Arab Tribes," in which all the documents are given at length, and to the verbatim Reports of the Trials, in "The Oriental Herald," where the whole of the proceedings in the Court of King's Bench are faithfully recorded.† As, however, there may be many readers of the present volume, to whom the facts of the case are but imperfectly known, and who may desire to be acquainted with them in outline, I shall, for their information, briefly recapitulate them; being now happily enabled to follow them from their origin to their close; and to put on record, in a permanent form, the final issue of the whole.

In the year 1816, Mr. Bankes and myself met at Jerusalem; and, by mutual consent, performed together a journey of seven days, among the ruined cities of the Decapolis, east of the Jordan, each paying his half of the expenses, the whole of which did not, however, exceed five pounds sterling. So great was Mr. Bankes's satisfaction at the pleasure and advantage of travelling in my company, that subsequent to this period, and during our joint stay in Syria, he gave me, in writing, pressing invitations to meet him at Baalbeck, solicited me to join him in an excursion to Palmyra, and actually made an attempt to come after me, for the purpose of joining me in the deserts beyond the Dead Sea, but was driven back by the dangers of the road. Having subsequently met again at Damascus, where we lived together in a Catholic Convent, he read my notes on the journey I had made, and was so much impressed with their value, that he proposed adding his drawings to these notes, for the purpose of forming out of them a joint work on Palestine and Syria. After we had parted at Damascus, he wrote me several letters, full of compliments to my industry and understanding, in which he acknowledged having read these notes, and evinced so much deference to my supposed superior judgment in matters of ancient architecture, that, on adverting to a difference of opinion between us on the age of a particular edifice, he asserted, that he should not venture, on such a subject, to put his opinion in competition with mine; admitting, at the same time, his own indolence in writing, and expressing a hope that I should not be ashamed to see my name associated with his, in what we might be able to contribute jointly to the work proposed.

We finally met in Aleppo, where Mr. Bankes, after a knowledge of me for nearly six months, in frequent personal intercourse and correspondence, retained and expressed the same unaltered high opinion of my character and acquirements; on which ground, he obtained for me the attention of the British Resident there, to whom he was himself strongly introduced; and on my leaving that city for an overland journey to India, he gave me a letter of high commendation to his friend, the late Sir Evan Nepean, then Governor of Bombay.

At the moment of our parting at Aleppo, Mr. Bankes expressed a strong desire to receive back all the letters he had written to me, during our separate journeys in Syria, on the plea that, as he kept few or no notes of his own, these letters, which contained fuller details than any he possessed, would be useful to him, while, from the completeness of my own notes, which he had seen, they would be of little value to myself. * In 1 vol. 4to. published by Messrs. Longman and Co. 1825.

↑ See Oriental Herald, vol. vi. p. 380; vol. viii. p. 157; vol. x. p. 360; and vol. xi. p. 375.

Having no reason whatever to decline complying with his wish, these letters were readily delivered up, excepting one only, which, being sought for in vain, was supposed, by both parties, to be lost, and was no more thought of, until it was subsequently found, on my arrival in India, stuck fast by the sealing wax, which the heat of the climate of Mesopotamia had melted, to the top lining of an old portmanteau, in which linen and loose papers had been kept; and this letter, with a shorter one found inclosed in it, fortunately contained all the evidence necessary to refute the charges of its author.

I proceeded to India; when, circumstances having led to my settling in that country instead of returning to England, as we had both thought probable when we parted, my notes were shewn to and approved by the late Dr. Middleton, then Lord Bishop of Calcutta, Colonel Mackenzie, the Surveyor General of India, Dr. Lumsden, the Arabic Professor at Fort William, and other distinguished literary characters in Bengal, at whose suggestion, and with whose admitted approbation, they were announced for publication, and the manuscript sent home, to England, and accepted by Mr. Murray, of Albemarle-Street, for that purpose.

Mr. Bankes, being then at Thebes, in Upper Egypt, and seeing this announcement in a copy of the "Calcutta Journal," which had reached him amid the ruins of that deserted city by way of the Red Sea, appears to have been inspired with the most ungovernable rage, or jealousy, at my appearing in print before him, (though all idea of the proposed joint work had been mutually abandoned before we separated ;) and, imagining, perhaps, that as all his letters to me had been returned, I should have no evidence to refute any charges he might advance, he addressed a letter to his father in London, directing him to go at once to Mr. Murray, to induce him to desist from publishing my work, on the ground that I had palmed myself upon his company, on a condition that I should keep his journal while he paid my travelling expenses !—that I had treacherously taken away these notes, and formed out of them the volume announced for publication;-that I was so ignorant as not to know a Turkish building from a Roman one, or a Greek inscription from a Latin one!-that I kept no notes whatever, not having even paper for so doing;-and that I was altogether a worthless and abandoned character.

