He then visited the cannibal Mpangwe, the Fans of Du Chaillu, whose accuracy he had always stood up for when the world had doubted him, and now he was able to confirm it. He then went to Benin City, which was mostly unknown to the Europeans. Belzoni was born in Padua in 1778. During the last eight years of his life he was an African explorer; and he died in Africa, at Benin, in 1823, and he was buried at Gwato, at the foot of a very large tree; guns were fired, and a carpenter from one of the ships put up a tablet to his memory. It is suspected that he was poisoned for the sake of plunder. It was said that some native had inherited his papers. Richard offered £20 for them, but without avail. Belzoni's tree is of a fine spreading growth, which bears a poison apple, and whose boughs droop nearly to the ground. It is a pretty and romantic spot. He writes, "I made an attempt at digging, in order that I might take home his bones and, if possible, his papers, but I was obliged to content myself with sketching his tree, and sending home a handful of wild-flowers to Padua. He died, some say, on the 26th of November, and some say the 3rd of December, 1820." It is remarkable the tender feeling that Richard had for Travellers' graves abroad; indeed, any English graves abroad, but especially Travellers or Englishmen. The number of graves that we have sought out, and put in a state of repair and furnished with tombstones and flowers, you would hardly believe—Lady Hester Stanhope's in Syria, Jules Jaquemont's in Bombay, a French traveller, and many, many others. It showed the feeling that he had about a traveller coming home to lay his bones to rest in his own land, and the respect he had for their resting-place. It makes me all the more thankful that I was able to bring him home to the place he chose himself, and that our friends enabled me to put up such a monument to him.

He brought out, in Fraser's Magazine, several letters in February, March, and April, 1863, previous to his "Wanderings." He ascended the Elephant Mountain, and when he came home he lectured upon that before the Geographical Society. I remember so well, when Richard had submitted something he had written to Norton Shaw, at the Royal Geographical Society, the latter saying, "I don't ever remember hearing this word before, Burton! Where does it come from?" He threw back his head and laughed. "I coined it myself of course, and who has a better right?" Norton Shaw laughed heartily. "Well," he said, "it is a good word, a very good word." "Oh!" said Richard, "I always coin one when I have not got one; it is the only way." He visited the line of lagoons between Lagos and the Volta river. He explored the Yellahlah rapids of the Congo river, and while engaged in all this he collected 2859 proverbs in different African tongues, as for example the Wolof tongue, Kanuri or Bornuese, the Oji or Ashanti, the Ga or Accra, the Yoruba; some from the Eun or Dahoman; some from the Isubú, and Dúalla, of the Bight of Biafra; some in the Efik of the Old Calabar river, also Bight of Biafra; some from the Fans or Mpangwe, from the Upper Gaboon river. He held that the object of language-study was to obtain an insight into the character and thought-modes of Mankind, and that it was not only necessary to speak their language, but to investigate their literary compositions.

He thought that in the Semitic dialects, and in other Asiatic and Indo-European tongues—as the Persian, which imitate their style—the habit of balancing sentences naturally produces this parallelism, and he believed that "The Thousand and One Nights" supplies as many instances as can be found in the Hebrew poets. He thought that the whole of Yoruba shows more or less the effects of El Islam. With respect to the Kafirs, he says it must be noticed that they are a mixed race of African, Arab, and perhaps Persian blood. He thought that a collection of proverbs of this sort would make a kind of manual of Asiatic thought. The nations of the East, he said, always delight in the significant brevity of aphoristic eloquence; and the Proverbs of Solomon show their antiquity and their extensive uses by the Jews. The Arabs were equally addicted to proverbs, which passed into the Persian and Indian languages. He therefore produced "Wit and Wisdom from West Africa; or, a Book of Proverbial Philosophy, Idioms, Enigmas, and Laconisms," in 1865, in 1 vol., and his "Mission to Gelele, King of Dahomè" (2 vols., 1864), which should be now a very useful book to the French army, as his "First Footsteps in East Africa" or "Harar" should be to the Italians.

[1] A month ago a black missionary from the Cameroons, with his white wife and her two sisters, paid me a most feeling visit at Mortlake, and visited Richard in his mausoleum, where they showed deep emotion and affection. He had stayed with them on the Cameroons nearly thirty years ago.—I. B.

[CHAPTER XVIII.]

HOME.

At last the time came round for a second leave, and we had a second joyous meeting at Liverpool—this time to part no more as previously. It was on the 28th of August, soon after his landing, 1864, that we chose our burial-place in the Mortlake Cemetery. We had been for that purpose to one of the big cemeteries—I think it was Kensal Green—and we had seen with discomfort that there was so much damp, and looking into an open grave we saw it was full of water; so he looked round rather woeful, and instead of saying it was melancholy, as most men would have done, and as I thought, he espied a tomb on which the instruments of the Passion were represented, amongst them the cock of St. Peter. So he said, "I don't think we had better be too near that cock, he will always be crowing and waking us up." We were on a visit to my aunts at Mortlake, who had bought Portobello House, close to the station, nearly opposite to where I live now, had been settled there for some years, and where we had had many large family reunions. We walked into the burial-ground where numbers of my people are buried, and he said, "We will have it here; it is like a nice little family hotel;" and he again confirmed the idea in 1882, when we came down to visit my mother's grave.