STEPHENS . INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL.

FAMILIAR as we have become, through the medium of books and prints, with the colossal monuments of Egyptian grandeur and the interesting features of the Holy Land,—countries that only twenty years ago would have made a traveller's reputation who visited them, but now overrun by holyday tourists,—these volun.es will be read with pleasure, though they add but little to our stock of information. Mr. STEPHENS is a young American, one of the most areeable we have met with in print ; and his nar- rative owes its attraction to his personal character. With no more learning than falls to the lot of every well-educated man, and with no other clue than that afforded by the Scriptures to the track of the Israelites and the footsteps of the Messiah—aspiring not to the character of a scientific, a sentimental, or a book- making traveller (for the publication of his notes was unpremedi- tated)—he carries us along with him by the amusing character of the " incidents" of his journey, and the lively reality of his unassuming narrative; which has the freshness and autobiogra- phical character of a journal, without its tediousness and frag- mentary shape. Mr. STEPHENS'S route from Alexandria to Cairn, and thence up the Nile to the Cataracts, is so far the beaten track of travellers; but in crossing the Desert, he struck out a new and almost un- trodden path, that, since the departure of the children of Israel from " the house of bondage," had only been crossed by the wandering Arab. Under the protection and guidance of the Sheik of Akaba, who had come to Cairo to escort the caravan of pilgrims to Mecca across the Desert, our traveller went through the heart of the Desert to the Holy Land. From Suez he pro- ceeded to Mount Sinai ; and thence traversed the "great and terrible wilderness" to Petra, the Edom of the Scriptures, by Akaba, or Gaza; ascending to the tomb of Aaron on Mount nor by the way, and passing through the whore length of the land of Idumea to Hebron. Neither BURCKHARDT, who first discovered Petra, nor either of the three different parties who have since at various intervals entered this city of the Desert, passed through Idumea: BURCKHARDT, who was the nearest to passing through the land, only glanced its borders; and the other travellers pro- bably followed the track of the caravan, which skirts its edge. To Mr. &meanies belongs the privilege of boasting that he was the first nat dern to disturb the literal fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah, who, in predicting the doom of Idumea, said, " None shall pass through it for ever and ever." This, considering the dangers and difficulties of the way, was no small feat to accom- plish. All travellers give the Arabs of this region the worst of characters : BURCKHARDT himself acknowledges that here he first felt fear during his journey in the Desert. Mr. STEPHENS, however, escaped without being attacked or plundered by the Arabs,—who seem, indeed, to be more formidable in appearance than reality : he came to regard their physical strength and war- like attributes with as much contempt as their moral qualities ; and, being well armed and escorted, after a little acquaintance with their dark, scowling looks and predatory propensities, his chief apprehension was the annoyance of their clamorous demand for bucksheesh, a term answering to our word " largess." From Hebron, he again fell into the beaten way of travellers in the Holy Land ; visiting Bethlehem and Jerusalem, seeing Jordan and the Dead Sea, and proceeding by Capernaum and Nazareth to Mount Carmel, and thence to Tyre and Sidon, where he sailed for Alexandria.

Oiaa rare and excellent quality in Mr. STEPHENS le, that he never affects rapture he dues not feel, nor works himself up into

factitious enthusiasm at the sight of objects and places which might be expected to excite them. He is evidently sensible to impressions that the strangeness and grandeur of the monuments

of man's greatness and littleness cannot fail to produce in every

cultivated mind ; and no pilgrim to the Holy Land ever felt a more sincere reverence for the associations which it awakens: but he has none of the cant of sentiment; when a thing disappoints him he says so; and he is " free to confess" when the romance of travel fades before its uncomfortable realities. In fact,

a man who could not resiat picking off a pigeon from a column of

the Temple of Denderah, though his shot knocked out an eye of Isis whose head formed the capital—who unconsciously shot a partridge from the top of Sinai—and who woke the echoes of Mount Hot by firing a pistol into the tomb of Aaron to get a

