Those cigars! Oh, those cigars! I never smoked the like of those cigars! They beat General Thouvenot's out of the field. They were at least three years old—nearer two pounds of them than one. You may have smoked a good cigar. You may have smoked an old cigar. But these united the two qualities; they were both old and good. The military son had brought them with him from Spain, and left them on his return to the army. The gift of them to me, then, implied a melancholy sentiment; he could not want them. This was expressed by the father, in making the present. It was touching—it was perfectly French. They had one fault, only one; a fault from which no old cigars are free. They were gone too soon; they burned out like tinder. But oh! while they were burning, how shall I describe the sensation! Sensation? It was more than that; it was mental elevation; a vision, a trance, a transfer to the regions of hope, imagination, and enchantment. Every-day nature became prismatic. Matter-of-fact sparkled with variegated lamps. Pledget might have smoked, and fancied himself a poet. Each cigar a tranquillising stimulant, a volatile anodyne, excited, and while it excited soothed, every faculty of the soul; fancy, sentiment, recollection, anticipation, and stern resolve. But ah, my cigar is out! A few puffs have sufficed! Too soon, too soon, it begins to burn my nose! Its last, its dying odours are hurried away by the envious breeze; and the visions which they inspired are gone like a beautiful dream!
[A MONTH AT CONSTANTINOPLE.][3]
Books of travel in the region which modern tourists particularly designate as "the East," and which may be considered to comprise Turkey, Syria, and Egypt, do not, as a class, very forcibly challenge our sympathy and criticism. The best horse may be ridden to death; and no country, however rich in associations and peculiar in its characteristics, however remarkable in configuration and interesting by its traditions, can yield continual fresh pastures to literary travellers, when they descend upon it like a swarm of locusts instead of dropping in at reasonable intervals. Time must be allowed for change and reproduction, or repetition and exhaustion will be the inevitable result. The East, moreover, as a theme for book-wrights, has not only been overdone, but, in many instances, very badly done. People have gone thither with the preconceived idea of publishing, on the strain for the marvellous, the romantic, and the picturesque; and, disdaining the common-sense course of setting down what they saw and giving their real and natural impressions, they have gilt and embellished, like a coach-painter at a sheriff's carriage, till they forced upon us the conviction that they cared more for glitter than for truth. Some, piquing themselves on diplomatic acumen, have filled their volumes with politics, and settled all manner of Eastern questions much to their own satisfaction, and greatly to the weariness of their readers; and these form perhaps the most intolerable of the many classes into which Oriental travellers are subdivisible, but which we shall not here further enumerate, preferring to turn to the examination of the latest Eastern tour that has issued from the English press and found its way to our critical sanctum.
Mr Albert Smith's name, well known within sound of Bow-bells, is far from unfamiliar to a large circle of dwellers without that populous circumference. We cannot affirm that we have read all his numerous works, but with some of them we are acquainted, and we are disposed to think him one of the most amiable and praiseworthy of the school of popular humorists to which he belongs. His jokes are invariably good-humoured and inoffensive—without being on that account deficient in point. He does not wrap radicalism up in fun, as cunning grandmothers envelop sickly drugs with marmalade; nor has his flow of gaiety a sour and mischievous under-current. Neither does he belong to the gang of facetious philanthropists whose sympathies are so exclusively granted to the indigent and miserable, that they have nothing left but gall and bitterness for those of their fellow-creatures who wear a decent coat, and have the price of a dinner in its pocket. A gentleman of most versatile ability, he is by turns dramatist, journalist, essayist, naturalist, novelist, correspondent of a London paper, critic of the ballet, a writer of songs and a manufacturer of burlesque. Such a host of occupations naturally entails the necessity of a little relaxation; and accordingly, in the summer of last year, Mr Smith laid down his pen, shook the sawdust from his buskins, and started for the Mediterranean. As far as Malta we have not ascertained how it fared with him, but of his subsequent proceedings he has informed us in a volume which we had little idea of reviewing when first we learned its expected appearance, but whose perusal has convinced us that it deserves such brief notice as the crowded state of our pages in these busy days will permit us to bestow upon it. We have already implied our opinion that it takes a skilful hand to write an amusing book on so hackneyed a text as a visit to Constantinople. Mr Smith has surmounted the difficulty in an easy and natural manner; and, whilst telling things just as they appeared to him, without affectation or adornment, he has contrived to give an agreeable freshness and originality to a subject which we really deemed threadbare and exhausted.
