watches the walls of his Serail—she stifles the intrigues of his ministers she quiets the scandals of his court-she extinguishes his rivals, and hushes his naughty wives all one by one, so vast are the wonders of the deep!- Eöthen.'

1. Generally chant, and here used synonymously with cant- repeating phrases that have little or no meaning in them.

2. The Turkish name of Constantinople, and evidently a corruption of that word. The ancient name of the city was Byzantium, after its founder Byzas the Megarean, B.C. 656.

3. Among the Turks, the Persians, and Easterns generally, bazaar is used to mean an exchange, market-place, or place where goods are exposed to sale.

4. A gondola is a flat-bottomed boat, very long and narrow, used at Venice, in Italy, on the canals. A gondola of middle size is about thirty feet long and four broad, terminating at each end in a sharp point or peak, rising to the height of a man. It is usually rowed by two men, called gondoliers, who propel the

boat by pushing the oars. The gondola is also used in other parts of Italy for a passage boat.

5. The serail, more commonly called the seraglio, is the part of Constantinople where the palace is. It is about three miles in circuit, and entirely surrounded by walls. Its whole surface is "irregularly covered with detached suites of apartments, baths, mosques, kiosks, gardens, and groves of cypress. The apartments are chiefly on the top of the hill, and the gardens below stretching to the sea. Though externally picturesque, from the contrast of its light and elegant minarets, with its dark, solemn, and stately trees, the seraglio is unmarked by anything to characterize it as the habitation of royalty."-M CULLOCH's Geo. Dic.

In the vacant space between Persia, Syria, Egypt and Ethiopia, the Arabian peninsula may be conceived as a triangle of spacious but irregular dimensions. From the northern point of Beles on the Euphrates a line of fifteen hundred miles is terminated by the straits of Babelmandel and the land of frankincense. About half this length may be allowed for the middle breadth, from east to west, from Bassora to Suez, from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. The sides of the triangle are gradually enlarged, and the southern basis presents a front of a thousand miles to the Indian Ocean. The entire surface of the peninsula exceeds in a fourfold proportion that of Germany or France, but the far greater part has been justly stigmatised with the epithets of the stony and sandy. Even the wilds of Tartary are decked by the hand of nature, with lofty trees and luxuriant herbage, and the lonesome traveller derives a sort of comfort and society from the presence of vegetable life. But in the dreary waste of Arabia, a boundless level of sand is intersected by sharp and

and of the Mediterranean. Whatever rude commodities were collected in the forests of Germany and Scythia, as far as the sources of the Tanais and the Borysthenes; whatsoever was manufactured by the skill of Europe and Asia; the corns of Egypt, and the gems and spices of the farthest India, were brought by the varying winds into the ports of Constantinople, which, for many ages, attracted the commerce of the ancient world.-GIBBON.

1. In Geography, latitude means the distance of any place, north or south of the equator, measured on its meridian. When the term was introduced, more of the earth was known from east to west than from north to south. From E. to W. was, therefore, naturally spoken of as length or longitude, and from N. to S. as breadth or latitude.

2. Piracy is the act, practice, or crime of robbing on the high seas; the taking of property from others by open violence

and without authority on the sea; a crime that answers to robbery on land.

3. This change of the pronoun is not good. The city may correctly enough be personified, and so have a feminine pronoun referring to it, but we ought not to have the neuter applied to it in the next line. Consistency ought to be observed throughout the sentence.

4. The ancient names of the Don and the Dnieper in Russia. They fall into the Euxine or Black Sea, after running upwards of a thousand miles each.

EVEN if we do not take a part in the chaunt' about " Mosques and Minarets," we can still yield praises to Stamboul.2 We can chaunt about the harbour: we can say and sing that nowhere else does the sea come so home to a city; there are no pebbly shores-no sand-bars-no slimy river-beds-no black canals-no locks nor docks to divide the very heart of the place from the deep waters: if, being in the noisiest mart of Stamboul, you would stroll to the quiet side of the way amidst those cypresses opposite, you will cross the fathomless Bosphorus; if you would go from your hotel to the Bazaars, you must pass by the bright blue pathway of the Golden Horn, that can carry a thousand sail of the line. You are accustomed to the gondolas the the palaces of St. Mark, but here at Stambouli twenty-gun-ship that meets you in the

out from the steadfast land, and in

the chief of the state to woo and

stormy bride of the Doge is

comes to his fee

from pala

the br

lifts

watches the walls of his Serail—she stifles the intrigues of his ministers-she quiets the scandals of his court-she extinguishes his rivals, and hushes his naughty wives all one by one, so vast are the wonders of the deep!- Eöthen.'

1. Generally chant, and here used synonymously with cant- - repeating phrases that have little or no meaning in them.

2. The Turkish name of Constantinople, and evidently a corruption of that word. The ancient name of the city was Byzantium, after its founder Byzas the Megarean, B.C. 656.

