WHEREAS it has been been deemed expedient, that the taxes, hitherto levied on carriages and horses at the Presidency, should be increased, the following rules for that purpose have been enacted by the authority of the Governor in Council, with the sanction of the Court of Directors of the United Company of Merchants of England trading to the East Indies, and with the approbation of the Board of Commissioners for the affairs of India, and shall have effect from the date of promulgation.

Section 1, clause 1-Clause 1, sec. 24, Reg. 19, A. D. 1827, is hereby rescinded.

Clause 2-The taxes on carriages and horses, used on the island of Bombay, shall in future be assessed and levied according to the following rates on every four wheel carriage, four rupees per month! on every two wheel carriage on springs, three rupees per month! on every two wheel carriage without springs, except such as are drawn by bullocks, two rupees per month! on every two wheel carriage used for riding and drawn by bullocks, one rupee and a half per month; on every two wheel carriage used for carrying loads and drawn by bullocks, if the wheel be of the breadth of two inches and a half, one quarter of a rupee per month! if the wheel be narrower than above specified, three quarters of a rupee per month. On every riding horse, one rupee and a half per

month.*

If the great art of good government be (as some writers contend) to draw as much as possible from the industrious poor, in order to pamper the luxuries of the indolent rich, then are the Governor and Council of Bombay among the best of rulers on the earth; and their Honourable Masters in England, among the greatest benefactors, in thus keeping their distant subjects from the evils of surplus wealth!

THE BROKEN HEART.

SHE stood, in the glorious morn of her life,

Ere her beauty had come to its prime;

And she vow'd that for ever she'd quit the world's strife,
For the hopes of her early spring time,

Like a perishing dream of the night had gone by—

Her fount of delight was all broken and dry.

* Just three times as high as the tax imposed only a month before : namely, six rupees per annum; the present rate being eighteen, or, by lunar months, nineteen and a half rupees per annum.

Her soul's inmost love, which a lov'd one had spurn'd,

She vow'd to her God should be given

In her heart's sinless shrine, that the incense which burn'd,
All pure should be wafted to heaven:

In her cell's hallow'd stillness she deem'd to have
That all rebel repinings for ever should cease.

So she looked her last with a tearless eye,

On a world she loved no longer

She passed from its pleasures without a sigh

As the holy flame grew stronger,

peace,

She deem'd her fond longings were thrown to the wind-
That her earthly affections were all left behind.

She entered those precincts of horrible gloom,
Whose threshold is pass'd again never-
The silence, but not the deep rest, of the tomb,
There she found had its dwelling for ever.
A desolate calmness, all cold and unblest,
Pervaded those shades-'twas not laden with rest.

With its vigils and fasts, stern devotion was there,
But its comforts were barren and vain ;

All heartless and cold was the murmuring prayer—
All feeble the languishing strain.

The tide of existence stood stagnant and still,

Yet her heart's early throbbings came back at their will.

Then she thought of the world from which she had pass'd―
It seemed robed in the hues of delight,—

A more beautiful green o'er its bosom was cast,
And the beings who walk'd it were bright
With beauty and love, then did sorrow arise
Within her fair bosom, and gush from her eyes.

And the vision of him who had won her first love,
In slumber came often before her,-

In the accents of strong deathless passion he strove
To tell her he yet did adore her.

Then the flood-gates of bliss once again were unseal'd,
But the convent's lone gloom with the morn was reveal'd.

The present was dark as the valley of death

The future, a dull hopeless void;

All chill'd was the glow of religion and faith,

And the dreams of the past were denied.

Yet she drank of the cup which her destiny gave,

Till its waters o'erflowed,-then she sunk in the grave.

L.

PACHO'S TRAVELS IN CYRENAICA AND MARMARICA.

[Concluded from our last Number, p. 501.]

Ir is not given to every man, to acquire reputation by an excursion into a little corner of the earth, which is, as it were, at one's door, and under one's eyes. But M. Pacho has proved himself to be precisely the man to explore Cyrene. Every thing goes on wonderfully well when the traveller is suited to his journey; but, unfortunately, this perfect accordance is uncommonly rare. If Ledyard had been sent into Cyrenaica, he would have rapidly traversed that country; on his return, he would have printed some concise and energetic notes, stamped with a sort of genius; the scenes and the ruins would have furnished him with picturesque representations; he would have described the manners of the inhabitants, by their resemblance or their contrast with those which he had observed at the other end of the world: but we could not expect any thing complete or finished from him. This companion of Cook was merely a traveller; he had not the patience to compare the ruins which he had seen, with other ruins of past time which are spoken of in books; he had no taste for such an occupation, and a quarter of the time which it would consume, would have sufficed him to reach, a second time, the Polar Circle, or to go to Tombuctoo, if death had not prevented him. Even Belzoni himself, who from a quack became an antiquarian, though he might delight in the midst of the ruins of Cyrene, was no writer. He was anxious to be moving, rather than curious to relate well; and required a striking, gigantic, and, so to speak, a dazzling subject; composed of facts which needed no embellishment, which the most meagre statement could not render dull, and such as, when once in circulation, pass from mouth to mouth, like the news of a victory: he revelled in the pyramids, the obelisks, and the tombs of the Pharaohs. On a subject of ordinary interest, and containing nothing of a popular description, he might have produced a work useful to science; but it would have been shapeless and charmless, with but little embellishment; good as a book of reference, but tiresome reading.

