tholomew Eliot George Warburton, who wrote as Eliot
Warburton, was born in 1810 in Tullamore, Ireland, and
died in 1852. He graduated at Cambridge, where he was the
fellow student and intimate friend of Hallam, Monckton
Milnes, and Kinglake (of "Eothen" fame). He studied law
and was called to the bar, but instead of practising in
the legal profession took to a most adventurous career of
travel, and wrote of his experiences in a spirited and
romantic style which soon secured him a wide reputation.
His eight works include "The Crescent and the Cross,"
which appeared in 1845, after his wanderings in Egypt,
Syria, Turkey, and Greece; "Memoirs of Prince Rupert," and
"Darien, or the Merchant Prince." He was sailing for
Panama, as an agent of the Atlantic and Pacific Company,
when he was lost in the steamship Amazon, which was burnt
off Land's End on January 4, 1852. Warburton was beloved
for his generous, amiable, and chivalrous disposition. His
peculiar gift for embodying in graphic terms his
appreciation of striking scenery and his picturesque
delineation of foreign manners and customs give his works
a permanent place in the classics of travel.

We took leave of Old England and the Old Year together. On the first of
January we left Southampton; on the evening of the 2nd we took leave of
England at Falmouth. Towards evening, on the 18th day since leaving
England, the low land of Egypt was visible from the mast-head. The only
object visible from the decks was a faint speck on the horizon, but that
speck was Pompey's Pillar. This is the site Alexander selected from his
wide dominions, and which Napoleon pronounced to be unrivalled in
importance. Here stood the great library of antiquity, and here the
Hebrew Scriptures expanded into Greek under the hands of the Septuagint.
Here Cleopatra revelled with her Roman conquerors. Here St. Mark
preached the truth on which Origen attempted to refine, and here
Athanasius held warlike controversy.

The bay is crowded with merchant vessels of every nation. Men-of-war
barges shoot past you with crews dressed in what look like red nightcaps
and white petticoats. Here, an "ocean patriarch" (as the Arabs call
Noah), with white turban and flowing beard, is steering a little ark
filled with unclean-looking animals of every description; and there, a
crew of swarthy Egyptians, naked from the waist upwards, are pulling
some pale-faced strangers to a vesse