Provisions, in the time of Dr. Shaw, were exceedingly cheap, a large piece of bread, a bundle of turnips, or a small basket of fruit, being to be purchased for less than a quarter of a farthing. A fowl might be bought for a penny or three halfpence; a sheep for three shillings and sixpence; and a cow and a calf for a guinea. The usual price of a bushel of the best wheat was fifteen pence. Bruce, whose fate it has been to have his testimony upon several important points called in question by ignorant conceited persons, has been ridiculed for asserting that the flesh of lions is commonly eaten by a tribe of African Arabs. Our traveller himself, who had been laughed at for making the assertion in conversation, introduced it timidly into the appendix of his first edition; but in the second it was restored to its place in the narrative, where it is said that “the flesh of the lion is in _great esteem_, having no small affinity with _veal_, both in colour, taste, and flavour.”
The majority of persons appear to believe, with Shakspeare, that the Moors are a black, ill-favoured people; but, on the contrary, the Moorish women would be considered beautiful even in England, and the children have the finest complexions in the world. The men, from constant exposure to the sun, are generally swarthy, but never black; and the fine olive tinge they thus acquire only renders their complexions the more agreeable to the eye, as Heber observes of the Hindoos. In these countries, as in Southern Asia, women are nubile at a very early age, being very frequently mothers at eleven, and grandmothers at twenty-two. The circumstance which renders the seclusion of women necessary in such countries is, that the age of puberty precedes the age of discretion; for the passions reaching their maturity long before the reason, they stand in need of being directed by the reason of others until their own is ripened, and when it is they have lost the habit of consulting it. The ancient custom of hiring old women, who, as the prophet Amos expresses it, “are skilful in lamentation,” to perform at funerals, still prevails in Barbary; and so powerful is the effect of this scenical representation of sorrow, that when they are ἀλαλάζοντας πολλά, or “wailing greatly,” expressing their mimic grief by sound, gestures, and contortions of countenance, they seldom fail to work up the bystanders to an ecstasy of sorrow, so that even the English, who know it to be artificial, are deeply touched by it.