Wherever the steamboat
touches the shore adventure retreats into the interior, and what is
called romance vanishes.
It won't bear the vulgar gaze; or rather
the light of common day puts it out, and it is only in the dark
that it shines at all. There is no cursing and insulting of
Giaours now. If a Cockney looks or behaves in a particularly
ridiculous way, the little Turks come out and laugh at him. A
Londoner is no longer a spittoon for true believers: and now that
dark Hassan sits in his divan and drinks champagne, and Selim has a
French watch, and Zuleika perhaps takes Morison's pills, Byronism
becomes absurd instead of sublime, and is only a foolish expression
of Cockney wonder. They still occasionally beat a man for going
into a mosque, but this is almost the only sign of ferocious
vitality left in the Turk of the Mediterranean coast, and strangers
may enter scores of mosques without molestation. The paddle-wheel
is the great conqueror. Wherever the captain cries "Stop her!"
Civilisation stops, and lands in the ship's boat, and makes a
permanent acquaintance with the savages on shore. Whole hosts of
crusaders have passed and died, and butchered here in vain. But to
manufacture European iron into pikes and helmets was a waste of
metal: in the shape of piston-rods and furnace-pokers it is
irresistible; and I think an allegory might be made showing how
much stronger commerce is than chivalry, and finishing with a grand
image of Mahomet's crescent being extinguished in Fulton's boiler.
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