[3] According to others the Sadia reigned before the Shereefs.

[4] I was greatly astonished to read in Mr. Hay’s “Western Barbary,” (p. 123), these words—­“During one of the late rebellions, a beautiful young girl was offered up as a propitiatory sacrifice, her throat being cut before the tent of the Sultan, and in his presence!” This is an unmitigated libel on the Shereefian prince ruling Morocco.  First of all, the sacrifice of human beings is repudiated by every class of inhabitants in Barbary.  Such rites, indeed, are unheard of, nay, unthought of.  If the Mahometan religion has been powerful in any one thing, it is in that of rooting out from the mind of man every notion of human sacrifice.  It is this which makes the sacrifice of the Saviour such an obnoxious doctrine to Mussulmen.  It is true enough, at times, oxen are immolated to God, but not to Moorish princes, “to appease an offended potentate.”  One spring, when there was a great drought, the people led up to the hill of Ghamart, near Carthage, a red heifer to be slaughtered, in order to appease the displeasure of Deity; and when the Bey’s frigate, which, a short time ago, carried a present to her Britannic Majesty, from Tunis to Malta, put back by stress of weather, two sheep were sacrificed to some tutelar saints, and two guns were fired in their honour.  The companions of Abd-el-Kader in a storm, during his passage from Oran to Toulon, threw handsful of salt to the raging deep to appease its wild fury.  But as to sacrificing human victims, either to an incensed Deity, or to man, impiously putting himself in the place of God, the Moors of Barbary have not the least conception of such an enormity.

It would seem, unfortunately, that the practice of the gentleman, who travelled a few miles into the interior of Morocco on a horse-mission, had been to exaggerate everything, and, where effect was wanting, not to have scrupled to have recourse to unadulterated invention.  But this style of writing cannot be defended on any principle, when so serious a case is brought forward as that of sacrificing a human victim to appease the wrath of an incensed sovereign, and that prince now living in amicable relations with ourselves.

[5] Graeberg de Hemso, whilst consul-general for Sweden and Sardinia (at Morocco!) concludes the genealogy of these Mussulman sovereigns with this strange, but Catholic-spirited rhapsody:—­

“Muley Abd-ur-Bakliman, who is now gloriously and happily reigning, whom we pray Almighty God, all Goodness and Power, to protect and exalt by prolonging his life, glory, and reign in this world and in the next; and giving him, during eternity, the heavenly beatitude, in order that his soul, in the same manner as flame to flame, river to sea, may be united with his sweetest, most perfect and ineffable Creator.  Amen.”

[6] Yezeed was half-Irish, born of the renegade widow of an Irish sergeant of the corps of Sappers and Miners, who was placed at the disposition of this government by England, and who died in Morocco.  On his death, the facile, buxom widow was admitted, “nothing loath,” into the harem of Sidi-Mohammed, who boasted of having within its sacred enclosure of love and bliss, a woman from every clime.