this bird, but I could not learn any name for it. It is the lovelorn nightingale of a silent tropic noon.'- pp. 244-246.

A ball, if we may believe a rheumatic man, is no joke in the West Indies. The Creole ladies are quite French, or rather Spanish, in their dancing. The quiet well-dressed quadrillers of England can form no conception of the degree of enthusiasm, to which the soul of a Spanish girl is kindled by the merry sounds of the violin. As to the Creole maidens, let our author be heard. While at Antigua, he relates,

Dr. Nugent the geologist gave us an excellent dinner at Merrywing Hall, properly so named from a certain daylight modification of mosquito which rejoiceth therein. The ovverol wore boots, and the ladies covered their ancles and feet with shawls; I being ignarus mali was horribly punished; nevertheless we enacted a quadrille in the evening for the amusement of the negros of the establishment.

6

Every Creole female loves dancing as she loves herself. From the quadrille of the lady down to the John-John of the negro, to dance is to be happy. The intense delight they take in it is the natural consequence of that suppression of animal vivacity which the climate and habits of the West Indies never fail to produce. The day is passed within doors in languor and silence; there are no public amusements or public occupations to engage their attention, and their domestic cares are few. A ball is therefore to them more than a ball; it is an awakener from insensibility, a summoner to society, a liberator of locked up affections, an inspirer of motion and thought. Accordingly there is more artlessness, more passion than is usual with us in England; the soft dark eyes of a Creole girl seem to speak such devotion and earnestness of spirit that you cannot choose but make your partner your sweetheart of an hour; there is an attachment between you which is délightful, and you cannot resign it without regret. She is pale, it is true, but there is a beauty, as South said, in this very paleness, and her full yet delicate shape is at once the shrine and censer of Love, whence breathe the melting thought,

The kiss ambrosial, and the yielding smile.

Their dancing is an andante movement, but they never tire. Upborne with indefatigable toes, they will hold you seven or eight hours right on end, and think the minutes all too short. At four in the morning my last partner went; she had started at half-past seven; she could no longer resist the cavernous yawns of her papa and mamma, but it was reluctantly that she went ;

necdum satiata recessit.

'I like a ball in the West Indies better than in England. True it is that you perspire, but then you have not to undergo the triumph of superior frigidity in your partner; she perspires in precise analogy with yourself, lifts and relifts the cambric toties quoties, as the Papists say, whiles ever doth the orient humor burst forth at intervals upon her ivory cheek, and gravitate in emulous contrafluence with your own. Windows, doors and jalousies are all thrown open to the breezes of night; flowers and evergreens give life and verdancy to the walls, and

the golden moon or diamond stars gleam through the many openings with that rich and sleepy splendor which good men will see hereafter in Paradise. It is my advice not to drink much; restrain yourself till twelve o'clock or so, and then eat some cold meat and absorb a pint of porter cup, which is perfectly innoxious to the system, and more restorative to the animal spirits, than punch, wine, or sangaree. Above all, do not be persuaded to swallow any washy tea; it gives neither strength or vivacity, but rather impairs both, and makes you excessively uncomfortable. It is important to remark that your shirt collars should be loose round the neck, and the gills low; a mere white stock of thick holland, well starched with arrow-root, is the best cravate; otherwise with the ordinary apparatus your cloth in an hour becomes a rope, and the entire focale sinks into a state of utter dissolution.'

pp. 250-253.

