Turned off from the high-road, at Tel Bysy, a hamlet near Hems, plunged into the desert, under the guidance of a single Bedouin sent for that purpose, and trusted herself, a solitary and unprotected woman, to hordes of robbers, whose livelihood is the plunder they make, and whose exploits are numbered by the travellers they have despoiled. Arrived at Mahannah's tent, her courage and demeanour struck that prince with astonishment. "I know you are a robber," she said, in their first interview, "and that I am now in your power; but I fear you not; and I have left all those behind who were offered to me as a safeguard, and all my countrymen who could be considered as my protectors, to show you that it is you and your people whom I have chosen as such.' Mutually pleased with each other, after a short interview, Mahannah escorted her ladyship to within a few miles of Hamah, and, commissioning his son to conduct her safe to the residence prepared for her in that city, they then parted.

The Arabs now began to flatter Lady Hester by designating her as a Maliki, or Christian queen. "Maliki (the queen)" she says in one of her letters written after her interview with the emir, "is in the mouth of every Arab both in Damascus and the desert." And in another; "I am queen with them all."

From Hamah the doctor was soon after this despatched on a medical and friendly mission to the emir, on which occasion he was accompanied by M. Lascans, to whose courage and intrepidity he scarcely does justice, for the Frenchman's excursions among the Arabs extended on the one hand to the central districts of Mesopotamia, and on the other to the country of the Wahabees, in the Arabian peninsula, both districts far more difficult of access than Palmyra. On the author's return from Tadmor, Lady Hester being satisfied as to the practicability of her journey to that city of the desert, she busied herself seriously in preparations for her departure. Whatever may have been Lady Hester's real motives in visiting Palmyra, the notions of her companion, who is spoken of as Mr. B., are curious enough. In a letter dated Hamah, March 13, 1813, that gentleman is made to say

If Lady Hester succeeds in this undertaking, she will at least have the merit of being the first European female who has ever visited this once celebrated city. Who knows but she may prove another Zenobia, and be destined to restore it to its ancient splendour?-perhaps she may form a matrimonial connexion with Ebu Seood, the great chief of the Wahabees. He is not represented as a very loveable object; but making love subservient to ambition, they may unite their arms together, bring about a great revolution both in religion and politics, and shake the throne of the Sultan to its very centre. I wish you (the letter is addressed to General Oakes) would come and assist them with your military counsel. How proud I should feel to learn the art of war under so accomplished a general!

Mr. B. appears to have been a gentleman ready and willing to keep a smouldering ambition alive by the strangest surmises and the most preposterous anticipations. But, to be brief, Mahannah came himself to Hamah with seventy Arabs to escort her ladyship. £150 was the sum agreed upon for the convoy, and the party started on the 20th of March. Her ladyship was received at Palmyra with every sign of welcome. Drums were beating and colours flying; a mock fight was gone through, and beautiful girls were placed on antique pedestals, who, as she passed, jumped down and joined in a dance. There is, however, no mention of her coronation as Queen of Palmyra. The wily Arabs, however, got tired at the end of a week, and adopted their usual expedient of express

ing dread that the Faydal Arabs should come from the banks of the Euphrates, tempted by the reputed riches of the Malika, and fight for a share of the booty. This having no effect, they pretended to have caught four Faydan Arab spies in advance of the tribe. "I shrewdly suspected the whole to be a trick invented by Nasar for the purpose of getting her away!" says her historian, and he adds, "She saw deeper into it, perhaps, than I could do, but did not tell her thoughts." So ended this muchtalked-of expedition to the city of Zenobia and the new empire of the desert, not to mention the matrimonial alliance with Ibu Siyud, Shaikh of the Wahabees! Lady Hester had not been long returned to Hamah, when she started along the valley of the Orontes to cross the Jibal Kraad to Latakiyah. On the road the author saw little fish (larvæ) turning into butterflies! and fancied, like Captain Newbold and others in modern times, from Burckhardt not having noticed them, that he discovered the ruins of Apanea. Arrived at Latakiyah, a suitable house was found, and Lady Hester took up her residence in it for a lengthened period of time. While in this pleasant and retired seaport town she avoided, as much as possible, all European and Levantine society, with the exception of Mr. Barker, visiting only the natives till the month of June, when, unfortunately, the plague made its appearance.

