occasions) a letter to the Shaykh Beshyr, desiring him to pay marked attention to me. The Shaykh was highly flattered with the distinction shown him.”
The recollection of the Pasha’s civility and the Shaykh Beshyr’s letter recalled her thoughts to what she had proposed to do at the beginning of the evening, which was to write an answer to Sir Gore Ouseley, and to thank the Oriental Translation Fund Society for their present. This was done in a letter from which the following are extracts:—
To the Right Hon. Sir Gore Ouseley, Bart.
Djoun, on Mount Lebanon,
November 20, 1837.
Forgotten by the world, I cannot feel otherwise
than much flattered by the mark of attention which
it has pleased the society of learned men to honour
me with. I must therefore beg leave, in expressing
my gratitude, to return them my sincere thanks.
You must not suppose that I am the least of an
Arabic scholar, for I can neither read nor write one
word of that language, and am (without affectation) a
great dunce upon some subjects. Having lived part
of my life with the greatest philosophers and politicians of the age, I have been able to make this
observation , that all of them, however they may dispute and ingeniously reason upon abstruse subjects,
