We have just been passing four joyous years with the Viscount de Marcellus : and though the weather be warm, and the subject exciting, we are anxious to render our readers at least partial participators of the pleasure we have ourselves received. In the plains of Troy"Illustrious Troy! renowned in ev'ry clime,

Through the long annals of unfolding time;"

we have seated ourselves on the mossy trunks, blasted with branches sear, where brambles and weeds occupy the places once frequented by old Priam and the Trojan princes who sate in palaces of royal state. There we have re-read our Odyssey and gazed on Cape Janisari, in Natolia; and turned over the pages of Rowe's Lucan; or have sung of that moment in the history of the city when Æneas escaped with his father, wife, and son, on its capture by the Greeks.

"The son of Venus from their last abode His gods, his sires, a venerable load, Forth on his shoulders bears from smoking Troy;

These and Ascanius, then an infant boy, Alone he saves."

Then we have read with him our Edipus Coloneus at the birth-place of Sophocles, at once the scene of his tragedy and of his early years; and have wrested ourselves with reluctance from the environs of Colonus and the remembrances of the seventieth Olympiad.

At Naples we have gazed with him on the blue sky of an Italian climate; sung our Virgil to the airs of the country; laughed at Tasso's envy of the dear Marino, and copied Metastasio who constantly studied him; conversed on the hard fate and sad fortunes of poor Charles IV., the king of Spain; pitied Sicilius Italicus who starved himself to death, so resolved was he on dying; laughed at the priests, monks, fiddlers, footmen, and lazaroni of this capital of indolence; bowed, with holy rapture, before the portals of the Gothic cathedral; and admired the macaroni, eaten the confections, and sipped the cordials of the lazy and dishonest Neapolitans.

At Jerusalem, we have taken out our Hebrew Bible from our pocket-library, and have chanted the requiems of Jere

miah, and have not forgotten Racine who said,

de Jérusalem l'herbe cache les murs;

Sion, repaire affreux des reptiles impurs, Voit de son temple saint les pierres dispersées

Et du Dieu d'Israël les fêtes sont cessées."

David and the Jebusites; Zedekiah, Nebuchadnezzar, the captivity, and Babylon; Titus and his avenging sword; Adrian and his new city; Mount Moriah; the Persians, the Saracens, and the Turks; the crusaders and the nine Latin kings; and Saladin and the Turks, have all passed rapidly before the eyes of our mind, and have all been recalled to our memories as we traversed the Heleods or the Holy City. We have washed our feet, when weary and fatigued, in the brook Kedron; have ascended together the Mount Olivet; have perambulated the covered bazars; have noticed Turkish rapacity and Armenian and Jewish industry; have admired the zones for the Grecian ladies of Cyprus and the Archipelago; talked to the guard of janissaries; prostrated ourselves, with unaffected reverence, in the church of the Holy Sepulchre; stood in awe before the mosque of Omar, and thought of that temple of Solomon whose site it now occupies; contemplated, by the long-lived hour, the Aksa and the Saharra of this most magnificent pile of architecture in the Turkish empire; and sighed over the Oriental splendour of the Armenian monastery, with all the superstitions and absurdities of a false and dangerous religion. We have climbed the rugged mountains of Judea, and gained the desert of St. John the Baptist. We have viewed the dark and profound valley of Terebintha, where David slew with his pebble the Philistine giant. We have traced the bed of that torrent which once rushed through the narrow valley, and have marked with delight the separation of the two camps :it was the field of battle of Saul. The voice of John the Baptist yet sounded in our ears, Vox clamavit in deserto.

And now we are transplanted to other scenes, to the Isle of Scio; where we have sojourned together for many a short week, then too brief, now but a

girls. They recognised me afar off. Come, come!' they cried to each other, 'here is the young stranger.' And they surrounded me in a moment.

"Stranger, tell us which is the pret. tiest of us all:-yon hesitate-come, come-decide.' And then they made the blue vault of heaven ring with their peals of laughter.

"Oh! how long he is in deciding; he is for all the world like our old men when they choose an archonite. Speak

now, speak.'

"But you are all so pretty!' "Ah! ah! do you hear what he says? There, take that flower; give it to her that you prefer.'

"I hardly know why it was, but I chose a light girl, with long tresses of hair, and I presented to her the flower. She advanced; she seized it hastily; and then her merry companions placed her next to me.

"He loves light girls,' they said; and indeed she is very pretty. Well, stranger, what think you of the girls of Scio ?'

"That it is a sad thing to quit them,' I said, with a sort of pretension to senti. ment which they did not understand, The laughs of the maidens redoubled.

"What is thy name?' I asked of her whom I had chosen,'

"What can that matter to thee, since thou art about to leave us?'

**I wish that a remembrance of thee may follow me.'

"O, yes,' she replied, whilst laughing; the souvenirs of young men melt like the snows of Samos. My name is Sebastitza.'

"And I am Phroso,' said a second; ' and I Smaragdi,' said a third; ' and I Eleuco,' laughed a fourth.

"But where dost thou come from?' asked Sebastitza. Thine accent is not ours.'

"I inhabit a land far behind those mountains yonder,-there where the sun sets.'

"Further off than Stamboul?' (Constantinople.)

"Ob, yes, much further than Stamboul,'

"Are there orange-trees in thy country? Do thy sultanas bedeck their beads with flowers? Are the girls of thy land as happy as the girls of Scio?'