It was on board the Scamandre, French Mediterranean mail-steamer, that Mr Albert Smith left Malta on an August evening of the year 1849, bound for Constantinople. The weather was fine and the sea smooth as a lake, and there could be no reasonable apprehension of shipwreck even for the crazy French vessel, whose last voyage, save on rivers or along coast, this was intended to be. But although somewhat rickety, of very moderate speed, and not particularly clean externally, the interior accommodations of the Scamandre were by no means bad. And the cabin passengers presented an amusing medley of nations and characters. There were French milliners, striving to pass themselves off as governesses, an elderly French actress from the St James's theatre, a brace of Marseilles bagmen, an enterprising Englishman bent upon smuggling muskets into Hungary, a young Irish officer who had thrown up his commission in the British service to campaign with Bem and Kossuth, and who must have arrived at his destination just as the war reached its end. There was also Mr Sophocles, an intelligent Greek professor from an American university, on his way home after twenty years' absence, and sundry persons unnamed, making about twenty in all, and Mr Smith himself, who, we venture to say, was not the least active and efficient in beguiling the tedium of a week's voyage in a slow steamboat, and who gives us an extremely amusing account of his fellow-passengers and their proceedings. Travelling quite as a citizen of the world, without pretension or care for luxuries, now footing it across the Alps with knapsack on shoulder, then a deck passenger from Genoa to Naples, availing himself of the smooth when it offered, but taking the rough readily when it came, sleeping sometimes on boards for want of a bed, with the knapsack aforesaid for a pillow—Mr Smith seems to have carried through the whole of his ramble those best of travelling companions, imperturbable good humour, and a determination to be pleased with everything and everybody. It is accordingly with all possible indulgence that he views the little foibles of his fellow-passengers per Scamandre, and there is not an atom of acid in the dry humour with which he parades them for the entertainment of his readers. Indeed, before the week's voyage is over, we begin to feel quite intimate with the motley company—to view with indulgence Mademoiselle Virginie's barefaced flirtations with the French commissary, and to sympathise with the good-tempered American, who, having had the misfortune to engage his berth in the first-class cabin—a sort of extra-magnificent place, whose chief distinction from the second class consists, as on German railways, in a heavy additional charge—preferred now and then dining with the less aristocratic inmates of the second cabin, "to know what was going on." There is no place like shipboard for betraying people's habits and peculiarities: everybody is more or less in deshabille; and such a group as that on the Scamandre is a mine to a shrewd observer. Mr Smith kept his eyes and ears wide open, as is his wont, and little escaped him. We select the following specimen of his strictures on foreign habits.
"I should be very sorry to class foreigners, generally, as a dirty set of people when left to themselves; but I fear there is too much reason to suppose that (in how many cases out of ten I will refrain from saying) a disrelish for a good honest plunging wash is one of their chief attributes. It requires but very little experience, in even their best hotels, to come to this conclusion. I do not mean in those houses where an influx of English has imposed the necessity of providing large jugs, baths, and basins; but in the equally leading establishments patronised chiefly by themselves. In these, one still perceives the little pie-dish and milk-jug, the scanty doily-looking towel, and the absence of a soap dish; whilst it would be perfectly futile to ask for anything further. So, on board the Scamandre, this opinion was not weakened. They dipped a corner of a little towel, not in the basin, but in the stream that trickled from the cistern as slowly as vinegar from any oyster-shop cruet, and dabbed their face about with it. Then they messed about a little with their hands; and then, having given a long time to brushing their hair, they had a cigarette instead of a tooth brush, and their toilet was complete. This description does not only apply to the Scamandre passengers, but to the majority of their race, whom I afterwards encountered about the Mediterranean."
We have a vivid recollection of the consternation of an amiable and numerous French family, in whose house a friend of ours once was domiciled, on finding that he each morning required, for his personal use, more fresh water than sufficed for their entire daily consumption, internal and external. Doubtless the worthy people indulged, every eight days or so, in a warm bath; but they had no notion of such a thing as diurnal ablutions above the waist or below the chin, and they shrugged and grinned monstrously at the eccentricity of the Englishman who commenced the day by a general sluice, whereas they rarely thought of washing even their fingers till they dressed for their ante-prandial promenade. And when our friend was laid up, some time later, with a smart twinge of gout, provoked by too liberal use of a very different liquid from water, the entire family, from the elderly father down to the youngest of the precocious juveniles, gave it as their unqualified opinion, that the ailment proceeded from their inmate's rash and obstinate indulgence in the ungenial and, in their opinion, extremely superfluous element.
"Athens in six hours," Mr Smith observes, is rather quick work; but he nevertheless found he could see in that time nearly as much of it as he wished. The Scamandre allowed but a day, and certainly he made good use of the brief halt. At Athens, as in Switzerland and on the Rhine, he found the ubiquitous Murray's Handbook the great authority and certificate of the native competitors for custom. A skirmish with clubs and boat-hooks—the former brought evidently in anticipation of the contest—took place amongst the fancy-ball-looking boatmen, in white petticoats and scarlet leggings, who crowded in light skiffs round the foot of the steamer's ladder. In the intervals of the fight a dialogue was carried on in English, more or less broken.