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them to overcome all difficulties, and the king was so well satisfied of the sincerity of their views and declarations, that he concluded a treaty with them, and consented to send his children to be educated at Cape Coast Castle. The following extract of a letter from Mr. Bowdich will amuse our readers:

The palace itself is most magnificent, the frame work of some of the windows is made of gold, and the architecture is so perfect that it might be technically described. We were permitted to enter soon after two o'clock, and the king received us with the most encouraging courtesy, and the most flattering distinction; we paid our respects in pairs, passing along a surprizing extent of line to the principal Caboceers, many from remote and some from Moorish territories, all of them encircled by retinues, astonishing to us from their number, order, and decorations. We were then requested to remove to a distant tree to receive their salutes, which procession, though simply transient, continued until past eight o'clock; it was indescribably imposing from its variety, magnificence and etiquette. When the presents were displayed, nothing could surpass the surprize of the king, but the warm yet dignified avowal of his obligation. "Englishmen," said he, (admiring the workmanship of the articles,) "know how to do every thing proper," turning to his favourite, with a smile auspicious to our interests. On Wednesday morning the king's mother and sisters, and one of the Caboceers of the largest Ashantee towns on the frontier, paid us a visit of ceremony; their manners were courteous and dignified, and they were handed and attended with a surprizing politeness by the captains in waiting.

'To-day we were conducted to a large yard, where the king, encircled by a varied profusion of insignia, more sumptuous than what we had seen before, sat at the end of a long file of counsellors, caboceers and captains. They were seated under their umbrellas of scarlet or yellow cloth, of silk shawls, cottons of every glaring variety, and decorated with carved and golden pelicans, panthers, baboons, barrels and crescents, &c. on the top; their shape generally that of a dome. Distinct and pompous retinues were placed around with gold canes, spangled elephants' tails to keep off the flies, gold-headed swords, embossed muskets, and many other splendid novelties too numerous to mention. Each chief had the dignity of his own province to his right and left; it was truly "concilium in concilio." We have observed only one horse, which is kept by the chief captain for state, the people riding on bullocks. At the request of the king I mounted this rare animal, first with a Moorish saddle, but it was inconvenient; and the king having heard Englishmen could ride with a cloth only, begged me to display my horsemanship, which I did for his amusement.

'The manners and deportment of the king are dignified in the extreme, and his sentiments would do credit to the most civilized monarch; he is highly delighted with the medicines, and has begged for a great quantity, trying to learn by heart the doses and uses of each. The surgical instruments also attracted his close attention, and when Mr. Tedlie shewed him a piece of bone which he had taken from an Indian blackman's head, who survived the operation, his wonder could only be equalled by

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his admiration. When I displayed my telescope and camera-obscura, the king exclaimed, "White man next to God; black man know nothing."

The king, it seems, keeps his harem at a little distance from the capital, and once took the gentlemen of the mission on a visit to it. The ladies live in the midst of a park, in small houses adjoining one another, and are allowed to walk about within the enclosure, but not to pass the gates, which are guarded by slaves. The number of these ladies, kept like pheasants in a preserve, was said to amount to three hundred and thirty-three.

The capital of Ashantee is supposed to contain about forty thousand inhabitants. It lies in a vale, and is surrounded with one unbroken mass of the deepest verdure. The houses are low and small, of a square or oblong form, and composed of canes wattled together and smoothly plastered over with a mixture of clay and sand called swish, which is also used to form their floors. The roofs are thatched with long grass. A piece of cloth passed round the loins and extending to the knee is the general dress of the natives. The richer class have a larger and finer piece, which they sometimes throw over the shoulders. They wear a great number of gold ornaments, rings, bracelets, necklaces, pendants, &c. and gold fetiches of every form.

While the gentlemen of the mission remained at Cummazee, a near relation of the king shot himself; among other ceremonies observed at his funeral, a slave was put to death by torture; and it was understood that human sacrifices were always a part of the funeral rites of all persons of consequence in the state. It is also said that suicide is very common among them.

Mr. Bowdich has been indefatigable in his endeavours to procure information respecting Ashantee and the countries beyond it. From one of the travelling Moors, he obtained, he says, a route-book at the expense of his own wardrobe and the doctor's medicines; but the fellow told him he had sold him his eye.' The route from Cummazee to Tombuctoo, it appears, is much travelled; in the way thither, the next adjoining territory is that of Dwabin, with the king of which Mr. Bowdich also concluded a treaty. Bordering on this is a large lake of brackish water, several miles in extent, and surrounded by numerous and populous towns; and beyond the lake is the country of Buntookoo, with the king of which the king of Ashantee was unfortunately at war. He obtained also the exact situation of the gold pits in Ashantee and the neighbouring kingdoms, from which it appears that the name of the Gold Coast' has not been inaptly given to this part of Africa.

Mr. Bowdich learned from some of the Moorish merchants, who had formerly been at Haoussa, that, during their residence there, a

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white man was seen going down the Niger near that capital in a large canoe, in which all the rest were blacks. This circumstance being reported to the king, he immediately dispatched some of his people to advise him to return, and to inform him that, if he ventured to proceed much farther, he would be destroyed by the cataracts of the river; the white man, however, persisted in his voyage, mistaking apparently the good intentions of those sent by the king to warn him of his danger. A large party was then dispatched, with orders to seize and bring him to Haoussa, which they effected after some opposition; here he was detained by the king for the space of two years, at the end of which he took a fever and died. These Moors declared that they had themselves seen this white man at Haoussa. This is unquestionably a more probable account of the fate of Park than that which was given by Isaaco, on the supposed authority of Amadou Fatima; and, as Moors do not destroy papers,' it is just possible that, by offering a considerable sum of money, those of this unfortunate traveller may recovered through the channel of some of the Moors of Cummazee.

