a little delirious this morning; for, when I awoke, I asked where Zezefôon had gone, although there she was, sitting up on her mattress by my bedside before my eyes.”

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END OF VOL. II.

FREDERICK SHOBERL, JUNIOR,
PRINTER TO HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS PRINCE ALBERT,
51, RUPERT STREET, HAYMARKET, LONDON.

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This book was written in a period when many words had not become standardized in their spelling. Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged unless indicated below. Obsolete and alternative spellings were left unchanged.

Footnotes were renumbered sequentially and were moved to the end of the chapter. Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, or partially printed letters and punctuation, were corrected. Final stops missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations were added. Punctuation was adjusted to standard usage. Duplicate letters and words at line endings or page breaks were removed.

Footnotes [3] and [22] were missing anchors in the text. Anchors were added where they may have belonged.

The following items were changed:

• that to than
• Pourcignac to Pourceaugnac, Footnote [17]
• Dairies to Diaries, Footnote [22]
• he to she
• crew to grew
• venemous to venomous
• espistle to epistle
• Bankes to Banks