Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, as related by herself in conversations with her physician, vol. 1 (of 3)

Lady Stanhope’s reception of Dr. —— —Her residence described—Supposed reasons for her seclusion—Her extraordinary influence over her dependants—Her violent temper—Dress and appearance—Her influence in the country—Abdallah Pasha guided by her—Her hostility towards the Emir Beshýr—Her defiance of his power—Her opinion of him—Flight of the Emir—His return—Death of the Sheykh Beshýr.

We reached Beyrout, after a prosperous voyage, on the 8th of December, having anchored eight days at Cyprus to disembark some merchandize, the Arab family, and the English party. In pursuance of Lady Hester Stanhope’s injunctions, I dressed myself in an old faded suit of Turkish clothes, and thus presented myself at the English and French consuls’ residences. My appearance certainly was not calculated to make her ladyship’s creditors suppose I came loaded with money to pay her debts; and I felt, as I passed through the streets, that my old Bedouin manteau or abah, and indeed my whole dress, in which I had twice traversed the desert to Palmyra, was of a hue and age to dissipate the hopes of the most sanguine.

I lost no time in sending off a messenger to announce my arrival to Lady Hester Stanhope; and received a note from her on the 11th, in which, after congratulating us on our safety, she expressed the pleasure it would give her to see me; she added that, as for my family, they must not expect any other attentions from her than such as would make them comfortable in their cottage; that they were not to take this ill on her part, as she had long before apprized me that she did not think English ladies could make themselves happy in Syria, and that therefore I, who had brought them, must take the consequences. This reception was not very agreeable to my feelings, but it was highly characteristic of Lady Hester.

With the bearer of the letter her ladyship sent camels for our luggage, donkeys for my family, and a horse for me. At Nebby Yôoness, where we slept the first night, we found another of her servants, who had been sent thither to prepare our dinner and beds; and, on the following day, two miles from her house, we met Mr. Jasper Chasseaud, her secretary, who had come thus far to welcome us. Placing my family under this gentleman’s guidance, I hurried forward alone, and reached Lady Hester Stanhope’s residence about noon. A cottage had been provided for us in the village of Jôon, with two black slaves for servants, and, so far as the accommodation was concerned, we had no reason to be discontented. Mr. Chasseaud accompanied my family to their new home, but it was twelve at night before I was able to join them.

I found Lady Hester in good health and excellent spirits, and looking much the same as when I left her some years before. She received me with great apparent pleasure, kissing me on each cheek, ordering sherbet, the pipe, coffee, and a finjàn[27] of orange-flower water; all which civilities, at meeting, are regarded in the East as marks of the most cordial and distinguished regard. I myself was truly astonished at all this, but more especially at her salutation on the cheeks after the Oriental fashion; for, in the early part of her travels, when I was with her for seven years together, I do not recollect that she had often even taken my arm—an honour she seldom vouchsafed to any body less than a member of the aristocracy. My astonishment was increased, when, for several days in succession, she insisted on my always sitting by her on the sofa—a privilege she rarely, indeed, I believe never, allowed to any one afterwards.

The conversation turned at first on such inquiries as are common, after a long separation, to persons who have known each other before. I remained with her from noon until midnight, in vain endeavouring to get away, during which time I hardly moved from the sofa, except to sit down to dinner. A description of the dinner appointments of this lady, who once presided at Mr. Pitt’s table in the splendour of wealth and fashion, may be considered both curious and interesting. She sat on the sofa, and I opposite to her, on a common rush-bottom chair, with an unpainted deal table (about three feet by two and a half between us), covered with a scanty tablecloth, of the kind usually spread on a bed-room table at an inn. Two white plates, one over the other, French fashion, were placed before each of us, and in the centre of the table were three dishes of yellow earthenware (common in the south of France), containing a pilàf, a yackney, or sort of Irish stew, and a boiled fowl, swimming in its broth. There were two silver table-spoons for each of us, which, she said, were all she had, and two black bone-handled knives and forks. One spoon was for the broth, one for the yackney; and, when the pilàf was to be served, we helped ourselves with the same spoons with which we had been eating. The arrangements were completed by a black bottle with Mount Lebanon wine in it, of exquisite flavour, it is true, and a common water-decanter. She said that in this style the young Duke of Richelieu had dined with her; adding, however, that her destitute state as to dishes and table-service was not quite so deplorable previously to the long illness she had gone through; but that, at that melancholy period, her slaves and servants had robbed her of everything, even to the cushions and covers of her sofa.

