Anti-Lebanon. Close along on the river's edge, through seven sweet miles of rustling boughs and deepest shade, the city spreads out her whole length. As a man falls flat, face forward on the brook, that he may drink, and drink again; so Damascus, thirsting for ever, lies down with her lips to the stream, and clings to its rushing

waters.

The chief places of public amusement, or rather of public relaxation, are the baths, and the great café. This last is frequented at night by most of the wealthy men of the city, and by many of the humbler sort. It consists of a number of sheds, very simply framed and built in a labyrinth of running streams,-streams so broken and headlong in their course that they foam and roar on every side. The place is lit up in the simplest manner by numbers of small pale lamps, strung upon loose cords, and so suspended from branch to branch that the light, though it looks so quiet amongst the darkening foliage, yet leaps and brightly flashes, as it falls upon the troubled waters. All around, and chiefly upon the very edge of the torrents, groups of people are tranquilly seated. They drink coffee, and inhale the cold fumes of the narguile; they talk rather gently the one to the other, or else are silent. A father will sometimes have two or three of his boys around him, but the joyousness of an

oriental child is all of the sober sort, and never disturbs the reigning calm of the land.

It has been generally understood, I believe, that the houses of Damascus are more sumptuous than those of any other city in the East. Some of these said to be the most magnificent in the placeI had an opportunity of seeing.

Every rich man's house stands detached from its neighbours, at the side of a garden, and it is from this cause no doubt that the city (severely menaced by prophecy) has hitherto escaped destruction. You know some parts of Spain, but you have never, I think, been in Andalusia; if you had, I could easily show you the interior of a Damascene house, by referring you to the Alhambra, or Alcanzar of Seville. The lofty rooms are adorned with a rich inlaying of many colours, and illuminated writing on the walls. The floors are of marble. One side of any room intended for noonday retirement is generally laid open to a quadrangle, and in the centre of this is the dancing jet of a fountain. There is no furniture that can interfere with the cool, palace-like emptiness of the apartments. A divan (that is, a low and doubly broad sofa) runs round the three walled. sides of the room: a few Persian carpets (they ought to be called Persian rugs, for that is the word which indicates their shape and dimension) are sometimes thrown about near the divan; they

are placed without order, the one partly lapping over the other-and thus disposed, they give to the room an appearance of uncaring luxury. Except these, there is nothing to obstruct the welcome air; and the whole of the marble floor, from one divan to the other, and from the head of the chamber across to the murmuring fountain, is thoroughly open and free.

So simple as this is Asiatic luxury! The oriental is not a contriving animal there is nothing intricate in his magnificence. The impossibility of handing down property from father to son for any long period consecutively, seems to prevent the existence of those traditions by which, with us, the refined modes of applying wealth are made known to its inheritors. We know that in England a newly-made rich man cannot, by taking thought, and spending money, obtain even the same-looking furniture as a gentleman. The complicated character of an English establishment allows room for subtle distinctions between that which is comme il faut, and that which is not. All such refinements are unknown in the Eastthe Pasha and the peasant have the same tastes. The broad cold marble floor-the simple couchthe air freshly waving through a shady chamber -a verse of the Koran emblazoned on the wall -the sight and the sound of falling water-the cold fragrant smoke of the narguilè, and a small

collection of wives and children in the inner apartments, all these, the utmost enjoyments of the grandee, are yet such as to be appreciable by the humblest Mussulman in the empire.

But its gardens are the delight—the delight and the pride of Damascus: they are not the formal parterres which you might expect from the oriental taste; rather, they bring back to your mind the memory of some dark old shrubbery in our northern isle that has been charmingly un-" kept up" for many and many a day. When you see a rich wilderness of wood in decent England, it is like enough that you see it with some soft regrets. The puzzled old woman at the lodge can give small account of "The family." She thinks it is "Italy" that has made the whole circle of her world so gloomy and sad. You avoid the house in lively dread of a lone housekeeper, but you make your way on by the stables. You remember that gable with all its neatly-nailed trophies of fitches and hawks and owls now slowly falling to pieces you remember that stable, and that; but the doors are all fastened that used to be standing ajar—the paint of things painted is blistered and cracked-grass grows in the yard. Just there, in October mornings, the keeper would wait with the dogs and the guns: no keeper now. You hurry away, and gain the small wicket that used to open to the touch of a

lightsome hand: it is fastened with a padlock(the only new-looking thing)-and is stained with thick green damp; you climb it, and bury yourself in the deep shade, and strive but lazily with the tangling briers, and stop for long minutes to judge and determine whether you will creep beneath the long boughs, and make them your archway, or whether perhaps you will lift your heel and tread them down underfoot. Long doubt, and scarcely to be ended, till you wake from the memory of those days when the path was clear, and chase that phantom of a muslin sleeve that once weighed warm upon your arm.

Wild as that, the nighest woodland of a deserted home in England, but without its sweet sadness, is the sumptuous garden of Damascus. Forest-trees, tall and stately enough, if you could see their lofty crests, yet lead a tussling life of it below, with their branches struggling against strong numbers of bushes and wilful shrubs. The shade upon the earth is black as night. High, high above your head, and on every side all down to the ground, the thicket is hemmed in, and choked up by the interlacing boughs that droop with the weight of roses, and load the slow air with their damask breath.* There are no other flowers. Here and there, there are patches of ground made

The rose-trees which I saw were all of the kind we call "damask;" they grow to an immense height and size.