How often during the successful ravages of Buonaparte, that great Arab chieftain of Christendom, might we not have drawn from the experience of Madrid, or Berlin, or Vienna, or Moscow, the aptest illustration of these conjectures respecting Timbuctoo?
And an African traveller, if so improbable a personage may be imagined, who should have visited Europe in these conjunctures, might very naturally have reported to his countrymen at home, that Russia, Germany and Spain were but provinces of France, and that the common sovereign of all these countries resided sometimes in the Escurial, and sometimes in the Kremlin.
We have seen this state of things existing in Ludamar, to the west of Timbuctoo, where a negro population is subjected to the tyranny of the Arab chieftain Ali, between whom and his southern neighbours of Bambarra and Kaarta we find a continual struggle of aggression and self-defence; and the well-known character of the Arabs would lead us to expect a similar state of things along the whole frontier of the negro population.

In the pauses of such a warfare, we should expect to find no intermission of the animosity or precautions of the antagonist parties.

The Arab victorious would be ferocious and intolerant, even beyond his usual violence, and the Koran or the halter would probably be the alternatives, which he would offer to his negro guest; whilst the milder nature of the negro would be content with such measures of precaution and self-defence, as might appear sufficient to secure him from the return of the enemy, whom he had expelled, without excluding the peaceful trader; and, under the re-established power of the latter, we might expect to find at Timbuctoo precisely the same state of things as Adams describes to have existed in 1811.
The reserve, with which we have seen grounds for receiving the testimony of the natives of Africa, may reasonably accompany us in our further comparative examination of their accounts and those of Adams, respecting the population and external appearance of the city of Timbuctoo.

We cannot give such latitude to our credulity as to confide in the statements of Sidi Hamet; nor do we place much reliance on the account of Caillie, who was the last European who may be said to have entered its walls.

Notwithstanding, therefore, the alleged splendour of its court, the polish of its inhabitants, its civilized institutions, and other symptoms of refinement, which some modern accounts or speculations, founded on native reports, have taught us to look for, we are disposed to receive the humbler descriptions of Adams, as approaching with much greater probability to the truth.