At length, after frequently pleading the anxiety my family must feel at being left so many hours in a strange habitation, I contrived to make my escape, and found Mrs. ——, on my return, sitting disconsolate in the midst of her trunks, under a conviction that I must either have been lost, or devoured by the wolves and hyænas, with whose neighbouring depredations, for want of other subjects of conversation, the secretary had endeavoured to entertain her. There was no great difficulty in appeasing her fears on such occasions, of which we had afterwards so many repetitions; but it was not quite so easy to reconcile her to the undisguised slights which Lady Hester Stanhope put upon her from the very moment of our arrival, in retaliation, as we supposed, for the repeated delays, of which Lady Hester believed her to have been the cause, in the prosecution of my journey. Her ladyship’s resentment was probably rendered still more severe by her general want of sympathy towards her own sex.

The reader will pardon these extraneous details. They are introduced for the sake of preserving entire the thread of the narrative, and certainly with no acrimonious feeling towards Lady Hester Stanhope, whose motive, as she afterwards told me, for adopting this strange line of conduct towards my family, was to check in the bud the womanish caprices, which she anticipated might otherwise disturb the harmony of our intercourse.

Before we commence our diary, it is necessary to give a description of the residence which Lady Hester Stanhope had chosen, in order to avoid the confusion which an ignorance of localities is sometimes calculated to produce.

Her first retreat, when she settled in Syria in 1813, was an old monastic house, about two miles from the ancient city of Sidon: but this she found much too small for her establishment; and having observed, in one of her rides whilst living there, a small house near the village of Jôon,[28] or Djoun, as the French spell it to accommodate the sound to their pronunciation, she resolved to hire it, and remove thither. It belonged to one Joseph Seweyah, a Damascus merchant, who very readily let it to her for 1,000 piasters, or £20 a-year, as the exchange was then, on condition that, on quitting it, the buildings and improvements she might make were to revert to him and his heirs, without any consideration on his part. The house was, and is, called Dar Jôon (see the view), dar signifying a Hall, or gentleman’s dwelling, as when we say Boxwood Hall, Wortley Hall. Dar also means a mount, or elevated hunch. In which of the two senses the word is applied in Dar Jôon I could not learn, as some Arabs told me one way, and some the other.

The mount on which the house stands is shaped like a half orange, with a flat on the summit, which afforded room for exercising ground, a garden, stabling, and any other additional buildings that might be thought necessary. The garden, entirely of her own creation, was richly diversified with covered alleys, serpentine walks, summer-houses, pavilions, arbours, and other embellishments, in which she displayed such admirable taste, that it would not be easy, even in England, to find a more beautiful garden within similar limits.[29]

Around the house Lady Hester built small rooms, stables, cottages, offices, and entire dwellings. The rooms and dwellings were intended for lodging those who, she expected, would fly to her for refuge, during the revolutions which she believed were then impending, not only over the country in which she resided, but the whole world; and, anticipating that many individuals, whose lives would be eagerly sought after by their persecutors, might ask for an asylum at her hands, she contrived several detached rooms, in such a way, that persons dwelling within the precincts of the same residence should be ignorant who their neighbours were; whose vicinity, in like manner, should be unknown to others. The whole was surrounded by a wall more than ten feet high to the north and east, and about six or seven feet high on the other two sides. The entire space within the wall was a parallelogram.

