Galloping, gossiping, flirting and fighting, feasting and starving,
but always in high spirits and the best possible humour, Colonel
Napier might answer an advertisement for "A Pleasant Companion in a
Post-chaise," without the slightest chance of rejection. But it is
difficult to imagine so dashing a traveller, boxed up in a civilized
conveyance, rolling quietly along a macadamized road, with a diversity
of milestones and an occasional turnpike gate, the only incidents by
the way--no wild Maronite glimpsing at him over the hedge; no
black-eyed houri peeping over the balustrades of the caravanserai,
(called by vulgar men the Bricklayers' Arms)--no Saïces to help John
Hostler to change horses; but dulness, uniformity, and most tiresome
and unromantic safety. England, we are sorry to confess it, is not the
land of stirring adventures or hair-breadth 'scapes--a railway coach
occasionally blows up; a blind leader occasionally bolts into a ditch;
a wheel comes occasionally into dangerous collision with one of
Pickford's vans; but these are the utmost that can be hoped for in the
way of peril, and other excitement there is positively none. We have
treated life as the mathematician did Paradise Lost--we have struck
out all its similes--obliterated its flights--expunged its glorious
visions--we have made it prose. But fortunately for us--for Colonel
Napier--for the reading public--there is a land where mathematicians
are unknown, and where poetry continues to flourish in the full vigour
of cimeters and turbans--the region of the sun--
"The first of Eastern lands he shines upon."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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