1

Mr Matthew Arnold, also, has been so fully and so recently noticed by us, and what we said about his addiction to ancient forms of art is so exactly applicable to "Merope," that we need say little more of it here than that, with the exception of "Sampson Agonistes," it is by far the most faithful, poetical, and learned revival of the Greek drama of which the English language can boast. We must confess, however, that Mr Arnold's admirable workmanship, and the weight which justly attaches to his opinion, have failed to impress us with the general feasibility of what he had attempted, or, rather, done. It seems to us that the forms of the Greek drama can never be revived among us, if it were only that their simplicity and severity exclude the representation of characters under other than very general aspects of good and evil. Our modern-shall we say "used up?"-intellects are entirely dead to causes which were powerfully moving in other times and under other conditions. Even among ourselves, in earlier days, an audience or a circle of readers might have been convulsed with excitement at the crisis in which Merope is on the point of slaying her son, mistaking him for her son's assassin; but, alas for the modern reader! "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba," unless they are better acquainted than the nature of the Greek drama allows them to be? We must know Merope and Epytus better, we must become personally interested in them as individuals, before we can care a straw for their fates as mere man and woman. We do not say that this is a right state of feeling, but we do say that it is the condition of all modern readers above fifteen years of age, and that it is fatal to the success of any thorough-going revival of the Greek drama.

1 North British Review, vol. xxi., p. 493.

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ART. VII.-1. The City of the Great King; or, Jerusalem as it was, as it is, and as it shall be. By J. T. BARCLAY, M.D. Philadelphia: 1858.

2. History of the Eastern Church. By the Rev. J. M. NEALE. Two Vols. 8vo. London.

3. History of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, from its Foundation, A.D. 44, to the Death of Heirotheus, 1846. By the Rev. J. M. NEALE. Two Vols. 8vo. London.

4. A History of the Church of Russia. By A. N. MOURAVIEFF. Translated by the Rev. R. W. BLACKMORE. 8vo. London. 5. Christianity in Turkey; a Narrative of the Protestant Reformation in the Armenian Church. By H. G. O. DWIGHT. London.

6. The Nestorians and their Rituals, etc.; also Researches into the Present Condition of the Syrian Jacobites, Papal Syrians, and Chaldeans, etc. By Rev. G. P. BADGER. Two Vols. 8vo. London.

THE East, be it Persia, or Syria, or Egypt, does not by any means fulfil the dreams which most of us have had of it. He that has caught up visions of its splendour from the Ghazels of Hâfiz, or the Lalla Rookh of Moore, will feel considerably angry when he discovers the extent to which he has been duped by a large class of poets to whom it has furnished poetical capital almost inexhaustible, and who, in regard to it, have drawn as largely upon their own fancy as upon the credulity of the untravelled multitude. The myrtle hedge-rows of the Shûbra, the "gardens of gul in their bloom,"-the olive and orange groves,The shining streams, with ranks

Of golden melons on their banks,—

the note of the turtle, the song of the nightingale, the hum of the wild bee, the spicy breezes, the "unclouded skies of Peristân;"these, with the beauteous forms and faces, too fair for earth, have been the materials out of which we of the cold cloudy North have constructed an Orient liker some Paradise that was never lost than a region of man's fallen earth. A few days' residence in an Oriental city, be it Cairo or Constantinople,-a few weeks' travel through these regions of wonder, say the banks of the Nile or the Ghôr of Jordan, would modify the enthusiasm of many a modern admirer of "the land of the sun."

Still it is a wondrous clime; so rich in its fruits, so gay in its flowers, so luscious in its odours,-the land of the palm and pomegranate, the vine and the olive;-and withal so exquisitely

sunny! What sunshine is that which bathes you as you sit gazing round you from the broad top of the old Pyramid of Cheops, or from which you hide yourself amid the giant-ruins of Abu-Sembel or Karnac, or through which you cut your way, as through liquid silver, in your white-sailed Nile boat! There is no sunshine like it; nowhere else does it seem so unmixed and unalloyed. Pass out of Egypt into the eastern desert; take your camel and pace along the shore of the Elanitic gulf, from Râs Mohammed to Kalat Akabah; from that take your way to Wady Mûsa, and wander amid the ruins of Petra; it is still the same pure sunshine. Pass out of the desert into Syria; sit down by the two wells of Bîr es-Seba, or on the margin of Bahr Lût, under the reflection of the hills of Moab, or under the palms of Jenîn, or on the western slopes of the great Lebanon, with the blue sea before you and the long ridges of snow above your head; you are still conscious of being shone upon by a sunlight purer and more intense than you have known amid your northern mists. An Arab, gasping with heat and thirst on the broad sand-plain of Debbet Ramleh, might sigh for the coolness of the soberer West, as we do in our dreams for the glow of "the delicious East" you yourself, climbing up the steep defiles of Et-Tih, might long for a cloudier sky; but still you cannot help acknowledging the purity of the matchless sunshine.

Of natural phenomena this perhaps strikes a Western most, and for a time makes the East so exhilarating. Its influence on character, morality, government, religion, is not now under discussion. Most certainly climate gives a helping hand to mould all these. Everything in a country that is permanent goes to form the characteristics of the nation,-be it mountain, or sea, or clouds, or sunshine.