As to her health, she was better perhaps than when I left her in 1820. Her pulse and her movements indicated considerable vigour of body. Although she had not stirred beyond the precincts of her residence, as far as I could learn, for nearly four years,[30] still she took the air and some exercise in her garden, and in attending to and overlooking the building and improvements that were constantly going on.

She was become more violent in her temper than formerly, and treated her servants with severity when they were negligent of their duty. Her maids and female slaves she punished summarily, if refractory; and, in conversation with her on the subject, she boasted that there was nobody could give such a slap in the face, when required, as she could.

Lady Hester Stanhope had adopted a particular mode of dress, to which she adhered without much variation, on all occasions, from the time she fixed her abode at Jôon. It was a becoming one, and, at the same time, concealed the thinness of her person, and the lines which now began slightly to mark her face. Lines, that mark the habitual contraction of the features into a frown, a smile, or a grin, she had none; and the workings of her mind were never visible in her lineaments, which wore the appearance of serene calm, when she chose to disguise her feelings. But age will, without furrowing the brow or the cheeks, bring on that soil of network which we see on the rind of some species of melons. This, however, was so very faintly traced, that it could not be detected without a little scrutiny: and, by means of a dim light in her saloon, together with a particular management of her turban, she contrived to conceal the inroads that years were now making on what her bitterest enemies could not deny was always a fine and noble face. It was this kind of pardonable deceit that made me exclaim, on meeting her again, after a long separation of several years, that I saw no alteration in her appearance.

Her turban, a coarse, woollen, cream-coloured Barbary shawl, was wound loosely round, over the red fez or tarbôosh, which covered her shaved head; a silk handkerchief, commonly worn by the Bedouin Arabs, known by the Arabic name of keffeyah, striped pale yellow and red, came between the fez and the turban, being tied under the chin, or let fall at its ends on each side of her face. A long sort of white merino cloak (meshlah, or abah in Arabic, ابه) covered her person from the neck to the ancles, looped in white silk brandenburgs over the chest; and, by its ample and majestic drapery and loose folds, gave to her figure the appearance of that fulness which it once really possessed. When her cloak happened accidentally to be thrown open in front, it disclosed beneath a crimson robe, (joobey) reaching also to her feet, and, if in winter, a pelisse under it, and under that a cream-coloured or flowered gown (kombàz), folding over in front, and girded with a shawl or scarf round the waist. Beneath the whole she wore scarlet pantaloons of cloth, with yellow low boots, called mest, having pump soles, or, in other words, a yellow leather stocking, which slipped into yellow slippers or papouches. This completed her costume; and, although it was in fact that of a Turkish gentleman, the most fastidious prude could not have found anything in it unbecoming a woman, excepting its association, as a matter of habit, with the male sex.

She never wore pearls, precious stones, trinkets, or ornaments, as some travellers have affirmed: indeed, she had none in her possession, and never had had any from the time of her shipwreck. Speaking of her own dress, she would say, “I think I look something like those sketches of Guercino’s, where you see scratches and touches of the pen round the heads and persons of his figures, so that you don’t know whether it is hair or a turban, a sleeve or an arm, a mantle or a veil, which he has given them.” And, when she was seated on the sofa, in a dim corner of the room, the similitude was very just.

It was latterly her pride to be in rags, but accompanied by an extraordinary degree of personal cleanliness. “Could the Sultan see me now,” she would say, “even in my tattered clothes, he would respect me just as much as ever. After all, what is dress? Look at my ragged doublet, it is not worth sixpence; do you suppose that affects my value? I warrant you, Mahmôod would not look at that if he saw me. When I think of the tawdry things for which people sigh, and the empty stuff which their ambition pursues, I heartily despise them all. There is nothing in their vain-glorious career worth the trouble of aspiring after. My ambition is to please God. I should be what I intrinsically am, on a dunghill. My name is greater than ever it was. In India, I am as well known as in London or Constantinople. Why, a Turk told one of my people who was at Constantinople that there is not a Turkish child twenty miles round that place who has not heard of me.”

