Some correspondence in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester concerning John Lewis Burckhardt and Lady Hester Stanhope's physician.

WHILST cataloguing the post-Mingana accessions of Arabic manuscripts to the John Rylands University Library, there came to my attention a slim sheaf of correspondence inside the front covers of Rylands Arabic MS. 834. * The manuscript is itself of considerable interest. It comprises an Arabic-Italian dictionary and classified vocabulary, and may have been copied around or before the middle of the eighteenth century ; the " useful phrases" of colloquial Arabic given in it point to an origin in the Syrian region.2 According to a note on the flyleaf, the manuscript was acquired by C. L. Meryon at Jaffa (Yafa) in 1813. Charles Lewis Meryon (1783-1877) is well-known as the personal physician and companion of Lady Hester Stanhope and as the compiler after her death of Lady Hester's Memoirs ... as related by herself in conversations with her physician; comprising her opinions and anecdotes of some of the most remarkable persons of her time (London, 1845, 3 vols.) and her Travels ... narrated by