Mr. Bankes, senior, having then no reason to suspect his son of falsehood, as soon as he received this letter, wrote to Mr. Murray on the subject, recited the contents of his son's communication; and, without even asking to see the materials alleged to be stolen, so as to identify them as those of another, urged Mr. Murray not to publish this worthless and imperfect work, (though pretended to be wholly made up of his son's materials,) but to wait until Mr. Bankes, junior, should himself return, when he would give to the world a much better account of the same countries than this now sent him, which he ventured unequivocally to denounce, though neither he nor his son had seen a line of its contents. Ten years have now elapsed, however, without the promised work, which was to supersede this volume of mine, having yet made its appearance!

Mr. Murray, having then also no reason to suspect the arrogant pretensions of the son, or the perhaps pardonable weakness of the father, yielded to this representation:

and although he had actually made a purchase of the manuscript, and fixed both the price and the period of publication, retracted his engagement, and declined to have any thing further to do with the supposed stolen production. The same representation operated equally with other booksellers; so that, until twelve months had elapsed, during which reference was made to me in India, the work lay under such odious imputations that no publisher would touch it.

At the same time that Mr. Bankes addressed this letter to his father in London, he wrote a similar one to Sir Evan Nepean, at Bombay, calling on him to discountenance me, and to use his influence to proscribe me in India; which letter fell into the hands of Mr. Elphinstone, Sir Evan Nepean's successor, and was generally seen in Bombay. He addressed another letter to myself, at Calcutta, calling on me to desist from my intended publication, and to give up all my manuscripts and papers to Sir Evan Nepean, for his use; or, in the event of my refusing to do so, threatening me with the exertion of all his influence to make my character as infamous in England, as he pretended it already was (and he himself had laboured hard to make it so) in the East. It is needless to say, that I despised his threats, and did not give up a single sheet to purchase his silence or forbearance.

The original of the letter to myself was sent by way of Arabia, and was twelve months before it reached its destination; but, for the more effectually securing the infamy which Mr. Bankes threatened to bring on my name, he gave an open copy of this letter, written with his own hand, to Mr. Henry William Hobhouse, whom he met at Trieste on his way to India, with instructions to make it public wherever he went. This gentleman, having known Mr. Bankes's family in England, and having then no reason to doubt the entire truth of the statements it contained, received the open letter in question. But learning, But learning, on his first landing at Bombay, that its accusations were likely to be disproved, he made no further use of it till his arrival at Calcutta ; where, at the request of Mr. John Palmer, a mutual friend of Mr. Hobhouse and myself, the letter was given up to me, as the person to whom (though open) it was originally addressed.

Mr. Bankes in the mean time returned from Egypt to England; and, in this interval, the proofs that I had been able to send from India, of the entire falsehood of his imputations, appeared so satisfactory to Messrs. Longman and Co., that they undertook the publication of the hitherto suppressed volume. When the work appeared, however, instead of Mr. Bankes coming openly forward, and claiming any portion of the volume as his own, or producing the original notes from which it was alleged to have been stolen, he made interest with Mr. Murray, or with Mr. Gifford, then Editor of the Quarterly Review, to admit into that Periodical one of the most ungentlemanly, bitter, and slanderous articles, that ever disgraced the critical literature of the country. In this article, which, on the testimony of Mr. Murray, was written with Mr. Bankes's own hand, he not only repeats all the calumnies contained in his letter before adverted to, but adds others equally unfounded; at the same time that he very modestly praises the labours of himself, and speaks of the impatience with which the literary world were

anxiously awaiting the appearance of his own valuable materials! now, as he asserted, rendered the more necessary by the intrusion of the worthless trash then under review! The world has waited, and will still have to wait in vain, however, for the promised

treasure.

This article reached India, where I was then residing; and, although I was there able to repel it, by an exhibition of proofs which established my innocence in the minds of all reflecting persons; yet, it was made a pretext, by my political enemies, for their calling on the Government of India to expel from the country a man denounced by such high authorities as Mr. Bankes and the writer of the article in the Quarterly Review, (then supposed to be two distinct persons, but since proved to be one and the same.) The Indian Government, wanting nothing but such a pretext as would lessen the odium of so harsh a measure, encouraged the cry thus raised; and, under this encouragement, the flood-gates of calumny were opened, and every species of atrocity attempted towards me by the favoured minions of power.

