PREFACE. THE Editor of "SHARPE'S LONDON MAGAZINE" greets her subscribers on the termination of her first half-yearly task; hoping she has done well, yet promising to do better-inasmuch as her resources will be increased, and her plans more thoroughly developed during the year that approaches. She has already received much valuable co-operation, and can safely assure her readers, that in every respect the next volume will equal, and, in some of its arrangements, surpass, that which is now a candidate for public favour. Will the subscribers permit her to say that she never "makes up" the table of contents, or cuts the leaves of "the last number," without surprise at the small price charged for a magazine combining so much artistic and literary attraction— every page of which is liberally paid for. If "the public" will call to mind, that the Contributors forming the "Staff" of the Magazine, are among the best and most popular authors of the day; and, that, in addition to what is brilliant and amusing, there is much solid and useful information, hallowed by religious but not sectarian principles, in every Parteach adorned by two delicate line engravings, she thinks "the public" will agree with her, in considering "SHARPE'S LONDON MAGAZINE" to be the cheapest periodical published in London, and that the publisher deserves cordial and extensive patronage, risking, as he does, a large capital, to enable families to obtain so much of the best and purest literature, for the sum of ONE SHILLING! The Editor would entreat the attention of Parents to the fact that she watches every page with minute care, so that nothing can creep in that may not be read aloud in the domestic circle. She congratulates her readers on the termination of "another year," and prays that they may meet together at the commencement of the new, with increased happiness, and increased trust-one in the other. A. M. H. ! RECOLLECTIONS BY A QUARANTINE DETENU. TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-EIGHT days, during my wanderings in the Mediterranean, having been unavoidably passed in the lazzarettos of France, Italy, Egypt, and Malta, I feel I have some right to record a few jottingsanent the miseries, impositions, and thousand torments, entailed upon unfortunate travellers by that monster-piece of charlatanism yclept Quarantine. When the Duke of Buckingham laid, as his heaviest anathema, upon the cur that snapped at his ducal fingers the wish that the brute "was married and settled in the country," his grace evidently knew little of quarantine, or I ween the sentence of a banishment to Chowbent, or the depths of the New Forest, for the term of a life, would no doubt have been exchanged for a month's residence in the lazzaretto of Alexandria, amid the flies and other Egyptian plagues, and perhaps during a Khamscen wind, bearing upon its hot breath clouds of sand, so subtle as to penetrate even the recesses of a watch, to say nothing of the parched and excoriated throat and blood-shot eyes of the traveller but lately landed from Beirout or Jaffa, and stricken, perhaps, with the fatal Syrian fever. Quarantine, as a sanatory measure, is, in reality, in the Mediterranean states, but of secondary importance, when compared with its other less ostensible uses, although the checking of contagion through its means is made the pretext for its troublesome enactments, and the fussy, provoking puerilities of the legions of officials living by the abuse; who seem, however, I must say, as far as they are concerned, to be in solemn earnest in their ideas of its importance as an efficacious stayer of the progress of the destroycr. The good people of Marseilles are devout adherents to VOL. XVI. the system, as they have not yet recovered the fright occasioned by the memorable plague of 1720, which carried off 45,000 persons. The barbarous codes of the Health-office, and their accompanying train of bugbears and extortion, are never-failing sources of patronage and profit, independent of being ready engines of tyranny in the hands of the petty despots who govern some of the shores of this sea. In the first place, shoals of hungry government hangers-on are provided for; secondly, the mulets imposed in the shape of fees are no contemptible addition to their finances; and thirdly, during seasons of popular excitement, the means afforded by the pretext of contagious disease raging in any other country possessing institutions of a liberal order, cut off all intercourse between the respective inhabitants until the dangerous period has passed by. Malta, which is so dependent upon Sicily for supplies of nearly every description, has at various times suffered much inconvenience by this most arbitrary system, and more particularly during the late outbreak in the latter island, as the Neapolitan authorities were constantly spreading reports of small-pox and other diseases as having broken out in the former, solely owing to British policy having inclined towards the cause of the insurgent Sicilians: these falsehoods, until disproved, and in all cases with much delay and trouble, were the means of interrupting the communication between the islands, the teeming productions of Sicily rotting in her fields, while the craving Maltese sighs in vain for the