There might, nevertheless, be perceived, under all this assumption and display of tattered raiments, a feeling of profound indignation at the neglect she had experienced from her former friends and acquaintances; and, for the purpose of affording evidence of the way in which she had been left, as she called it, to rot, she carefully preserved a bag of her old ragged clothes, which she would not suffer to be given away.

The frequent alarm she expresses in her letters of approaching blindness seems to have been nothing more than the defective vision incident to the decline of life. Spectacles in silver-gilt or tortoiseshell rims, which I sent her from time to time in parcels containing other small commissions, without hinting that they were intended for her, she affected to consider, when she got them, as only useful for presents to old people to whom she was charitable. I now found that she had taken to wear them, but of that kind worn by poor old women in England, without branches, such in fact as are stuck on the nose, and vulgarly called barnacles.[31] Her voice on such occasions became nasal from the compression of the nostrils, and at first she was very reluctant to betray her use of these glasses before me; but, after a short time, her objections wore away: yet she never could be persuaded to wear any other kind of spectacles, invariably giving away all gay and handsome ones that were sent to her.

The influence she had enjoyed in Syria, during the first years of her residence there, had been merely that sort of consideration which is accorded to a person of high descent and connections, who had made a great figure in England, and who had acquired a romantic celebrity by her travels: it was the homage paid to an illustrious name. But when, by degrees, her extraordinary talents came to be known, more especially her political abilities, and when it was observed that Pashas and great men really valued her opinion and feared her censure, she obtained a positive weight in the affairs of the country on her own account, independently of the prestige of birth and notoriety.

Speaking of this, she one day said, “What offers have not been made me! which, had I chosen not to be clean-handed, would have put pretty sums into my pocket.” Among the rest, she mentioned one man, who had offered her a vast sum, if she would lend her name and protection in some extensive mercantile speculation. The Sheykh Beshýr (the acknowledged chief of the Druze nation, and the powerful rival of the Emir Beshýr, the reigning prince) sent her, when he was proscribed and in flight, at three different times, carte blanche to settle with Abdallah Pasha or the Porte the amount of the sum which would save his life: “but,” she said, “knowing the Sheykh was not clean-handed, I could not undertake to buy him off; yet the whole of his treasures would have been at my disposal.”[32]

In relating this story, Lady Hester Stanhope added, “How odious has Abdallah Pasha rendered himself by his extortions and confiscations, because none of his people will speak the truth to him! When he wants money, his secretaries tell him he has only to sign an order for it, and then perhaps half a dozen families are driven into exile, or half ruined. But I speak plainly to him; and once, when I wrote to him how he was making himself hated by a particular act of oppression about money, he tore the buyurdee[33] in pieces, which gave force to that act, and drove his secretaries out of his presence for having flattered and deceived him. Why, doctor, when he receives a letter from me, if there are half a dozen others at the same time, he will let them lie on his sofa whilst he reads mine, and then will put that alone into his pocket, and take it into his harým to read over again.”

But Lady Hester’s nearest neighbour among Pashas and Princes, and the one who, consequently, was the most frequently mixed up in her affairs, was the Emir Beshýr, prince of the Druzes; and, as his name will necessarily occur very often in this diary, it is desirable to give a sketch of his career and character. At a remote period, his ancestors had migrated from the neighbourhood of Mecca to this part of Syria, and their origin was acknowledged to be noble. In the course of time, his family had attained to great consideration in Mount Lebanon, and stamped him, who sprung from it, as an Emir, or Prince.

The Emir Beshýr was now the reigning prince of the Druzes, himself a Mahometan born, but, as it is said, professing Christianity, whenever it answered his wicked ends to do so. In the annals of no country, according to Lady Hester Stanhope, can be found a man who has practised more barbarities, considering the small extent of his principality, than he has done. Not content with emasculating, he cut out the tongues and put out the eyes of five young princes, nephews and relatives of his own, whose contingent prospects to the succession gave him uneasiness. His atrocities transcend belief. All those who were obnoxious to him, high or low, were sure, in the course of his protracted despotism, to be removed, either by secret machinations or overt acts. On Mount Lebanon it was common to hear whispers that some one had been made away with, but nobody dared to give utterance to their suspicions of the agency.

