people to a better order of things. Perhaps there was much that deserved to be called visionary in his proceedings; a number of illiterate and semi-barbarous Beys made but a wretched figure under the denomination of Notables; and tribes accustomed to the patriarchal institutions of the desert, could but view with stupid wonderment the introduction among them of popular assemblies. Yet for a while all things seemed to proceed as the French General could have wished, and the natives and foreigners lived together in the greatest apparent harmony.

Nor was Buonaparte unmindful all this while of the interests of general knowledge. With his armed multitude came astronomers, chymists, geologists, botanists, geographers, antiquaries, professors, in short, in every branch of philosophy, who, under his guidance and protection, turned themselves each to his favourite pursuit. Seldom has such a spectacle been presented to the eyes of mankind as that which now met them in the country of the Ptolemies. Warriors, politicians, and men of science followed their several occupations as it were side by side, and order and decorum prevailed in the midst of bloodshed and violence.

This flattering state of affairs was not, however, of long continuance. The inhabitants of Cairo and its vicinity broke out into open rebellion, which was not quelled without some loss to the French, and prodigious slaughter among themselves; whilst England and the Porte prepared to wrest from the invaders their insecure conquests. The battle of the Nile, moreover, which at once cut off every hope of securing reinforcements or supplies from Europe, had roused into action all the chiefs and beys of Upper Egypt. Hordes of Mamelukes threatened the French outposts on all sides; and Commodore Sir Sidney Smith, arriving with a squadron on the coast, prepared to support them. To oppose these multiplied dangers, and to crush at a blow all who were adverse to his designs, Buonaparte determined upon an expedition across the desert into Syria; at the same time that a division should penetrate up the country by the Nile, for the purpose of effecting a diversion.

He set out upon this campaign in the beginning of 1799, at the head of 12,895 men, and his progress, in spite of all the obstacles which nature and the enemy threw in his way, was for a time prodigious. His army had moved in different divisions and travelled by different routes, but it united on the 6th of February before El-Arisch, which was held by a native garrison of 2000 men. The place was attacked and carried at the point of the bayonet. The next point where a serious opposition met them was Jaffa, which the Turks defended with much obstinacy; but, like El-Arisch, it was also carried at last, and there remained but one post capable

of arresting the further progress of this victorious army. St. Jean d'Acre refused to open its gates, and Buonaparte prepared to besiege it.

Of the gallant defence of that city by Djezzar-Pacha and his ally Sir Sidney Smith, it is not necessary that we should give here any particular account. It was, to use the words of our author, "une continuité d'assauts et de combats livrés dans un espace si réserré, que les assiégeans et les assiégés furent pendant deux mois à la distance du jet d'une pierre les uns des autres;" and it ended, as every body knows, in the retreat of the French. The retreat was conducted in good order, and the troops, or rather the remains of the troops, re-entered Cairo early in June.

It was well for Buonaparte that he had not longer persisted in his endeavours to reduce Acre. The whole of Upper Egypt was in a ferment. The Mamelukes, recovering their courage, gave ample employment to Dessaix, who had been appointed to keep them in check; whilst a Turkish army landing at Aboukir, proceeded to place Alexandria in a state of investment. Buonaparte flew to its assistance, attacked the besiegers in their trenches, and after a long and hard-fought action, defeated them with great slaughter. This was his last military operation in Egypt. Having strengthened the works at Alexandria, and otherwise put that city in a state of defence, he returned to Cairo, where the intelligence of Dessaix's success was communicated to him, and where he devoted a few days to the confirmation of that tranquillity which now every where prevailed. But Buonaparte's own views had already turned themselves elsewhere, and on the 24th of August he finally quitted Egypt. The following are the observations with which M. Dumas concludes his history of this remarkable war:—

"This war in Egypt, which we are apt to regard merely as a grand episode, operated powerfully on the affairs of France and of all Europe. The harbour and Peninsula of Aboukir will be no less celebrated than the gulf of Ambracia, and the promontory of Actium; nor was the naval engagement of Aboukir more fatal to the French than that on shore was advantageous to them. If Buonaparte had, like Antony, had his choice of contending on either element, he would not have required the advice of the old centurion, which was equally applicable to the French as to the Romans fighting for Antony, on board his vessels; that advice was Let us leave these Egyptians and Phenicians to fight at sea, the land is our element, on land we are sure to conquer.

"We have observed the effect produced on the combined powers by the victory of Nelson, and the total destruction of the French fleet. The victory of Buonaparte, and the annihilation of the Turkish army on the Peninsula, had not, as we shall see, less important consequences.

"What an instance of the caprice of Fortune and the destiny of empires! The two most powerful among modern nations-perpetual rivals, and continually affecting the superiority in arms, the one on the ocean, and the other on the land-have rendered the same shores illustrious by two battles equally memorable, and on the same localities, where the soldiers of Antony and Octavius contended for the last time." This is perfectly French, but it is tolerably just notwithstanding. The length to which this Article has already extended warns us to stop here. There are in these volumes many matters of which we have taken but a very imperfect notice, some which we have not noticed at all; but we have done our best to make our readers acquainted with the general contents of the whole. We can only add, that whoever may take the trouble to peruse the volumes for himself, will, if he have any relish for lively description and happy narrative, find that he has set himself to a task not less agreeable than profitable. To the subsequent volumes we propose to return on some future occasion.