The life and habits of a people are, to a large extent, moulded by their climate and the peculiarities of their land. Orientalisms and Occidentalisms are not altogether capricious and arbitrary. Many of them are the offspring of the sky and soil. Certain features must always be peculiar to certain nations, not merely because of their ancestry, but because of their physical distinctions; and though, to some extent, there may be a fusion of these, an interchange of peculiarities, yet there are certain great ridges or outlines which must remain unobliterated and almost unsoftened.

Not very far from our shores, and under our dominion, there lies a singular specimen of the East. A Mediterranean island, four days' journey from Dover, will introduce the traveller into some of the "lights and shades" of Oriental life.

It was Christmas-day in Malta. No English June could breathe more of summer than this Mediterranean December:

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the sunlight was superbly yet calmly brilliant; the scorching bite of the sirocco had not yet found its way across the wave from the Lybian furnace where it is generated; the caper-plant hung itself out from the seams or splits in the bastion walls; the oranges gleamed from beneath their freckled foliage; the karûb and the prickly pear were beginning to look out for spring; while the carnation and the lily, luxuriating in the bright air, proclaimed themselves the winter flowers of this sunny isle.

All Valetta was in gala dress, tricked out for holiday, the Church's choicest holiday. Yet with the significance of that holiday nothing was in keeping; and all that was seen or heard seemed, if not a burlesque upon the ecclesiastical symbolism of the season, at least an inebriate outburst of that strange kind of extreme worldliness which finds fullest vent to itself in connection with the scenic ritualism of corrupted Christianity. There was nought to recall the Babe of Bethlehem, the Child of the stable and the manger. The purple robe, the reed, the mock homage, these rather suggested themselves to the muser, whatever they might do to the participator of the glittering mockery. Religion and revel; worship and frolic; the confessional and the tavern; the church and the opera; the penance and the sensuality-these were the alternations of the day for which the population was bustling to prepare. The tall yellow houses; the strait steep streets, with the bold auberges of the Templar age projecting at intervals; the frequent statues of guardian saints; the massive churches, that to the stranger seem half Eastern and half Western, half Arabic half Grecian, in their architecture; the varied dress of the men, and the sly faldette of the women; the crowds of sauntering priests, each one a Silenus or a Bacchus; the scores of British soldiers idling in the shade or drinking in the cafe ;-these are some of the sights that give to the traveller characteristic specimens of the island on whose white rocks he is treading.

Malta is truly the East,-more so than Alexandria. In the latter the West meets the East, and predominates; in the former the East meets the West, and predominates. Lower Egypt is Occidental; Middle Egypt is Oriental (Cairo, its chief city, more Oriental than Calcutta); Upper Egypt, with its temples, tombs, and pyramids, represents the extinct dynasties and tribes of far antiquity. Malta is all Eastern, save in religion. The rock itself is a fragment of Africa; but the religion is not from Mecca, but Rome,-one of the most genuine relics of sensuous European mediævalism that either East or West can furnish. For this it owes something to the Crusades; and the Knights of St John share with apostles the honour of being its tutelary deities. The language, too, is quite unique. Its base is Arabic,

and three-fourths of its words are of that tongue; but Italian has come in, adding new vocables and corrupting the old. A Bedawi from Wadi Sudr or Wadi Mûsa would find himself more at home, in so far as language is concerned, among the Popish peasantry of Sliema or Citta Vecchia, than among his fellow Moslems of Stambûl or Bagdad. Hence Malta furnishes dragomen for Egypt, for the desert, and for Syria, Antonio of Valetta finding small difficulty in conversing with Sheikh Besharah of the Arabah.

With the religion of Malta England does not concern itself, giving full scope to the two thousand men who curse the island under the name of priests; nay rather, it would seem as if governors and generals were more anxious to withhold truth than to give it, more concerned about repressing Protestantism than restraining Popery. For education England does nearly as little as for religion. Why should not men die in the faith in which they were born? Why should children get instruction, without which their fathers, and their fathers' fathers, did sufficiently well? The moral responsibilities of power are nervously protested against by the political philosophies of the day, and totally set aside by the statesmanship that proclaims, as its fundamental axiom, neutrality in religion, the non-recognition of any revelation, liberty, equality, fraternity among all gods and goddesses, saints and prophets alike.

St Julian's College, we have said to ourselves, might do something for its own island. It trains labourers for Asiatic Turkey; and it does well. But might it not break ground in Malta? There is work for its students there. It need not fear to measure swords either with the priesthood or the peasantry around, for both are grossly unlearned. Its square towers seem to speak of strength for siege; let there issue from these the men whom it trains for other fields, to prove their spears upon their own.

Yet there are many things in Malta that speak well of British rule. In this island-gateway of the East justice has its seat, and law is reverenced. In spite of priestly sway and the imperiousness of Romanism, there is a large amount of northern fairness, and the will of the ruler is circumscribed by honest statutes. This supremacy of law over individual will is the real root of the differences in government between Europe and Asia. But the difference is easily effaced. Place a consul beside a pasha in some Eastern town, removed from the ventilation of Western

See "Seventh Report of the Malta Protestant College" (1857). Nothing can be more satisfactory than the "declaration of principles," at p. viii; yet malicious men have cast at it the imputation of "Tractarian" (p. 27)-a convenient epithet, we find, for the unscrupulous. One hears it sometimes at home, and travellers pick it up in the East, as it is flung recklessly about to serve a purpose.