EASTERN LIFE. PRESENT AND PAST BY HARRIET MARTINEAU. "Joyful to receive the impression thereof, as the eye joyeth to receive light; and not only PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. T is nearly thirty years since I entered by travel upon my study of "Eastern Life, Present and Past"; yet, in preparing for the issue of a new Edition of the book in which I there recorded my impressions and thoughts, there has not been more than a moment's pause upon the question how to present it after so con. siderable a lapse of time. The practice of many authors, poets, essayists, philosophers, and, among the rest, travellers, of altering passages of their works to make them accord with the latest views or impressions of the writer's, must operate either as an example or a warning in such a case as the present. Which should it be?—a warning or an example,-in case of such a lapse of years as must have wrought more or less change in the mind of the writer, and in the aspect of the objects described? I must say that this is a matter on which I have never entertained any serious doubt. Even in the most questionable case of all— that of works of the Imagination, and of productions of the great Masters of Expression, I have always regretted, as no doubt most readers have, the changes too often introduced by poets and essayists in the latest edition of their works, upon the assumption that experience and practice must have improved them,-giving them some. thing more and different to say, and power to say it better. Many, however, who would agree with me in regarding the practice of altering prose and polishing verse as a mistake, may consider books of Travel to be so essentially different from other books as to be treated in a wholly different manner. If changes have been wrought in the scenery of a remote country, or if an ancient people has been brought nearer to us by the advancing civilisation of its inhabitants, the traveller, or his readers, may entertain a doubt whether his book should not be altered, so as to make it as like a picture of the present time as new impressions can make it. For my part, I am satisfied that this is a grave mistake. In writing of my Eastern travel my object was to present faithfully and vividly what I saw, and learned, and felt, and thought; and the book is reissued now unaltered, because I can answer only for what I witnessed; I have nothing to say about the consequences of the deaths of the rulers of Egypt, or of the creation of the Suez Canal, or about life in the Lebanon at this day; or about the exploration of Palestine. An apt illustration of the case of a book of Travel which is still demanded after a course of years, and by a new generation, may be seen in the extraordinary interest which is inspired at this day by Abdallatif's narrative of his Egyptian travel in the twelfth century. Who that has read that book could possibly wish that a line of it had been altered to keep up with the changes constantly wrought by time upon the aspect, and the life, and the character of Egypt? Are we not rather eager to see the wonders of the land as he saw them, the colonnades gracing the sea-shore, before any hint had been offered of the destruction at work at their bases? When the traveller now sees the sparkling granite of one of those pillars emerging, as bright and as fresh as ever, from its grave in the barren sand hills, is he not thankful that we have Abdallatif's picture of the temple in its beauty, rather than any afterthought of its fate when one and another of its columns had been laid low ?-Did not Abdallatif himself enjoy the thought of Father Abraham walking reverentially round the Great Pyramid, gazing at its smooth pictured sides? And would he have exchanged this vivid retrospect for the truest description of the changes wrought by the crumbling away of the surface, the blunting of the angles, the conversion of the shining stone mountain into a gigantic staircase, such as it has by degrees become? The cause which Abdallatif himself assigns for the interest inspired |