THERE

are certain changes which, looked at prospectively, appear so improbable, or at least so remote, that he who would speculate upon them, no matter how plausible may be his conjectures, is looked upon by those around him as evincing symptoms of at least an enthusiastic temperament, if not of a defective understanding. Nature moves with so slow and magnificent a course, she glides so imperceptibly from one phase of things to another, that to calculate on the influence of intellectual advancement or retrogression upon her, appears like an insult to her dignity, and renders the speculator obnoxious to the charge of something little short of infidelity. Even the acknowledged divine afflatus of the prophets of old did not exonerate them from a similar imputation; and when the rapt visions of Isaiah pictured the thronged and mag

nificent avenues of Petra a desert and a desolation, all the authority which inspiration lent to sublimity did not command complete credence for the fatal prophecy, and its fulfilment nee ded the sanction of an enlightened and far future age, to establish and stamp it with the seal of truth.

Hence we have analogy to justify the supposition, that if there had arisen a mind, so late as at the commencement of the present century, of power and foresight vast enough to have calculated from the elements of action then at work, the amount and direction of the change which forty years should have produced, the bulk of mankind would have lifted up their hands in mingled astonishment and derision, and charged upon the prophet an amount of presumptuous impiety measured by their own comparative intellectual inferiority.

Forty years ago, the deserts of Egypt and Syria lay beneath the sun in slumber as deep as that of the mummies in the chambers of Memphis. It seemed as if the denunciation of the Lord which had swept over them like a simoom, and left them lifeless and prostrate through the long centuries of European relapse and revival, were to be as eternal in its duration as in its truth, and that the judgment-day were destined to find those once fertile regions the terra damnata they were left, as impassable to the foot of the traveller as the Dead Sea was fabled to be to the wing of the bird-a silent monument of human faithlessness, on which the epitaph was to be legible to quick and dead.

But during forty years the mind of man had been at work. The bounddaries of his power, physical and intellectual, had been enlarged beyond all former precedent. By the potent influence of Christianity and enlightenment, door after door, sealed up against the darkness and infidelity of the nations, had been thrown open to their light and to their faith, the walls of partition which had separated the sacred from the profane, had been successively levelled, and the meditative and thoughtful spirit of man was admitted once more, now that the Divine purpose had been vindicated and recognized, to penetrate "within the veil," and draw the lessons of wisdom from the long-closed volumes wherein they were earliest written.

All is now patent before us. The world is at liberty to satisfy its curiosity, where for ages faith alone, and the scanty and vague reports of the adventurous few who had pressed within the sacred precincts, were what it had to trust to; and it is likely that ere long the tide of international circulation will pass as freely through the deserts of Arabia, Syria, and Egypt, as the Niger has been found to do through those tracts in which it was supposed to have lost itself in the sands.

But although a very moderate enthusiasm is now sufficient to realize this state of things at no very distant period, yet at present the way, though open to all, has been trod by comparatively few. Men of some degree of adventure alone, or of some degree of religious fervour, have been, with a

few exceptions, found hitherto to have availed themselves of the providential permission. It yet requires zeal, opportunity, and a command of resources not within the reach of every one, to turn aside from the beaten track, and plunge into the desert. A degree of romance yet characterizes the course of those who do so. A visit to Calvary and the pyramids has not become an every-day occurrence, a mere excursion of business or pleasure. And still less changed are the aspect and character of the places thus visited. All travellers bear testimony to the unbroken and portentous repose of the deserts, not only those tracts which have been always so, but those which, from fertility and magnificence, have withered into desolation under the Divine curse. The steps of travellers have as yet worn no path. They pass as over a sea, which closes after them. They find solitude, ruins, and tombs-they leave solitude, ruins, and tombs behind them. true they are relieved from the hostility of fierce tribes-from the obstruction of barbarous chiefs-from the interdict of pashas or sultans; they have accommodation, refreshment, information, security; but the land is as it was--depopulated of man-devastated of cultivation-discrowned of cities and temples-crowded instead with the mighty memories of the past alone, which fill the scene with the works and the wonders of primeval antiquity.

It is

This will not always be it will not long be-but it is; and hence the untiring interest with which the world follows the steps of traveller after traveller, eagerly catching every echo that tells of his discoveries and adventures, and pondering on the records of his experience in the chamber of its inmost sympathies.

If in passing over holy ground, Lord Lindsay exhibited all the pure and exalted feelings of Lamartine, without his too sickly and superstitious sentimentalism, Mr. Warburton has caught, or been originally possessed of, the tone of mind of his noble predecessor, with the admixture of a vein of sprightliness, a rapidity and brilliancy of thought, a felicity of imagery, which the other could not so justly lay claim to; and thus brought to the task the only requisite wanting to constitute the full mental equipment of a tra