This man was Lady Hester’s determined enemy. She was living within his principality—within his reach—and yet she braved him! and the greatest proofs of personal courage that she had occasion to show, perhaps, during her life, were manifested in her bold and open defiance of his power; which is the more extraordinary in a woman, apparently neglected by her country and friends, towards a prince, who has been certainly one of the most perfidious as well as bloodthirsty tyrants that ever governed a Turkish province.

Lady Hester, as I said, was domiciled within his territory, and many were the petty vexations with which he harassed her, in the hope of finally driving her away; for he considered her as a very dangerous neighbour, seeing that she openly cultivated the friendship of the Sheykh Beshýr, his rival, and made no disguise of her bad opinion of him, the Emir. Finding, however, that she was determined to remain at Jôon, some of his emissaries were employed to insinuate the peril to which she would inevitably expose her life if she persisted in her hostility to so powerful a prince. But Lady Hester Stanhope was not a woman to be frightened; and, when she found a fit opportunity, in the presence of some other persons, of getting one of the Emir’s people before her, so as to be sure that what she said must reach his ears and could not well be softened down, she desired the emissary to go and tell his master that “She knew very well there was not a more profound and bloody tyrant on the face of the earth; that she was aware no one was safe from his poisons and daggers—but that she held him in the most sovereign contempt, and set him at defiance. Tell him,” she added, “that he is a dog and a monster, and that, if he means to try his strength with me, I am ready.”

On another occasion, one of the Emir Beshýr’s people came on some message to her, but, before he entered her room, laid by his pistols and his sabre, which in Turkey these myrmidons always wear on their persons. Lady Hester’s maid whispered to her what the man was doing, when her ladyship, calling him in, bade him gird on his arms again. “Don’t think I am afraid of you or your master,” she said; “you may tell him I don’t care a fig for his poisons—I know not what fear is. It is for him, and those who serve him, to tremble. And tell the Emir Khalyl” (the Emir Beshýr’s son) “that if he enters my doors, I’ll stab him—my people shall not shoot him, but I will stab him—I, with my own hand.”

Lady Hester, after relating this to me, thus proceeded: “The beast, as I spoke to him, was so terrified, doctor, that he trembled like an aspen leaf, and I could have knocked him down with a feather. The man told the Emir Beshýr my answer; for there was a tailor at work in the next room, who saw and heard him, and spoke of it afterwards. The Emir puffed such a puff of smoke out of his pipe when my message was delivered—and then got up and walked out.

“Why, what did Hamâady[34] say to the Emir, when he was deliberating how he should get rid of me?—‘You had better have nothing to do with her. Fair or foul means, it is all alike to her. She has been so flattered in her lifetime, that no praise can turn her head. Money she thinks no more of than dirt; and as for fear, she does not know what it is. As for me, your Highness, I wash my hands of her.’

“Oh, doctor, if you were to feel the bump behind my ear, it is bigger than any thing you ever saw! And they say of the lions, that the more their ears are buried in bone the bolder they are. Why, at the time I am speaking of, there were five hundred horsemen about in the neighbouring villages, and they killed three men, one between the house and the village, one at the back of my premises, and one other farther off, just to let me know what they could do, thinking to terrify me; but I showed them I was not to be frightened. I always slept with a khanjàr” (a poniard) “by my side, and slept as sound as a top. Poor Williams was terrified out of her senses: she used to get up in the night and come to me. Why do I keep Seyd Ahmed but on account of his courage? because, in these dangerous times, you must have servants of all sorts. I remember when I and Miss Williams were left without a farthing of money, and the Emir had surrounded the house with the intention of murdering us, that Seyd Ahmed remained at his post, when all the rest were so frightened they did not know what they did; and we had nothing to eat too, but he never complained. Once, when we were at Abra, all the black slaves formed a plot to run away in the night to Sayda, which they executed. I had rung my bell several times, and, as nobody answered it, I went out to look, thinking they were all asleep, for it was two in the morning. Not a soul was to be found except the little black boy. I awoke Seyd Ahmed, called Miss Williams; and, although Seyd Ahmed was in a terrible fury, and wanted to set off in search of them in the middle of the night, I would not let him: for I thought it was a plot of the Emir’s to get the men out of the house, and then to have us murdered. But all these matters never disturbed my equanimity—I was as collected as I am now.”