light—is not likely to sustain the reputation of a Eusracin, DELAMARTINE. The imagination is not so easily evoked byll. sight of a locality—a particular spot of ground, or a whole regi; does not naturally awaken poetic or historical associations al the inevitable process of cause and effect. Much depeseia,„4 frame of mind at the time, and that again on the bodily eaaditi`4 rt's,'i; Thebes, the city of temples, with its most vast and stepando one of Carnac to which that of Luxor forms the portal, imp4' by its overpowering magnificence, as the Pyramids do by it tile beauty of its architecture : the Desert, like the sea, immensity, or the Acropolis of Athens by the symmetry ati is sublime; and Sinai is an imposing object in itself, stripped of all asse.a. tions. The various pieces in the Holy Land, however, marked 0,4 by credulity and the rapacity of priestcraft as the identical 80,4 where particular events occurred that are recorded in the seem more calculated to shock the devout and rational Chrislii;', by the profanation of sacred associations to fanatical parte*, than to enkindle holy emotions within him. In conteinalatingl plot of earth, or a bit of stone, whether a relic of an individua an event, the mind is pinned down to a material point; whereas, in ranging freely over the scene of past glories and greatness, t4 imagination has room to expand—the very air :cans redolent them. It is, however, a useful, if a disappointing lesson, to ler, from a survey of places famed in story, how much of their beau:7 and majesty is owing to our imagination : and this lesson },fr, STEPHENS, with his practical views of things, teaches very fereibir though without doing violence to rational feelings of veneriti4' for antiquity and sacredness. For instance, in thus bringing de Patriarchs bodily before us, by likening them to the present rse of Arabs, while he strips the latter of the romance of a savage state, he does not abate one jot of our reverence for father Alin, ham.

THE ARAB or THE DESERT.

"The Iltdouius are essentially a pastoral people ; their only riches are di flocks and herds, their home is in the wide &wit, and they have no local 5tt4; ments: to-day they pitch their tent among the mountains, tomorrow in 'Le plain ; and wherever they plant themselves for the time, all that they liana earth, wife, children, and friends, are immediately around them. In fact, life of the Bedouin, his appearance anal habits, are precisely the same as thole of the patriarchs of old. Abraham himself, the first of the patriarchs, soi Bedouin ; and four thousand years have nut made the slightest alteration hide character and habits of this extraordinary people. Read of the patriarchs in the Bible, rind it is the best decription you can have of pastoral life in the ELS at the present day. "The woman whom we had pursued belonged to the tent of a Bedouin not fu from our road, but completely hidden from our view ; and when overtaken by Tuualeb, she recognized in him a friend of her tribe, and in the same spirit, and almost in the same words which would have been used by her ancestonfou thousand years ago, she asked us to her tent, and promised us a lamb or aid for supper. Her husband was stretched on the ground in front of his tent, and welcomed us with an air and manner that belonged to the Desert, bit which a king on his throne could hot have excelled. He was the embodied per. sonitication of all my conceptions of a patriatch. A large loose frock, a stripe! handkerchief on his head, bare legs, sandals on his feet, and a long white beard, formed the outward man. Almost immediately after we were seated, he took his shepherd's cloak, anal, assisted by his son, selected a Iamb from the dart for the evening meal : and now I would fain prolong the illusion of this pas toral scene. To stop at the door of an Arab's tent, and partake with him of a lamb or a kid prepared by his hospitable howls, all sitting together on the ground, and provided with no other implements than those which Nature girt us, is a picture of primitive and captivating simplicity ; but the details were surh • as to destroy for ever all its poetry, and take away all relish for patriarchal feast!. While we were taking coffee, the lamb lay bleating in our ears, as if consciou of its coining fate. The coffee drunk and the pipe smoked, our host arose, and laid his hand upon the victim : the long swinil which he wore over his shoulder was quickly drawn ; one man kohl the head, and another the hind legs; and, with a rapidity alinoA inconceivable, it was killed and dressed, and its smoke;

