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sent for the doctor of a frigate that was on the coast for him—a man who could kick his forehead with his toe. I quizzed Mr. Elliot a great deal.
"But now, doctor, what did Mr. Forster say about the Scotch? If he agrees with me that they sprang from hereabouts, I might have given him some useful hints on that subject: but we will write him a letter[1] about it."
- ↑ A long letter was subsequently written, in which she explained her theory of the origin of the Scotch; and, having learned by a note from Mr. Forster that they would return from Beyrout to Sayda in their way to St. Jean d'Acre, I rode down to Sayda in the hope of meeting him. Circumstances, however, made them set off a day sooner than they intended and I missed them. The letter Lady Hester took back into her own possession, and seemed to set so much value on it that she would not even give me a copy. At the time I could have repeated the substance of it with tolerable accuracy from memory; but, as she strictly regarded it in the light of a private communication, I did not consider myself justified in making any use of it without her sanction. It will be sufficient to say that she found a great resemblance between the names of the Scotch nobility and certain terms in the Arabic language, indicating patronymics, dignities, offices, &c. Her general notion was that Scotland had been peopled by the flight of some tribes of Arabs in the middle ages. She once had an intention of writing to Sir Walter Scott, to urge him to make some researches on that head, and she showed me a list of Scotch names apparently of Arabic origin. Thus she would say Gower meant Gaôor, or infidel; and by a stretch of deduction, commonly indulged in even to still greater excess by people who have a favourite theory to sustain, she would argue that, as Mr. Pitt used to say that Lord Granville was the counterpart of the statue of Antinous, with the same face and the same pose when he stood talking unconcernedly, therefore the race of Antinous, which was also Eastern, was continued in him.