After a short visit to Barbuda, our author returned to Barbados, whence he sailed in August last for England: but before he concludes his journal, he devotes a chapter to the discussion of the question still pending between the planters and slaves. It is not our purpose to follow him on this subject; indeed, from the flippant manner in which he treats it, we are not much disposed to rely upon his authority, or to be influenced by his reasoning: yet it would be uncandid not to concede some respect to his evidence, when he asserts, from his own observation, that in the twelve islands which he visited, he saw nothing to support the general and prominent charge against the planters, of cruelty, active or permissive, towards the slaves.' We can readily conceive that it is difficult, if not impossible, for any one, particularly an Englishman, to form a just notion of the present state of society in the West Indies without a personal acquaintance with it. The relation also between the planter and his slaves may be more extensively modified by habits of daily intercourse, by the pride of protection on one side, and the natural sentiment of gratitude on the other, and by many nameless reciprocal services, than is generally imagined in this country. But be it remembered, that this mitigation of the lot of the slave depends on the character of the master. The same argument holds good in a country governed by an absolute monarch. The people are secure in their persons and property, they are to a certain extent free, and may be perfectly happy, so long as their sovereign is a man of benevolent dispositions and sound wisdom. But let the death-bell sound-the scene changes a tyrant succeeds to the throne, and in a few years his folly, his rapacity, his cruelty, may be felt at every fire-side in his dominions. So it is in the West Indies, and so it will be, as long as the system of slavery shall be permitted to exist there. The character of one planter, or of all the present planters in the West Indies, is, and ought to be, no security for the slave. It is only on a wise system of liberty, commenced and shaped during its whole progress to his capacity for benefiting by it, that he can repose for the enjoyment of his social rights; and it is only with the establishment of such a system, that any rational man can be contented.

We must aver, that we are as adverse as any planter can be, to any measure tending to a sudden or even to a very speedy emancipation of the slaves; and we apprehend that no such measure is in the contemplation of any party. So far as we have been able to observe, such a precipitate course is strongly deprecated by the most zealous opponents of slavery, although some of the colonial legislatures assert the contrary. We trust, therefore, that the government, supported as it now is by the unanimous voice of the people of England, will firmly persevere in carrying into execution the resolutions of parliament on this subject. Ministers, we hope, will not condescend to enter into petty disputes with the assemblies of the islands. They know the sort of busy, fretful, pettifogging persons of whom some of those assemblies are composed; and they have only to add a little more strength to the executive power in the West Indies, in order to reduce those declaimers to a proper temper, and a clearer knowledge of the interests of the colonies themselves. We should deplore any measure aimed against the constitution of the representative assemblies; for while we are endeavouring to remove the shackles of the negros, we should not violate the acknowledged liberties of the whites. Justice should proceed even-handed between both parties, and reconcile their interests in a manner worthy of the empire to which they belong.

ART. III. New Arabian Nights' Entertainments: selected from the original Oriental MS. by Jos. Von Hammer; and now first translated into English by the Rev. George Lamb. 3 Vols. Small 8vo. Boards. London. Colburn. 1826.

18s.

For more than a century, since M. Galland first made Europe acquainted with the "Thousand and One Nights," these delightful tales have diffused through all ranks amusement, combined with genuine information concerning the manners, religion, and political circumstances of the nations of the East. By a singular fortune, the same adventures which charm the Bedouin of the desert, the frequenter of the Oriental coffee-house, and the secluded inmate of the Oriental harem, form the delight of all classes in civilised and Christian Europe; and the marvellous story of Aladdin or Sindbad may, at the same moment, be listened to in the Arab tent and in the British cottage. It were needless to trace out in what the great charm of these narratives consists: brilliancy of imagination, and wonderfulness of event, have, and always will have, attractions for the young and the ignorant mind; and the mature and wellinformed will always, even though the taste for such characters be gone, revert with pleasure to what enraptured them in the gay and susceptible period of youth and childhood. What would we not give ourselves to feel again, what we well remember feeling when in our eighth year we, with breathless attention, read, and almost

believed, the marvellous adventures of Prince Agib, of Sindbad and Sobeide, laughed over the comic adventures of the Barber and his brethren and of Aon Hassan, and shed tears of sympathy for the misfortunes of Aboulhasan, Ali Ebn Becar, and the fair Shemselnihar! But those days are past, never to return: yet can we still recur to the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments," still through them become intimate with the unchanging manners of the East, philosophising on the origin of their fictions, and, best of all, through them recall the blissful days of childhood, surrounded with a halo of Eastern splendour and magnificence. We may respect the efforts of Mrs. Sherwood and her excellent and well-meaning fellow labourers, who endeavour to supplant the lying dreams of Oriental fancy by domestic and religious tales; but never, never will they interest and delight like the nameless authors of the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments."