Once some camels, that Lady Hester had sent with a load to a neighbouring seaport, were returning light, when some persons, who were employed by the Emir Beshýr, and who were accustomed to see the richest individuals of the province eager to embrace any opportunity of obliging him, thinking that she would be delighted that her camel-drivers should have rendered any assistance to their prince, stopped the camels, and loaded them with marble slabs, that were intended for the floor of a part of the Emir’s new palace, then building. These the drivers were ordered to deposit on Lady Hester’s premises, where they would be sent for. As soon as she heard that the slabs were lying near her porter’s lodge, she went out, and had them broken to pieces. “You may guess,” said she, when she told the story, “what a face the Prince made when this was related to him.”

There was a man, named Girius Baz, who was prime-minister to the Emir Beshýr; and, being an ambitious man, who sold his services to the injury of his master, he was strangled by him, and his goods and property, as far as they could be come at, were confiscated. The widow was left in poverty and destitution, as it was generally believed; and Lady Hester, having one day desired me to give two hundred piasters to her son, a lad, who had come begging in a genteel way, told me the following story:—

“That son,” said she, “was about eight or ten years old when his father was killed, and, since he has grown up, he maintains his mother by weaving. To succour this distressed family was a dangerous business with a man so cruel and jealous as the Emir; but I did it. One day, I asked one of the Emir’s officers why his master had so little compassion on Baz’s widow! ‘Because,’ answered the officer, ‘she goes about, saying she does not like the Emir.’—‘Like him!’ said I; ‘how can she like the man who murdered her husband? If she said she liked the Emir, it must be a lie, and therefore she only speaks the truth. Why did the Emir put it out of her power to like him?’—‘Because,’ replied the officer, ‘the minister became more powerful than his master, and then it was necessary to get rid of him.’—‘If he was too powerful,’ resumed I, ‘it was the Emir’s fault: he should have kept him under.’—‘But he could not,’ retorted the man.—‘Then, by your own confession,’ continued I, ‘he rode on the Emir’s shoulders; but that was no reason why he should have had him killed in a——.’—‘He was not killed in a——,’ interrupted the officer; ‘he was only seized there, and afterwards killed in his room.’—This was precisely what I wanted to get out,” added Lady Hester; “I made the man confess that the Emir had murdered Girius Baz, and it was of no consequence to me when, how, or where.

“Poor woman!” cried Lady Hester, after a pause, returning to the widow’s case, “I once had her for four months with me here, but she was so overwhelming in her gratitude and thanks, and kept so constantly about me, to attend upon me, that I was obliged to send her home again. Would you think it, that even in this case the sufferers proved themselves almost as bad as the tyrant! for this very woman carried on the farce of abject poverty for two years, and, at the end of that time, all of a sudden, appeared the diamonds, shawls, and money, she had hitherto concealed; in fact, she turned out almost as rich as I was myself. There is no believing a word you hear from any of them. Even Gondolfi[35] assured me that, in all his life, and in no other country, had he seen a people so full of lying, theft, and all kinds of vice as these are; and this, to crown all, is what he said of the Emir himself:—‘I have known him,’ said he, ‘twenty years, and never was there a more heartless, cruel man. I took an opportunity of talking to him in private, after he had put out his nephews’ eyes, and told him what an execrable thing it was. He beat his breast, and professed such repentance for what he had done, that I was quite moved, and thought to myself, perhaps the man acted from what he considered necessity, and that surely he would be more humane in future. But, soon after, I heard of the murder of Girius Baz, and of half a dozen more enormities, and I felt persuaded that his hypocrisy was as great as his cruelty.’

