Visits to the Monasteries of the Levant: With Numerous Woodcuts

King's College London seal gilt stamped on from cover, gilt dentelles inside edges of boards, three page edges gilt. Foldout in in fine condition. 367 pages.
Robert Curzon Jr., 14th Baron Zouche (1810 - 1873) was a traveler, author, briefly a member of Parliament, and a collector, if not a connoisseur, of Biblical and other ancient manuscripts. He traveled extensively in the Levant (Egypt, the Greek Islands, Jerusalem, Greece and Mont Athos) beginning in 1833. Certainly by his collecting (some said looting) a considerable number of priceless manuscripts, they have been preserved, but whether he was a gentleman traveler and bibliographer or a gentleman thief who cared little about significance and more about profit, is disputed.
In any event he is an engaging writer and provides lively and interesting pictures of Arab and Greek life in a turbulent time, soon after the Greek War of Independence. Travel was arduous and dangerous at the time, and required an adventurous spirit. He wrote down the account of his travels in 1849, and the book proved very popular at the time, going through 6 printings. As he says in his preface to this 1865 edition, "In the days when I wrote this book, the difficulties to a traveler in the Levant were a difficult as they would be now in China or the most distant lands. The adventures which happened to me then are now never met with, and these pages describe a state of affairs so entirely passed away, that the account of them seems to belong to a much more remote period than the year 1833."