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ART. V. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. 3 vols. London. 1818.

FR

RANKENSTEIN, a Swiss student at the university of Ingolstadt, is led by a peculiar enthusiasm to study the structure of the human frame, and to attempt to follow to its recondite sources the stream of animal being.' In examining the causes of life, he informs us, antithetically, that he had first recourse to death.—He became acquainted with anatomy; but that was not all; he traced through vaults and charnel-houses the decay and corruption of the human body, and whilst engaged in this agreeable pursuit, examining and analyzing the minutiae of mortality, and the phenomena of the change from life to death and from death to life, a sudden light broke in upon him

A light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I be, came dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprized that among so many men of genius, who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.

'Remember, I am NOT recording the vision of a madman. The sun does not more certainly shine in the heavens, than that which I now affirm is true. Some miracle might have produced it, yet the stages of the discovery were distinct and probable. After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.'-p. 84-85.

Having made this wonderful discovery, he hastened to put it in

practice;

practice; by plundering graves and stealing, not bodies, but parts of bodies, from the church-yard: by dabbling (as he delicately expresses it) with the unhallowed damps of the grave, and torturing the living animal to animate lifeless clay, our modern Prometheus formed a filthy image to which the last step of his art was to communicate being:-for the convenience of the process of his animal manufacture, he had chosen to form his figure about eight feet high, and he endeavoured to make it as handsome as he could -he succeeded in the first object and failed in the second; he made and animated his giant; but by some little mistake in the artist's calculation, the intended beauty turned out the ugliest monster that ever deformed the day. The creator, terrified at his own work, flies into one wood, and the work, terrified at itself, flies into another. Here the monster, by the easy process of listening at the window of a cottage, acquires a complete education: he learns to think, to talk, to read prose and verse; he becomes acquainted with geography, history, and natural philosophy, in short, a most delicate monster.' This credible course of study, and its natural success, are brought about by a combination of circumstances almost as natural. In the aforesaid cottage, a young Frenchman employed his time in teaching an Arabian girl all these fine things, utterly unconscious that while he was

very

'whispering soft lessons in his fair one's ear,'

he was also tutoring Frankenstein's hopeful son. The monster, however, by due diligence, becomes highly accomplished: he reads Plutarch's Lives, Paradise Lost, Volney's Ruin of Empires, and the Sorrows of Werter. Such were the works which constituted the Greco-Anglico-Germanico-Gallico-Arabic library of a Swabian hut, which, if not numerous, was at least miscellaneous, and reminds us, in this particular, of Lingo's famous combination of historic characters Mahomet, Heliogabalus, Wat Tyler, and Jack the Painter.' He learns also to decypher some writings which he carried off from the laboratory in which he was manufactured; by these papers he becomes acquainted with the name and residence of Frankenstein and his family, and as his education has given him so good a taste as to detest himself, he has also the good sense to detest his creator for imposing upon him such a horrible burden as conscious existence, and he therefore commences a series of bloody persecutions against the unhappy Frankenstein-he murders his infant brother, his young bride, his bosom friend; even the very nursery maids of the family are not safe from his vengeance, for he contrives that they shall be hanged for robbery and murder which he himself commits.

The monster, however, has some method in his madness: he meets his Prometheus in the valley of Chamouny, and, in a long conversation, tells him the whole story of his adventures and his

crimes,

crimes, and declares, that he will 'spill much more blood and become worse,' unless Frankenstein will make (we should perhaps say build) a wife for him; the Sorrows of Werter had, it seems, given him a strange longing to find a Charlotte, of a suitable size, and it is plain that none of Eve's daughters, not even the enormous Charlotte* of the Variétés herself, would have suited this stupendous fantoccino. A compliance with this natural desire his kind-hearted parent most reasonably promises; but, on further consideration, he becomes alarmed at the thoughts of reviving the race of Anak, and he therefore resolves to break his engagement, and to defeat the procreative propensities of his ungracious child-hence great wrath and new horrors--parental unkindness and filial ingratitude. The monster hastens to execute his promised course of atrocity, and the monster-maker hurries after to stab or shoot him, and so put an end to his proceedings. This chase leads Frankenstein through Germany and France, to England, Scotland, and Ireland, in which latter country, he is taken up by a constable called Daniel Nugent, and carried before Squire Kirwan a magistrate, and very nearly hanged for a murder committed by the monster. We were greatly edified with the laudable minuteness which induces the author to give us the names of these officers of justice; it would, however, have been but fair to have given us also those of the impartial judge and enlightened jury who acquitted him, for acquitted, as our readers will be glad to hear, honourably acquitted, he was at the assizes of Donegal.— Escaped from this peril, he renews the chase, and the monster, finding himself hard pressed, resolves to fly to the most inaccessible point of the earth; and, as our Review had not yet enlightened mankind upon the real state of the North Pole, he directs his course thither as a sure place of solitude and security; but Frankenstein, who probably had read Mr. Daines Barrington and Colonel Beaufoy on the subject, was not discouraged, and follows him with redoubled vigour, the monster flying on a sledge drawn by dogs, according to the Colonel's proposition, and Prometheus following in another-the former, however, had either more skill or better luck than the latter, whose dogs died, and who must have been drowned on the breaking up of the ice, had he not been fortunately picked up in the nick of time by Mr. Walton, the master of an English whaler, employed on a voyage of discovery towards the North Pole. On board this ship poor Frankenstein, after telling his story to Mr. Walton, who has been so kind as to write it down for our use, dies of cold, fatigue, and horror; and soon after, the monster, who had borrowed (we presume from the flourishing colony of East Greenlaud) a kind of raft, comes alongside the ship, and notwithstanding his huge bulk, * In the parody of Werter, at the Variétés in Paris, the Charlotte is ludicrously corpulent.

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