ART. IV.-Lettres sur le Bengale, écrites des Bords du Gange. Par F. Deville, Capitaine de Marine. Paris. 1826. 18vo. THERE is a French maxim, the precise proverbial terms of which we cannot at this instant call to mind, but of which the purport is, that a wise man learns to shave on the chin of a fool; and though we do not mean to pronounce (nor is this our coup d'essai,) whether a young critic can most advantageously wield his maiden pen in the castigation of a very silly author-we hesitate not to say, that admitting this to be the case, we never met with an auctorial chin (to apply the proverb,) half so well adapted for the first cut of a critical razor, as that of Mons. le Capitaine de Marine, whose letters are in both senses of the term lying before us. The English reader will easily suppose, that even with all fit literary acquirements, a Frenchman would not prove the most impartial writer on the state of India, with reference to the British power in that quarter, for his unavoidably recurring remembrance of the successless struggles of his own nation to maintain something like an equality with ours in the East, must of course increase his hereditary dislike of us; nor could he readily be brought to allow us credit either for the superior military tact which expelled the other European intruders; or for the system of government which so very effectually debars their return. But, if even with all the learning and powers of research, which are indispensable in a historian, a Frenchman might not be found the most unobjectionable commentator on our Eastern affairs,

still less is it to be expected that a pert, ignorant, and flippant master of a French trading-vessel, whose travels to the interior extended no farther than Chandernagore, (some thirty or forty miles from Calcutta,) and whose utter ignorance of the languages, English as well as native, was alone sufficient to incapacitate him as a describer of manners and customs-still less, we repeat, is it to be supposed that such an individual can produce a valuable account of what is altogether beyond his professional sphere, and what he has only viewed with the prejudiced eye of a jealous coxcomb. It seems almost incredible, but is literally true, that this trumpery pamphlet has been gravely referred to on several occasions as an authority! Now, if the epistolary correspondence of Captain Deville were to fall into the hands only of persons who had been in India, and who are well acquainted with all circumstances appertaining to that country, it would be superfluous for us to hold up his crudities to refutation or contempt, because no such person could read ten successive pages without meeting with inventions the most barefaced, facts the most shamefully perverted, or reasonings the most absurd, which his own knowledge would enable him to see through as he read; but as these ridiculous billets doux of the Captain are more likely to be conned by the lovers of fiction than by the students of history, and by the fair sex rather than by ours, we think it worth while to occupy a very few pages of a work like this in explaining to such readers that culpable misrepresentations are without the pale of authorized fiction; and that even a French lover, with all his affected admiration of his mistress's mental qualifications, does not hesitate to impose on her understanding by relations given as true, but which he must feel all the while he is writing them, she cannot believe without forfeiting all pretensions to the good sense of which he feigned her to be possessed.

These remarks, which have been elicited by the prefatory history of the letters in question, require some explanation, previously to our entering on the gist of the book, for as few travellers make a series of love-letters the medium through which to convey their novel information to the public, it might be conjectured that we were inappropriately dragging in the misplaced theme, from some notion of our own, that the Captain must have been in love, and thinking of anything but what he should have been, while composing his very curious description of Bengal. Not so, however. The fact really and confessedly is, that Mons. Deville did" temper love and books together," and that he concerted his epistles for the purpose of instructing his Adorable in the ways and means of the English in India, and of shortening the weary hours of a lover's absence, in what he calls, and has practically

shown to be, the "land of fiction!" How much of profound remark or of undeviating veracity an ordinary reader will expect from the letters of a French trading captain in Calcutta to his chere amie in Paris, (this Captain being at the same time, for reasons best known to himself, a determined hater, even beyond all other Frenchmen, of every thing British,) we shall not interrupt our criticism to inquire; but we may warn him en passant, that the less he anticipates in this way the better, though we are assured in an editorial advertisement," that the letters now presented to us are particularly calculated to excite our interest; and that being composed amid the scenes which they describe, by a traveller well informed, and worthy of belief, they cannot fail to throw a new light upon the very beautiful country, which is still so imperfectly known to Frenchmen."

The editor goes on to inform us, that, unlike some authors who are fond of drawing attractive, but too often imaginary pictures, our Captain gives us with equal freedom, both the bad and the good of all that he has seen, balancing for example the destructiveness of the periodical monsoons against the general beauty and salubrity of the climate, and the lamentably absurd prejudices and barbarous superstitions of the natives against their naturally amiable characters and affectionate dispositions. "Lastly," says the sapient editor, "if he makes us perceive the advantages derivable from commerce, he also shows us the English drawing all these advantages to themselves, monopolizing the riches of that unhappy nation, and reducing it to a state of wretchedness next to slavery." It is particularly against the English, as we have already said, that the Captain's indignation is concentrated, and be the immediate topic of his letter what it may, (the editor too observes this ;) he cannot get through more than half a dozen sentences without recurring to his abuse of that nation, the idea of which seems to haunt him like the raw-headand-bloody-bones, the dark chamber and grim white woman of the nursery-themes always abhorrent, and yet always involuntarily brought into remembrance. The subject changes itself into a sort of spectre, an "Ancient Mariner," a "Basilisk," an omnipresent "Foletto," or shall we not rather say that M. Deville delights in all this-and returns with zest to his vile objurgations? Certain it is, his anathemas are numberless, one crowding upon another, and while to an intelligent reader not one of his invectives has the robe of truth thrown over its natural coarseness, each is accompanied by that mawkish affectation of philanthropy, which is now so common-place, and consequently so disgusting.