It was not till the month of January, 1814, that after suffering severely from the fever of the country, and most of her horses dying of the glanders, that her ladyship quitted Latakiyah to go and reside in a small and secluded monastery called Mar Elias, situate in the country not far from Sayda. Her ladyship had now ceased to be a traveller, and had become a sojourner in the land of her adoption, and abandoning Europe and its customs altogether, she conformed herself entirely to the modes of life of the orientals. The great object with which she now busied herself was the discovery of treasure. A curious document, once in the possession of the church, had fallen into her hands. It contained indications of the existence of treasures at Ascalon and other places, buried by the celebrated Pasha of Acre, Al Gezzar, and she had applied to the Turkish government, through Sir Robert Liston, our ambassador at Constantinople, for permission to dig for them. The doctor took up his residence at Abra, a neighbouring village, and shortly after his arrival was happy enough to discover a curious Greek sepulchre, and which he subsequently made known to Mr. Bankes. At the latter end of March the plague declared itself in Abra, and proved, for a time, both virulent and fatal. The doctor's situation was, during this time, any thing but enviable; as to Lady Hester, she shut herself up in her convent. July, the plague having subsided, she removed, on account of the heat, to Meshmushy, a village five hours' distance, and situated in a high part of the mountain. Ten more weeks were passed in this retirement. At the expiration of that time and early in October, the weather having got somewhat cooler, an excursion was made to Baalbec. This journey was performed on asses, out of feelings of indignation at the neglected state in which she began now to feel herself left by her friends and relatives. Notwithstanding this assumption of the style of the poorest class of pilgrims, Lady Hester's arrival at the city of the sun attracted the same curiosity as elsewhere. Her ladyship's hatred of flattery was attested at this place by her requesting her physician to obliterate a complimentary effusion with which he had decorated the walls of the inner temple. A

In

fall of snow drove the party away, and they returned by Ainnete and the cedars of Lebanon to Tripoli. Ainnete, as Burckhardt spells it, is a spring close to the sources of the Orontes. The author says it ought to

be called Ayn Aty, but Mr. Barker spells it Ainate, M. Renouard queries Ain ata, "gift spring," and Dr. Lee Aïn-net-e, "the forthcoming spring ?"

Having nothing particular to detain her at Tripoli, Lady Hester quitted that place early in 1815 for her old residence at Mar Elias, near Sayda. She was at this time amusing herself with a plan for forming an association of literary men and artists, whom she proposed inviting from Europe, for the purpose of prosecuting discoveries in every branch of knowledge in the Ottoman empire. She proposed to accomplish this by means of subscriptions; and experiments on the effect of bezoar and serpent stones on the plague and bites of venemous animals was so great a hobby with her, that she particularly charged her physician to write about them to certain persons only, lest some one should get hints enough to anticipate her discoveries, and thus rob her of a part of her renown! But her ladyship was diverted from this chimerical project by the arrival of a capuji bashi, literally head door-keeper, but in reality a confidential messenger from Constantinople. The Osmanli, as usual, felt his way by sending a message to Lady Hester, expressing his wish to see her at the governor's, at Sayda, but her ladyship, with her usual clear-sightedness, sent such an answer that the official mounted horse at once to wait upon her. Great was the terror felt at the sudden appearance of an emissary seldom employed but on affairs of strangling, beheading, confiscation, or imprisonment; but this quickly subsided when the real cause of his advent came to light, which was neither more nor less than the immediate commencement of the search for treasures. Laying aside the mysterious monkish record which Lady Hester had become possessed of, the possibility of the existence of buried treasures in oriental countries, as in Spain in the time of the Moors, was far greater than might appear at first sight. The frequency of war and tumult, the constant government persecutions and extortions, the non-existence of banks and places wherein money may be deposited in security, all contribute to such results, the probability of which were in this case added to by the peculiar circumstances of its being currently reported that Al Gezzar had secreted his ill-gotten gains from the Sublime Porte. In February, 1815, Lady Hester journeyed from Mar Elias to Acre, from whence she proceeded to Ascalon. It was at this time that she received certain strange letters from Sir Sidney Smith, urging the emir of the Druses to supply 1500 soldiers to assist in attacking Algeria. Lady Hester disapproved of the whole plan, besides that, as the author points out, it was infeasible in itself, and she acted accordingly.

The explorations were commenced at Ascalon early in April, on the south side of a ruinous mosque. One hundred men were employed at a time, and relieved by another hundred next day. Foundations were soon discovered with fragments of Corinthian columns. On the fourth day a mutilated statue was found, which Lady Hester ordered to be destroyed, so that it should not be said that under the pretence of searching for treasure for the osmanlis, she was in reality seeking for antiquities. On the eighth day two stone troughs of considerable length were discovered, June.-VOL. LXXVII. NO. CCCVI.

R

having four gray granite columns closely and methodically packed crosswise upon them. On the ninth the granite pillars were removed-a work of no trifling magnitude-and the troughs were found empty. On the fourteenth the closing hand was put to their labours. In a letter to the Earl of Bathurst, descriptive of these operations, Lady Hester says, "We came to the under-ground fabric we were looking for; but, alas! it had been rifled. It was as nearly as one could calculate capable of containing three millions of pieces of gold-the sum mentioned in the document."