The success of M. Galland's translation was prodigious, and, as we are told in the preface to the present work, was the cause to him of considerable annoyance; for the Parisians used at night, as they returned from their parties, to stop before his house, rouse him up, and insist on his telling them a story. They were speedily translated into the principal European languages: there appeared edition after edition of them, and the press teemed with multiplied imitations; yet so little was known, except by a very few, concerning Oriental literature, that, within these forty years, a scholar like Dr. Beattie professed not to know whether they were a real translation of an Arabic original, or merely one of the pieces of European manufacture that are "plus arabe qu'en Arabie." This question, however, has been long since set at rest. Several manuscripts of them have been brought to Europe, and a portion, we cannot actually say how much, has been printed at the Calcutta press.

It is rather a curious remark, that Persia and Egypt have been the only countries that have attained to any considerable degree of refinement and civilisation without possessing a theatre. Greece and Rome, China and Hindoostan, modern Europe, and even the islands of the Pacific, have enjoyed that refined and rational amusement, resulting from the dramatic imitation of human actions and human passions; but both ancient and modern Egypt, Persia, and the Mohammedan countries in general, have been at all times without a theatre. What, then, supplied its place?—The story-teller. The story-teller in the East is what the rhapsodist was in heroic Greece and the minstrel in chivalrous Europe; a man whose life is devoted to collecting and narrating amusing and surprising tales, who carries from place to place his stock of entertainment, and lives by the contributions of his hearers. For a full account of the storytellers and their mode of narration, we must refer to the preface of Scott to his edition of the "Arabian Nights," and that of Hammer to the present tales, or rather to the " History of Hajji Baba,”

where the vivid description of an eye-witness sets the story-teller and his audience full in our view.

The frame-work of the Sultan, Sheherzade, and Dinarzede, in which the Arabian tales are set, was probably the invention of one of the numerous story-tellers who frequented the court of the Abbasside caliphs, as the frame-work of their respective collections of tales was invented by Boccaccio and Chaucer; but the tales themselves could never have been the production of a single mind. Some of them, Prince Ahmed and the fairy Pari Banou, for example, may have existed among the Persians before the time of Mohammed; others may have come from India; others, such as the nocturnal adventures of Haroun al Rasheed, may have had some foundation in fact, and the imagination of successive story-tellers may have added, altered, modified, till one of their number invented a connecting story, and reduced them to writing. Nothing is, in fact, more difficult than to trace the first origin of a fictitious narrative: it is like tracing a river to its fountain-head: for some space the progress is easy; we find the stream decreasing in magnitude still as we ascend it; we mark the influx of the minor streams that feed it; but at length we become bewildered by the number of rivulets of similar magnitude, and are unable to decide to which the honour of having first given origin to the full-flowing river belongs. Even so is it with story; meagre and poor in its origin, as it passes from narrator to narrator, it acquires additional circumstances, until at length the slight event, jest, or sentiment ends in the full-formed, circumstantial tale; but over the first origin hangs the mist of uncertainty. The same story is to be found in the plains of India and Persia, the towns and villages of Europe. Whittington and his Cat may be heard in Sheeraz, and the fairy legends of Ireland in Spain and Denmark. Shall we say that all these stories have emanated from one common cradle, or shall we, perhaps more philosophically, suppose that the human mind works in a similar manner in all ages and all climes, and that identity in invention is no more to be wondered at than identity in action?

We confess that it was with some degree of impatience we opened the present collection. But alas! our curiosity was soon satisfied, and nothing remained for us but the wearisome task of wading through three volumes of most uninteresting and sometimes immoral and indelicate tales. To our jaundiced eyes even the title-page was displeasing, for we thought we could discern something of trick in the announcement that these tales were 6 selected from the original Oriental MS. by Jos. Von Hammer, and now first translated into English by the Rev. George Lamb.' In our simplicity we had fancied that we were reading a direct translation from the Arabic, till we encountered the word 'pleasure-house,' and immediately Lusthaus flashed so strongly across our mind, that we were quite satisfied our friend Von Hammer had wasted his time rendering these stories into