Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 — John Shaqi
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
a car drawn by two horses, which in six hours brought him to the banks
of the Timok, the river which separates Servia from Bulgaria. The
Servian population, among whom he now first found himself, struck him as
a superior race, both physically and morally, compared with those whom
he had just left, possessing a manliness of address and demeanour
unknown to the serfs of Bulgaria; and, instead of the woolly caps and
frieze clothes of the latter, the peasants wore the red fez, and were
generally dressed in blue cloth. The plough cultivation of Bulgaria was
now exchanged for the innumerable herds of swine, which form the staple
commodity of Servia, fed in the immense oak woods which cover the
country. "They form" (as Mr Paget informs us in his work on Hungary) "a
very important article of trade between Servia and Vienna; and I doubt
if Smithfield could show better shapes or better feeding than the market
of a Servian village." Continuing his route along the banks of the
Danube to New Orsova, where he crossed to the Hungarian bank, he again
posted, with "an enormously stout Wallachian matron" for a travelling
companion, to Drenkova, whence another steamer conveyed him to Semlin,
and half an hour's pull down the Danube and up the Save (the line of the
two rivers being distinctly marked at the confluence by the muddy colour
of the former, and the clearness of the latter) landed him safe at
Belgrade.
We may here mention an amusing anecdote, related in another part of the
volume, in connexion with the town of Panczova below Semlin, where "the
town-major, after swallowing countless boxes of Morison's pills died in
the belief that he had not begun to take them soon enough. The
consumption of these drugs at that time almost surpassed belief. There
was scarcely a sickly or hypochondriac person, from the Hill of Presburg
to the Iron Gates, who had not taken large quantities of them." _Mais
voila le mot d'enigme._ "'The Anglomania,"' was the answer to a query of
the author, "'is nowhere stronger than in this part of the world.
Whatever comes from England, be it Congreve rockets or vegetable pills,
must needs be perfect. Dr Morison is indebted to his high office (!) for
the enormous consumption of his drugs. It is clear that the President of
the British College must be a man in the enjoyment of the esteem of the
government and the faculty of medicine; and his title is a passport to
his pills in foreign countries.' I laughed heartily, and explained that
the British College of Health, and the College of Physicians, were not
identical." We well remember a statement some years since among the
innumerable puffs of the arch-quack, (now gone, we believe, to that
bourn whither so many of his patients had preceded him,) that in
gratitude for the countless cures of incurable diseases by the
"Universal Vegetable Medicine," a statute of the Hygeist had been
erected in Bukarest, not in his native brass, but 'in his habit as he
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