Lady Hester rested herself awhile after this disappointment, in a cottage situate half a league from Jaffa. The experiment, although unsuccessful, had had the effect of increasing her popularity and notoriety throughout Syria. None of the indications mentioned in the MSS. could be found in the Awgy, so that her ladyship was induced to give up the idea of researches in that direction as fruitless. But some further explorations were carried on near Sayda, with no better success than at Ascalon. It was the expense of these researches, which ought to have been defrayed by the Osmanli government, that first involved her ladyship in debt, but she endeavoured to repair her losses by the strictest economy, and with this view she retired for the summer to her favourite site of Meshmushy.

It was in the interval of this residence in the mountain that Colonel Boutin, a Frenchman, whom Lady Hester had previously laughingly denounced as a spy, was murdered in the Ansairi mountains, which he had attempted to cross, in order to abbreviate the journey between Hamah and the sea-coast. Lady Hester employed an Italian of the name of Volpi, a hardy and resolute Druse, and a native Christian, to make those investigations, which she found the Osmanli officials unwilling to undertake. In the autumn of the same year, her ladyship also renewed her endeavours, on the occasion of a visit she made to Antioch, to rouse the Osmanlis to punish the assassins; but it was not till the summer of the ensuing year, that, backed by the representations of the French ambassador at the Porte, a field-officer was sent with a detachment of troops, to take signal vengeance of the unfortunate Ansairis, and to carry fire, slaughter, and rapine, into their secluded villages. It is remarkable that the author, in one part of his work, says that Colonel Boutin was assassinated by his own Turkish domestics, which is hardly to be reconciled with these proceedings, ostensibly done by the order of the Syt, as Lady Hester was generally denominated. Certain it is, that her ladyship visited the Ansairis after this disastrous event, and even harangued them upon their conduct, at a time when nothing but the terror excited by her late severe vengeance, and admiration of her fearless and magnanimous conduct, could have saved her life.

It was this summer, also, that Lady Hester was visited by Mr. Bankes and by Mr. Buckingham, and some misunderstanding took place with the former, with regard to the efficiency of certain letters of introduction, given by her ladyship to the Emir of the Palmyrean Arabs. Miss Williams, the companion of her latter days, also arrived from England; as did further the medical man, who took the author's place as professional attendant upon her ladyship, during the brief visit of the latter to this country.

Among the visiters, at this period, was also Dr. Wolff, who forwarded

a letter to Miss Williams from her sister. A note, which the enterprising traveller received in return, is one of the most extraordinary epistles penned by her ladyship. It was as follows:

“TO DR. WOLFF.

"I am astonished that an apostate should dare to thrust himself into notice in my family. Had you been a learned Jew, you never would have abandoned a religion, rich in itself, although defective, to embrace the shadow of one. Light travels faster than sound; therefore the Supreme Being could never have allowed his creatures to be left in utter darkness, until paid and speculating wanderers deem it proper to raise their venal voices to enlighten them.

"HESTER LUCY STANHope.'"

With this suggestive, but hasty and somewhat reprehensible letter, we terminate our notice of this remarkable record. Her ladyship's final retirement to Jun, and her melancholy death at that place, have been narrated in the previously published memoirs, and in Mr. Eliot Warburton's travels, extracts concerning which have also appeared in our pages. There is, however, every thing that is desirable in this interesting narrative, and we hope, even in the succinct analysis of it which we have here given, to do away with a hundred fictions and a thousand misrepresentations that have been made upon Lady Hester's career in the East, and upon her oft-debated greatness. Apart from the detractions of some, and the exaggerations of others, the bitterness of Mr. Bankes, or the poetic imaginings of De Lamartine, it will be seen, that with all her failings and eccentricities, infinite tact, great ability, and wondrous perseverance and resolution, were ever brought to bear upon her enterprises however dreamy in their nature, and upon the objects she had in view, however fallacious might be their purport.

The history of these enterprises and objects does not the less attach to their heroine an imperishable reputation for acts and deeds which often approximate more closely to the marvellousness of Arabian Nights' Entertainments, than to realities of travel and adventure, that have occurred within our own time.

THE OPERA.

VERDI'S "LOMBARDI."

A FEW foreboding bars-something dismal, something ecclesiastical, attune the mind of the auditory for the tale of devotion and death which is to be set before them.

Up goes the curtain, and straight before our eyes stands the church of St. Ambrose, Milan, beautifully lighted. Citizens, masculine and feminine, assemble to celebrate the return of Pagano, who, having been banished for attempting the life of his brother Avino, is now generously pardoned by that brother, and has come back again. The brother, good easy man, thinks all is right, but not so the citizens, who exchange communication in masses of unison, and think that the screw which has been "loose, will continue loose still. That abominable Pagano, though he may