I sought my remedy, where an Englishman should be always proud to meet his opponents, and where I have never yet shrunk from mine, in a British court of justice. I called those libellers (not before an impartial and independent jury, for in India, in cases of civil prosecution, there are no juries whatever, but I called them) before a single English judge, being willing to abide the issue of his decision, though he sat alone upon the bench, and was, of necessity, in continual and familiar intercourse with the very members of the ruling body to whom I was an object of so much dread and hatred. The proceeding was by a civil action, in order to give my slanderers the utmost opportunity of producing proofs. Will it be believed, that this was the moment chosen by the Indian Government, when I stood before the supreme court of justice, seeking merely to defend my character against unjust imputations, for banishing me from the country altogether? Yet such was the fact: I was not permitted to remain in India to bring my calumniators to justice; but was banished, without a trial or a hearing, in the midst of those proceedings, and thus cut off from the power of enjoying the triumph which my innocence afterwards received. Much, however, as every cause, and especially a personal one, must suffer by the forcible removal of the plaintiff from the court and country in which it is tried, my own was so strong as to outlive all this; for, while I was absent on the ocean, in the ship that bore me as an exile from India for ever, a verdict was given against my calumniators, on which occasion, the judge who pronounced it declared that "the malice of the libels was only equalled by their falsehood," and that they were "too atrocious to be even thought of without horror."

On my arrival in England, and before I had received intelligence of the issue of the trial in India, I commenced three several actions against my slanderers here; 1st, against Mr. Murray, the publisher of the Quarterly Review, for the libellous article contained in that work; 2nd, against Mr. Henry Bankes, senior, the present Member for Dorsetshire, for the letter addressed by him to Mr. Murray, and which led to the suspension of my publication; and 3rd, against Mr. William John Bankes, then

Member for the University of Cambridge, for the false and scandalous imputations contained in the open letter sent out to India by the hands of Mr. Hobhouse.

All these actions have now happily been brought to a close. In the first, Mr. Murray voluntarily expressed, in open court, his sincere regret that his publication, the Quarterly Review, should have been made the vehicle of unfounded slander against a respectable individual, and consented to a verdict being recorded against him, including damages and costs, without attempting a justification, though Mr. William John Bankes, the writer of these unfounded slanders, was then himself in court, and every witness ever professed to be required by him was in attendance; so that the not even calling them was additional proof, if any more were necessary, of the utter absence of all grounds for the acknowledged falsehoods contained in the article in question. In the second, Mr. Henry Bankes, the father, though he needed no other witness than his son, who was the only source of his information, to prove his allegations, declined placing that son in the witness-box to support his own assertions; and consented to a verdict being recorded against himself, paying all costs as between attorney and client; thus confessing to the whole world, that his son had made him the medium of communicating to others slanderous imputations which he dared not venture to support by his oath, and abandoning them as scandalous and false. A very short detail of the progress and termination of the third cause will complete the history of this extraordinary combination of events and proceedings.

On commencing the action against Mr. William John Bankes, the open letter sent to India by Mr. Hobhouse was produced, and its publication morally proved, by the fact of Mr. Hobhouse's hand-writing being at the top of the first page, where he had obliterated a motto in Italian, apparently because of its extravagant language, and written underneath it these words, "I desire this motto not to be noticed. H. W. Hobhouse;"―a proof, not merely that the letter was read by him before it came into my possession, (which of itself is legal publication,) but also of his feeling himself authorised, by the writer of it, to shew that he had so read and understood its contents. This letter was set out at full length in what is technically called "the declaration," where it must have been seen and read by Mr. Bankes and his legal advisers; and in what are called "the pleadings," he justified his having published it, on the ground that it was true, that he could prove its truth, and that, therefore, I ought to have no remedy for any injury it might have done me. In the mean time, he solicited the indulgence of the Court to allow him to send to Syria or Egypt (where the Court has no jurisdiction) for a man named Mohammed, (without any other specification,) who, with another person named Antonio, (the one an Albanian soldier, the other a Portuguese groom,) were the respectable witnesses necessary to establish his case. This indulgence was granted, on condition that Mr. Bankes should admit the identical letter produced to have been really written by him, reserving only the question of its publication; and several months passed away in the supposed finding and bringing over these witnesses from abroad, though it is believed that they were both nearer London than Jerusalem, at the time