Very different from this will be the work of M. Pacho, if he complete it as he has begun it. He has not only made a very useful voyage; he has not only filled up a chasm in the geography of the north-east of Africa, designed with care all the monuments which offered themselves to his view, copied numerous inscriptions with unequalled fidelity and exactness, collected plants, determined a latitude approached from more than sixty different points, and, lastly, studied the manners and customs of the inhabitants: but on his return amongst us, he availed himself of the advice of our learned men, he searched in libraries for all that related to the country which he had just visited; and, when he began to write about it, he

reduced his journal to a just proportion, and by carefully expunging all those private details which interest none but the traveller himself, gave a proof of his taste in a subject which demanded it. In short, this man, buried so long in Libya, (for the vogage to Cyrene was not his first enterprise,) has shown himself a skilful narrator. Clear and precise in technical details, he knows how to relate an historical fact, to describe a country and its manners, and to analyse and communicate the immediate impressions of the scenes of nature on his mind. Many of these merits we have already remarked on, in our account of The Historical Introduction to Cyrene;' the rest became evident to us, in perusing 'The Account of Marmarica.'

Every one, by consulting his memory, will easily find the situation of Marmarica. It is that part of the shore which extends to the left of the Nile, behind the island of Crete, and opposite to Greece; a small country, in some parts capable of culture, and which appears in every respect to belong to Egypt. Indeed it may be said to have had the same origin as Lower Egypt; for if one was, according to the expression of the ancients, the daughter of the Nile, the other was, at least, fertilized by its alluvial discharges. The ancient Egyptian tradition, so confidently related by Herodotus, will be remembered. The Egyptian priests used to say, that before the time of Menes, the Nile flowed through Memphis, and lost itself among the sands of Lybia; but that prince made it a new bed on the east of this town, and forced it to return between the two chains of mountains which form its valley. In the time of Herodotus, not only was the ancient bed of the river visible, but also the embankment that closed up its entrance, which the Persians preserved with the greatest care. Even now this channel is not unknown; it may be traced across the desert, and passes to the west of the lakes of Natron. It is even said that decayed timber, masts and yards, the wrecks of ships which formerly navigated it, still point out its track; the Arabs continue to give it the name of Bahr bela má, or the sea without water.' It is traced on the map of M. Pacho; and, from the direction which he gives it, it would seem that the river took its rise in Marmarica below the Lake of Mareotis. But at the same time that Egypt is indebted to the new bed of the Nile for the Delta and its wonderful fertility, does not the eastern part of Marmarica owe, to the ancient course and rich alluvia of the same river, those germs of fruitfulness, which distinguish it from the arid sands by which it is surrounded. But we will leave this conception, which may possibly have no foundation, and pass on to the exact information which M. Pacho gives us.

6

All the country, comprised between Alexandria and the Gulph of Bomba, covers an extent of one hundred and fifty-six leagues from east to west. A tract of cultivable land stretches along the sea-coast, and extends ten, or fifteen leagues at most, towards the south,

Beyond that lies nothing but a burning desert, where, at long intervals, one meets with small spots of fruitful land, which Strabo, the philosophical geographer of antiquity, very ingeniously compared to the spots on the leopard's skin. The tract of land which has been mentioned, is crossed on every side by chains of hills, rising progressively in height the further they are removed from the sea-coast, which are intermingled with plains, and sometimes during winter discharge large torrents of water down their sides. The soil of Marmarica bears testimony on every hand to great natural changes, at the same time that its state of devastation presents a picture of great human revolutions. Sea-shells are incrusted on the rocks, plants petrified by the sea are scattered over the hills, and the substratum of the soil is composed of baysalt and granite intermixed; in short, an assemblage of minerals of different kinds, incongruously heaped together, forms the general characteristic of this country. 'In traversing it,' says M. Pacho, • the traveller experiences a painful sensation. The uniform nakedness of the place renders him more sensible of the destruction of the towns, and of the absence of their inhabitants. He sees before him nothing but gloomy plains and burning hills; he advances, but the aspect is the same; and in the midst of this vast picture, without life as without colour, scarcely is he informed of the presence of man by the distant bleating of the flocks, and the black specks of the Arab tents.'

This picture of the desert, which separates Egypt from Cyrenaica, explains, in some degree, the ignorance in which Europe has remained with regard to the Libyan Pentapolis, in spite of its vicinity and all the charm of its ancient recollections. In Marmarica, however, inhospitable as it is, dwell Arabs who are mild, peaceable, and benevolent towards strangers; while in Pentapolis, where the earth is as fertile and delightful as ever, the present inhabitants are vile and bigoted, and feel nothing but hatred and contempt for those who are not Musulmans. The first form the tribe of the AouladAly, the second that of the Haraby.

According to the documents which M. Pacho has been able to collect, the population of the country, comprised between Alexandria and the mountains of Cyrenaica, amounts to about 38,000 souls. All the men are armed, but they do not all possess horses; the number of horsemen amounts at most to 4,000.

Marmarica, or rather its most easterly parts, formed, in ancient times, the Egyptian states, called Mareotis and Libya, and it is still subject to the Pasha of Egypt. But his authority extends only to the west of Berek-Marsah, or, according to other reports, to the foot of Catabathmus Magnus, farther towards the west, which would assign him a much greater extent of territory. To reconcile these accounts,-the one given by M. Pacho, and the other by a German traveller, (M. Scholz,) who preceded him without having