[33] Napoleon in captivity, being asked if he really had the intention of attacking Gibraltar, or the hope of getting possession of it, answered, “It was not my business to relieve England from such a possession. It shuts nothing, it opens nothing, it leads to nothing,—it is a pledge given by England to France, because it ensures to England the undying hatred of Spain.”
[34] The following is only suggested as a rough guess:—
| Ordinary expenditure during ninety years of peace | £18,000,000 |
| Extraordinary expenditure during fifty-five years of war | 22,000,000 |
| Sieges, including expenses of fleets for its defence, vessels for its supply, loss of ships to the enemy, &c. | 10,000,000 |
| Fortifications | 5,000,000 |
| £55,000,000 |
[35] “Potiemur præterea cum pulcherima opulentissima que urbe tum opportunissima, portu egregio unde terra marique quæ belli usus poscunt suppeditentur * * Hæc illis arx, hoc horreum, ærarium, armamentarium, hoc omnium rerum receptaculum est. Huc rectus ex Africa cursus est. Hæc una inter Pyrenæum et Gades statio. Hinc omnis Hispania imminet Africæ.”—Livy.
[36] He did his best to restore it to its rightful owner.
CHAPTER IV.
EXCURSION ROUND THE STRAITS.
Tetuan, June 15th.
I have been a week in Barbary. I landed at Tangier, and crossed the country to this place, but I have been too busy taking in and digesting, to put pen to paper. If I could abstract my eastern self, the task of description would be comparatively easy. Yet Morocco is as different from the East, as the East is from Europe; nor has it only the interest of diversity. This land seems the common parent of both: things come suddenly upon you, which carry you back to the earliest times, or afford the key to the commonest present customs. The idle curiosity first awakened, is soon changed to a sense of the importance of every trifle.
I will begin with the last thing I have seen. I have just returned from the gardens called Kitan, about three miles from this place: they are in a wooded valley at the beginning of the fore-foot of the lesser Atlas, which towers above. We passed through lanes of tall reeds, partitioning off other gardens, and entered by a gate a lofty apartment, composed of split reeds woven together in various trellice patterns: over the higher parts, the vine was trained; the sides, windows, and doors were festooned with jasmine. Here our horses were left; but the gardens in Morocco are adjusted for equitation, and the covered alleys are high enough to be ridden through. The ornamental buildings were ruined and the garden is let out as an orchard for its fruit. A broad terrace supported a reservoir on a level with the tops of the trees, and on it stood a pavilion. The whole exhibited a stamp and character of its own, and one could quite imagine it to belong to the people who had introduced gardening into Spain; or rather, who had converted Spain into a garden. I was no less surprised to find realised an early association of my own, of Morocco and gardens. No doubt the materials are here ready formed,—luxuriant vegetation, infinite variety of plants, charming sites; and these alone are enchanting to us of more northern climes; but none of these are wanting in Spain—at least the difference is slight, and in degree only; but here there is a type and style.
There were the same hedges of reeds; lanes of cactus, trellices of cane. Before Mirza crossed the Straits, or the Saracens issued from the desert, the Arabs came not to teach, but to learn the culture of flowers, and the irrigation of fields: they came to pluck the fruit, not to plant the seed of the golden tree. So, in like manner, came the Greeks. I want no books to tell me where were the Hesperides. I tried to forget the taste, figure, and perfumes of the orange and lemon, and the trees that bear them, that I might, with the Greeks who first saw these bowers, enjoy the surprise of their dark perpetual green, of the white untiring flowers, of the freshness, ever ready for the thirsty, stinted by no season, and throughout the year lavishing on all the bounty and the fragrance of their golden fruit.