3. Among the Turks, the Persians, and Easterns generally, bazaar is used to mean an exchange, market-place, or place where goods are exposed to sale. 4. A gondola is a flat-bottomed boat, very long and narrow, used at Venice, in Italy, on the canals. A gondola of middle size is about thirty feet long and four broad, terminating at each end in a sharp point or peak, rising to the height of a man. It is usually rowed by two men, called gondoliers, who propel the

sun.

naked mountains: and the face of the desert, without shade or shelter, is scorched by the direct and intense rays of a tropical Instead of refreshing breezes, the winds, particularly from the south-west, diffuse a noxious and even deadly vapour; the hillocks of sand which they alternately raise and scatter, are compared to the billows of the ocean, and whole caravans, whole armies, have been lost and buried in the whirlwind. The common benefits of water are an object of desire and contest; and such is the scarcity of wood, that some art is requisite to preserve and propagate the element of fire.

Arabia is destitute of navigable rivers, which fertilize the soil and convey its produce to the adjacent regions; the torrents that fall from the hills are imbibed by the thirsty earth; the rare and hardy plants, the tamarind or the acacia, that strike their roots into the clefts of the rocks, are nourished by the dews of the night: a scanty supply of rain is collected in cisterns and aqueducts: the wells and springs are the secret treasures of the desert; and the pilgrim of Mecca,1 after many a dry and sultry march, is disgusted by the taste of the waters, which have rolled over a bed of sulphur or salt. Such is the general and genuine picture of the climate of Arabia. The experience of evil enhances the value of any local or partial enjoyments. A shady grove, a green pasture, a stream of fresh water, are sufficient to attract a colony of sedentary Arabs to the fortunate spots which can afford food and refreshments to themselves and their cattle, and which encourage their industry in the cultivation of the palm tree and the vine. The high lands that border on the Indian Ocean are distinguished by their superior plenty of wood and water: the air is more temperate, the fruits are more delicious, the animal and the human race more numerous; the fertility of the soil invites and rewards the toil of the husbandmen, and the peculiar gifts of frankincense and coffee have attracted in different ages the merchants of the world. If it be compared with the rest of the peninsula, this sequestered region may truly deserve the appellation of the happy; and the splendid colouring of fancy and fiction has been suggested by contrast, and countenanced by distance. It was for this earthly paradise that nature had reserved her choicest favours and her most curious workmanship; the incompatible blessings of luxury and innocence were ascribed to the natives; the soil was impregnated with gold and gems, and both the land and the sea were taught to exhale the odours of aromatic sweets.

This division of the sandy, the stony, and the happy, so familiar to the Greeks and Latins, is unknown to the Arabians themselves and it is singular enough, that a country, whose language and inhabitants have ever been the same, should

scarcely retain a vestige of its ancient geography. The maritime districts of Bahrein and Oman are opposite to the realm of Persia. The kingdom of Yemen displays the limits, or at least the situation, of Arabia Felix; the name of Neged is extended over the inland space; and the birth of Mahomet has illustrated the province of Hejaz along the coast of the Red Sea. -GIBBON.

1. Mecca is one of the most famous cities of the eastern world, the birthplace of Mohammed, and the great centre of attraction to all the pilgrims of the Mohammedan faith in Arabia.

2. This use of the verb illustrate, in the sense of rendering illustrious, though not without authority, does not seem elegant.

ARABIA AND ITS INHABITANTS.

THE Arabs Mahomet was born among are certainly a notable people. Their country is notable, the fit habitation for such a race. Savage, inaccessible rock-mountains, great grim deserts, alternating with beautiful strips of verdure; wherever water is, there is greenness, beauty, odoriferous balm shrubs, date-trees, frankincense-trees. Consider that wide-waste horizon of sand, empty, silent like a sand sea, dividing habitable place from habitable. You are all alone there, left alone with the Universe; by day a fierce sun blazing down on it with intolerable radiance, by night the great deep heaven with its stars. Such a country is fit for a swift-handed, deep-hearted race of men. There is something most agile, active, and yet most meditatively enthusiastic in the Arab character.

The Persians are called the French of the East; we will call the Arabs Oriental Italians. A gifted noble people; a people of wild strong feelings, and of iron restraint over these; the characteristic of noble-mindedness, of genius. The wild Bedouin welcomes the stranger to his tent, as one having right to all that is there; were it his worst enemy, he will slay his foal to treat him, will serve him with sacred hospitality for three days, will set him fairly on his way, and then by another law as sacred, kill him if he can. In words, too, as in action, they are not a loquacious people, taciturn rather, but eloquent, gifted when they do speak. An earnest, truthful kind of men. They are, as we know, of Jewish kindred; but with that deadly, terrible earnestness of the Jews they seem to combine something graceful, brilliant, which is not Jewish. They had "poetic contests among them before the time of Mahomet. Sale says, at Ocadh, in the south of Arabia, there were yearly fairs, and there, when the merchandising was done, poets sang for prizes :-the wild people gathered to hear that.-CARLYLE's Hero- Worship.'