picturesque speronara, with raking mast and tapering * A kind of large, open boat, with latteen sails, a number of which trade between Sicily and Malta. B yard, and whose gaudily-painted hull, deeply submerged with plentiful stores of pulse, grain, and wine, and gunwales high-heaped with the orange, the grape, and the melon, once gladdened his eyes at the Marina, at the custom-house, and at the stairs of Nix Mangiare, the soubriquet of these famous steps being at such a juncture very appropriate. The intercourse between Egypt and Syria is greatly trammelled by quarantines, each country being considered, in the Health-office phraseology of the other, as "suspected;" an evil which told heavily upon the comforts of the crew of a little English schooner, named the Emmetjee, which for some years conveyed the mails between Alexandria and Beirout. Under this system of retaliatory measures, she rode quarantine at both places, and actually has had, for the period of a year or more, the yellow flag continually flying, and her crew confined to their diminutive bark, not larger than a fishing-smack—a run on shore being as unattainable by them as by the phantom mariners of the fabled ghost-ship of the Cape of Good Hope. The little Emmetjee was for some years the retreat of a venerable man, whose white hairs and services in every clime had given him just claims to the "red flag at the fore;" but, lacking friends and interest, he performed, as a lieutenant, the humble duty of guarding the letter-bag. The schooner being a merchant vessel, upon her services being dispensed with by the Admiralty, the fine old officer was sent adrift at Alexandria, nearly 3,000 miles from England, without government having made any provision for his departure, from a coast on which the comforts necessary to his declining years were so much abridged by the pitiless regulations of quarantine. The well-known liberality, however, of the Peninsular and Oriental Company, in giving this gentleman a passage from Alexandria, remedied the shortcomings of the Admiralty. An absurd anomaly amid the strictness of Egyptian quarantine requires notice. Suppose, for instance, a traveller has arrived at Alexandria, by sea, from the Holy Land, and is desirous of proceeding to Malta by the English steamer; he is of course immured in the lazzaretto until the vessel sails, and at the proper time is released from his prison, and placed in a wretched boat, both dirty and leaky, and which is dragged at the stern of another, rowed by Arabs, to the anchorage of *Nix mangiare means, in Maltese dialect, "Nothing to eat ;" and the stairs, having been made during a period of scarcity, to give employment to the poor, derive their soubriquet from that season. the packet. Upon coming alongside, it is probable he discovers that the vessel is not ready for sea-the "mails" are not on board-and he is in consequence forbidden to ascend the gangway ladder, as such a proceeding would entail an immediate quarantine, and at once cut off all communication between the ship and the shore, a very serious inconvenience at the busy hour or two previous to departure. In this predicament, the Arabs immediately make the poor voyageur's boat fast to the rudder-chains of the steamer, and leave him in solitary grandeur, perched on the summit of a pile of trunks, to contemplate, like another Marius, tawny ruins on the distant beach, their crumbling outlines wavering or trembling in the loom of the hot haze; or, nearer at hand, his eye rests upon the rudder, the cabin windows, and the keel of the jolly-boat which dangles above him; while ever and anon the old adage of "listeners never hearing any good of themselves," is exemplified, to the marvellous disturbance of his equanimity of temper, by facetious early arrivals among the passengers, who, stealing a peep, retreat a few paces from the taffrail, and, sotto voce, thus indulge, more candidly than politely, in speculations as to the unknown :---" I wonder who upon earth that is!""Did you ever see such an outrageous hat upon any man ?"-"I wonder where did that fellow shave last?"-"How they would stare at him in the park!"-"I say, is it not preciously hot? come, let us see if we can't find a bottle of soda water." Time wears on-one, two, three, four long hours run their sluggish sands out; the sun gets fierce and fiercer still; in vain the eye, averted from the dusty palms and painfully glittering shore of the South, wanders seaward to the cooler North, in search of the long dark lines, which, making the blue deeper still, and tinging the shallower waters near the reefs with streaks of fainter green, till at last, overleaping the rocky barriers of El Kot† and El Hout in snowy flakes, herald the welcome sea breezes;-fruitless is the search; the birdlike sail of the humble djerme -the white turban and swarthy face of her "rais," or steersman-even the chibouk, with which he soothes himself into a tranquillity rivalling Nature's calm-are faithfully reflected on the unruffled harbour. During these weary hours, our poor traveller has passed through the various stages of annoyance and irritation; +Rocks forming part of the barrier stretching across the mouth of the harbour, and between which are the passages. Djerme, a kind of boat with latteen sails. |