The interest just now felt in everything that relates to the East would alone be sufficient to ensure to the author of “El Medinah and Meccah” the favourable consideration of the Reading Public.  But when it is borne in mind that since the days of William Pitts of Exeter (A.D. 1678-1688) no European travellers, with the exception of Burckhardt[FN#3] and Lieut.  Burton,[FN#4] have been able to send us back an account of their travels there, it cannot be doubted but that the present work will be hailed as a welcome addition to our knowledge of these hitherto mysterious penetralia of Mohammedan superstition.  In fact, El Madinah may be considered almost a virgin theme; for as Burckhardt was prostrated by sickness throughout the period of his stay in the Northern Hejaz, he was not able to describe it as satisfactorily or minutely as he did the Southern country,-he could not send a plan of the Mosque, or correct the popular but erroneous ideas which prevail concerning it and the surrounding city.

The reader may question the propriety of introducing

[p.xxvi]in a work of description, anecdotes which may appear open to the charge of triviality.  The author’s object, however, seems to be to illustrate the peculiarities of the people-to dramatise, as it were, the dry journal of a journey,-and to preserve the tone of the adventures, together with that local colouring in which mainly consists “l’education d’un voyage.”  For the same reason, the prayers of the “Visitation” ceremony have been translated at length, despite the danger of inducing tedium; they are an essential part of the subject, and cannot be omitted, nor be represented by “specimens.”

The extent of the Appendix requires some explanation.  Few but literati are aware of the existence of Lodovico Bartema’s naive recital, of the quaint narrative of Jos.  Pitts, or of the wild journal of Giovanni Finati.  Such extracts have been now made from these writers that the general reader can become acquainted with the adventures and opinions of the different travellers who have visited El Hejaz during a space of 350 years.  Thus, with the second volume of Burckhardt’s Travels in Arabia, the geographer, curious concerning this portion of the Moslem’s Holy Land, possesses all that has as yet been written upon the subject.

The editor, to whom the author in his absence has intrusted his work, had hoped to have completed it by the simultaneous publication of the third volume, containing the pilgrimage to Meccah.  The delay, however, in the arrival from India of this portion of the Ms. has been such as to induce him at once to publish El Misr and El Medinah.  The concluding volume on Meccah is now in the hands of the publisher, and will appear in the Autumn of the present year.  Meanwhile the Public will not lose sight of the subject of Arabia.  Part of El Hejaz has lately been inspected by M. Charles Didier, an eminent name in French literature, and by the Abbe Hamilton,-persuaded, it is believed, by our author to