from the company; and as this will commonly be proportionate
to the skill of his performance, he has another incentive to excel,
in addition to the desire of fame. They have likewise vocal and
instrumental music, puppetshows, the magic lantern, and other
diversions.
While the men have their coffee-houses, the women in Egypt,
as we have already observed, have their baths, where they enjoy
some degree of emancipation from the secluded state, in which
they are kept by their domestic tyrants. In some respects indeed
they enjoy advantages over the men. They are not exposed like
the men to be plundered and ill treated by the great. All their
clothes and jewels are their own property, over which the husband
has no power. They may inherit land, as well as the men, and
receive possession of it on paying a fine to the government, from
which none are exempt: and as the public opinion is favourable
to them, their property is in general more respected, and they
are treated with more equity. Their complaints likewise are heard
with far more patience, though sometimes, when they imagine
any injustice is done them, carried to intemperance.
That the dissipation of the higher classes, in countries arrived
at a certain pitch of luxury, should stifle the sentiments of nature,
need not excite our wonder; but it is remarkable, that, even an ion w©
the arabs of the desert, some of the wives of the more opulent do
not suckle their own children, but employ wet-nurses.
The manner in which the egyptian women carry their children,
is calculated to excite astonishment in a european spectator.
An infant not more than a year or two old, perfectly naked, as