“You are shocked,” continued Lady Hester, “and say you are sick at your stomach from hearing of the atrocities of Ibrahim Pasha’s governors in getting recruits. Oh, they are nothing to what the Emir Beshýr has done in his time! Think of women’s breasts squeezed in a vice; of men’s heads screwed into a tourniquet until their temple-bones were driven in; of eyes put out with red-hot saucers; and a hundred other barbarities, worse than any you ever heard of! Wasn’t it extraordinary, that the same day that I sent the Emir’s man away with such a message to his master, one of the house-dogs pupped, and one of the puppies was blind?—not blind, as puppies usually are, but with his eyes burnt out, just as if they had been seared with a red-hot iron. I said to the man, ‘The demon of your Prince has entered the very dogs.’ The man almost fainted away before I had done with him, for I was not afraid of them; and even now, weak as I am, I do believe I could strangle the strongest of them.

“The Emir Beshýr has duped everybody. He duped the Pasha with the Sultan, and duped the Sultan with the Pasha. He cheats the English, cheats the French, and cheats all round. There is not a greater hypocrite on the face of the earth; and, although he sends his compliments to me by every traveller that passes, he is only waiting to see what turn matters will take, to fall on me, if he can; and, if he cannot, to lie and cringe, until a safer opportunity occurs of taking his revenge.

“You knew Aubin, the French navy surgeon, who had been a prisoner in the hulks at Portsmouth, and used to abuse the English so. Well, he was made the Emir’s doctor, because he procured him a ship to fly to Egypt in; the events on the mountain here succeeded each other so rapidly after your first leaving me! About 1820, Abdallah Pasha having hostile intentions against the Emir Beshýr and the Sheykh Beshýr, they both fled to the Horàn; and, after some time, when the Pasha pretended to be pacified, they both returned. Soon after that, the Emir, not being quite sure of what Abdallah Pasha meditated, thought it safest to fly a second time; and it was by the assistance of Monsieur Aubin that he embarked for Egypt, on board of a French merchant-vessel, commanded, I believe, by a Captain Allard. The Sheykh Beshýr, finding his former domineering rival fled, assumed the supreme authority in the mountain, and told the Emir Beshýr, by letter, that, if he ventured to return, he, the Sheykh, should be obliged to have him arrested, and sent prisoner to the Pasha.

“The Emir Beshýr, on arriving in Egypt, was coldly received at first, as it was said, by Mahomet Ali; but afterwards, having induced the Viceroy to believe that he could put him in possession of Acre and all Syria, he was, by Mahomet Ali’s money and mediation, restored to his principality. It was then that the plan for the conquest of Syria was concocted in secret between them. The Emir, on his return, contrived to recover his ascendency over the Sheykh Beshýr; and, picking a quarrel with him, he succeeded in taking him prisoner, and sent him in chains to Acre, where Abdallah Pasha finally cut his head off. At the same time, the Emir, to complete the ruin of the Sheykh’s party, mutilated the young Princes, who had shown themselves the Sheykh’s partisans. The Sheykh’s wife fled; and Aâlm-ed-dyn, a Druze, whom he employed in the execution of his bloody barbarities, was sent after her, and told to bring her son, a little boy, cost what it would. ‘Let me see him cut in pieces before my eyes,’ said the sanguinary wretch. The tyrant! he never sleeps without a number of guards round his person. His wife died soon after, and he sent a confidential agent to Constantinople, and bought two young Georgian slaves, he then being past eighty; and, after having both with him to see which he liked best, he took one of them as his favourite. It was for them that the mâalem[36] you saw at Cyprus, looking after canary-birds, was sent.”