'The Penetration of Arabia a record of the development of Western knowledge concerning the Arabian Peninsula with illustrations from drawings, photographs, and maps by J. G. Bartholomew.' [‎307] (430/496)

THE CENTRAL SOUTH 307
diate fame and perhaps long immunity from oblivion,
but which will not itself attain the immortality of a
classic, — that immortality which only supreme lit
erary quality, added perhaps to absolute sincerity,
can confer on a record of adventure. The journey
which it relates is certainly among the most remark
able ever made in any part of the world. Among
Arabian explorers, when all counts are considered, —
the area covered, the risk incurred, the success at
tained,— only Doughty can justly be compared to
Palgrave. The range of the author's interests and
knowledge, his intellectual capacity, and his extraor
dinary adaptability to the special conditions of the
land he visited, distinguish him from all travellers
but the very elect; and the qualities devoted to the
composition of his narrative were such as rarely go
to the making of a travel book. f
But beside Palgrave's high qualities as a narrator,
his brilliant generalisation, dramatic interest, sense of
style, sympathy, and lightness of touch, he showed
equal defects, — vagueness and haste, artificiality,
vulgarity, and a fatuous garrulity which is truly
Levantine. His " Odyssey" is the antithesis of
Doughty's. It is saturated with the man, egotistic
from cover to cover, the record of an individual, and
no more than an individual. Palgrave presents him
self as a type of none but himself. Reading him,
one always wonders and sometimes admires; but few
can sympathise, and fewer ever be at one, with his
view of life.