BEBEC.       137

in order to congratulate the trembling wretch who quailed before him, gasping out assurances of his innocence of all offence, either against his faith of his neighbour, that the opportunity was taken from him of perpetrating all the misdeeds which were registered in his face, and from whose dark effects the Pasha had so fortunately rescued the public: for there they were; and if yet to do, the greater the blessing which had been vouchsafed to him in an interference that might prevent them altogether. And upon these premises, or rather to satisfy this caprice, it is seriously asserted that so many miserable and guiltless wretches were sent to suffer an to die amit the filth, and squalor, and toil of the public bagnio, that the Sultan found it necessary to interfere with the pursuit of his minister, and to compel a discontinuance of the pastime.

It was possibly from a consciousness of his own great personal beauty that Ali indulged in so inhuman a hatred towards those who were less physically gifted; and that his taste for bringing his victim into immediate contact with himself, grew out of the savage vanity of forcing upon him a sense of his own ugliness. Be that as it may, he is described by those who knew him as one of the mildest and most benevolent looking of men.

On the page of poet the same record is inscribed; for thus "the Childe" bears witness to the fidelity of the description at a later period of the Pasha's life: -

"In marble-paved pavilions, where a spring
Of living water from the centre rose,
Whose bubbling did a genial freshness fling,
And soft voluptuous couches breathed repose,
ALI reclined, a man of wars and woes;
Yet in his lineaments ye cannot trace,
While gentleness her milder radiance throws
Along deeds that lurk beneath, and stain him with disgrace.

"It is not that yon hoary lengthening beard
Ill suits the passions which belong to youth;
Love conquers age - so Hafiz hath averr'd
So sings the Teian, and he sings in sooth -
But crimes that scorn the tender voice of ruth,
Beseeming all men ill, but most the man
In years, have mark'd him with a tiber's tooth;
Blood follows blood, and through their mortal span,
In bloodier acts conclude those who with blood began."

On the crest of the hill behind Bebec, there is an oak wood, in whose depths as a small space covered with short fresh turf, without a single tree, where the human voice awakens a multiplied echo so singular as to have become a source of much amusement to its visitors.