entrails, yet curling with life, were broiling on the fire. " •

"One by one I had seen the many illusions of my waking dreams fade awn, the gorgeous pictures of Oriental scenes melt into nothing, but I bad still clung to the primitive simplicity and purity of the children of the desert, their tem. perance and abstinence, their contented poverty and contempt for luxuries,u approaching the true nobility of man's nature, and sustaining the poetry of de 'land of the East.' But; any last stream was broken ; and I never saw among the wanderers of the desert any traits of character or any habits of life which did not make me prize and value more the privileges of civilization.I had ben

more than a month alone with the Bedouins ; anal, to say nothing of time mauners,—excluding women from all companionship, dipping their fingers up to the knuckles in the same dish, eating sheep's insides, and sleeping under tents crawling with vermin engendered by their filthy habits,—their teraperanos and frugality are from necessity, not from choice; for in their nature they are gluttonous, and will eat at any tiine till they are gorged of whatever they co get, and then lie down and sleep like brutes. • * " One might expect to find these children of Nature free from the reproach of civilized life—the love of gold. But, fellow-citizens and fellow-worshippers of mammon, hold up your heads, this reproach must not be confined to you! "I never saw any thing like the expression of face with which a Bedouia looks

upon silver or gold. When he asks for bucksheesh, and receives the glittering metal, his eyes sparkle with wild delight, his fingers clutch it with eager rape city, and he skulks away like the miser to count it over alone and hide it from all other eyes."

The following correction of an erroneous notion about the dif- ference between the camel and dromedary is curious : but the explanation looks very like what the author suspects it to be—am Arab hoax.

TILE IIUMP OF THE CAMEL AND DROI■IEDARY.

"I hail along discourse about the difference between the camel and the drew- dary. Buffon gives the camel two humps, anal the dromedary one ; and this, I believe, is the received opinion, as it had always been mine ; but, since I had been in the East, I had remarked that it was exceedingly rare to meet a camel with two humps. I had seed together at one time, on the starting of the cara- van of pilgrims to Mecca, perhaps twenty thousand camels and dromedaries' and had not seen among them more than half-c. dozen with two humps. Nat satisfied with any explanation front European residents or travellers, I. had in- quired among. the Bedouins; and Toualeb, my old guide, brought up smo camels, had given such a strange accouna that 1 never paid any regard to it. No, however, the sheik told nee the same thing, namely, that they were of ailerent races, the dromedary being to the camel as the blood•horse is to the rt.howle; and that the two humps were peculiar neither to the dromedary Of the camel, or natural to either; but that both are always born with only one 11:0,p, which, being a mere mass of flesh, and very tender, almost as soon as the

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young camel is born a piece s sometimes cut out of the middle for the con. ;eoieoce of better arranging the saddle; and, being cut out of the centre, a hoop is 1 ft on either side of theiavity; and this, according to the account given by Toualeb, is the only way in which two humps ever appear on the hack of a camel or dromedary. 1 should not mention this story if I had heard it only once ; but, precisely as I had It from Toualeb, it was confirmed with a swat deal of circumstantial detail by another Bedouin, who, like himself, hail rived among camels and dromedaries all his life ; and his statement was assented to by all his companions.I do not give this out as a discovery made at this lee 'day in regard to ananimal so well known as the camel ; indeed, I am told that the Arabs are not ignorant of that elegance of civilized life call ' quizzing ;' I give it nierelv to show how I whiled away my time in the desert, aud fur what it is worth." Mr. STEPHENS'S opinion of the far-famed MOHAMMED ALI, MOIR of Egypt, is, we suspect, the true one : the old rebel is nothing more than a vulgar despot—one of the common herd of crafty conquerors, who only seek to aggrandize themselves ; his

schemes for the civilization and enlightenment of his virtual sub- jects being mere claptrap.