yashmaks:" of Cypriote witchery in hair, shoulder-slope,
tempestuous fold of robe. He opines as he contemplates the plain,
clumsy Arab wives that the fine things we feel and say of women
apply only to the good-looking and the graceful: his memory
wanders off ever and again to the muslin sleeves and bodices and
"sweet chemisettes" in distant England. In hands sensual and
vulgar the allusions might have been coarse, the dilatings
unseemly; but the "taste which is the feminine of genius," the
self-respecting gentleman-like instinct, innocent at once and
playful, keeps the voluptuary out of sight, teaches, as Imogen
taught Iachimo, "the wide difference 'twixt amorous and
villainous." Add to all these elements of fascination the unbroken
luxuriance of style; the easy flow of casual epigram or negligent
simile;--Greek holy days not kept holy but "kept stupid"; the mule
who "forgot that his rider was a saint and remembered that he was a
tailor"; the pilgrims "transacting their salvation" at the Holy
Sepulchre; the frightened, wavering guard at Satalieh, not
shrinking back or running away, but "looking as if the pack were
being shuffled," each man desirous to change places with his
neighbour; the white man's unresisting hand "passed round like a
claret jug" by the hospitable Arabs; the travellers dripping from a
Balkan storm compared to "men turned back by the Humane Society as
being incurably drowned." Sometimes he breaks into a canter, as in
the first experience of a Moslem city, the rapturous escape from
respectability and civilization; the apostrophe to the Stamboul
sea; the glimpse of the Mysian Olympus; the burial of the poor dead
Greek; the Janus view of Orient and Occident from the Lebanon
watershed; the pathetic terror of Bedouins and camels on entering a
walled city; until, once more in the saddle, and winding through
the Taurus defiles, he saddens us by a first discordant note, the