"I smiled at these questions; and talking with them as I sauntered along, I arrived at the boat which was waiting for me. They accompanied me to the spot.

"There I wished them, as I bade them adieu, that the year might soon see them married; and then their laughter knew no bounds. But, amidst their mirthful

shouts, they cried, as they run from the spot, Stranger, forget not the girls of Scio.'

"And now, in reperusing these lines, written some hours after our adieux, I cannot repress the profound emotions which agitate my heart. Poor young girls of the loveliest isle of the sea, what has been your fate? Where are now those noisy laughs, those innocent pleasures, those pomps of your fêtes and of your spring? The wind of the tempest has blown over you, and all bas disappeared. I was one of the last travellers who witnessed the delights and enjoyments of your isle; others, who have followed me, have only seen disasters and ruins. Eleuco, Smaragdi, Sebastitza, young and unfortunate creatures, were you among the three hundred maidens for whom the Turkish army disputed; and who, an hour afterwards, were slaughtered, to put an end to their differences as to your possession? Were you amongst the number of the thirty thousand women sold to the bazars of Cairo and of Smyrna? Did you hasten to hang on the coast yourselves your Archbishop Plato, and to slay your brethren and your fathers in the streets of your town, in the monasteries of your mountains, and in the caverns of Mount Pelineus? Alas! who remains to-day of those I once knew and loved? Vambas alone, saved from the general wreck, drags along, far from his cherished isle, a languishing existence. Some days after these sanguinary scenes, from this same coast which death rendered deserted, the wretched remnants of the butchered population of Scio beheld two thousand of their executioners perish beneath the waves of T'chesme; and the plague of Scio, the ferocious Ali Pacha, burnt, himself and his admiral's vessel, by the intrepid Canaris, expired on this same soil, yet inundated with the blood of his victims. Fatal and prompt expiation for so many crimes! This is the result of revolutions!"

And 'tis thus that we have introduced to our readers" the Eastern question." We felt that we had need of bespeaking their kindliness for our subject, and their pardon for our manner of discussing it; especially in these warm days of June and July, when even Siberian snows would seem not to be destitute of charms, and when Alpine glaciers are visited by Lady Dorothy Mugglewort, late lady-mayoress of London. So, as our subject was a warm one, we have collected some refreshing sorbets for the commencement of our repast; and, thanks to the

Viscount de Marcellus, whose exquisite work has just appeared, we have been able to gratify our readers with the extracts which we have freely, and yet accurately, translated.

Whilst, in old England, we are occupied with the imbecilities of a weak, ignorant, and pusillanimous administration, wondering what new folly will next be perpetrated by Lord John or Lord Cupid; whilst in France an insufficient and irresolute administration is seeking to "gain time," preparatory to that catastrophe which must ere long arrive in a country torn to pieces by political factions; or whilst, in the same country, they are occupied with the trials of the rebels of 12th May, whose exploits were noticed in our June Number, by the title of "Paris Pastimes;" whilst in Spain the conflict is becoming more active in the northern provinces, and yet at Madrid there is the deathlike silence of the grave; whilst to Switzerland the English are flocking by thousands, to see the valley of Interlachen, the falls of the Geisbach, or the glaciers of Grindelwald; whilst the hereditary prince of Russia is visiting all countries but France, and throwing about, in elegant and costly profusion, his favours and his gold; whilst les braves Belges are rejoicing over the ratification of a treaty which will ensure to them disappointment and bankruptcy; and whilst the Dutch are laughing in their sleeves at the miserable bargain which the Belgians have made, and with which they are yet so well satisfied, the old Euphrates is once more the scene of Oriental warfare; and the battle of Bagdad, with the Cairo of the middle ages, is once more to be fought-though in another century.

We love the Turks. "The bearded Turk, that rarely deigns to speak," is with us a vast favourite. We know his failings, and deprecate his vices; but we cannot forget his history, his antecedents, his high honour, his noble fidelity, his greatness in his fall, and his sublimity even among his ruins. We are not among those who are mystified by the word "reform." The tenacity of the Mussulman for his ancient customs excites not our ire. The Conservative characteristics of the proud Turk remind us of our ancient halls,

not yet polluted by the cloven foot of a fierce and rabid democracy. The opposition which is made to the sultan is a Conservative opposition; and his weakness partially arises from his having wounded the just dignity and loftiness of the Turkish spirit. The sultan is weak, because he has not attended to the prejudices of his subjects. He has modified rather the manners than the institutions of the country, and rather the customs than the manners. Montesquieu has truly said, that you never offend men more than when you change their ceremonies and usages. Through such innovations, Mahmoud has rendered himself suspected by Ismalism, so that he has deprived himself of the assistance to be derived from the moral force of his people, without gaining in exchange any material or physical strength. Thus he has transferred to Constantinople the French school of cavalry, though he had at his disposal the first cavaliers of the world; and there, in ancient Byzantium, the descendants of the Mamelukes are being taught how to forget their Turkish horsemanship, without learning, in return, how to mount their steeds à l'Européenne. But when we say that we love the Turks, we speak of the nation, not of the sovereign; and when we proclaim, as a maxim of British policy in all ages, "the integrity of the Turkish empire," it is Turkey with the Bosphorus, Turkey with the Holy Land, Turkey with Egypt, Turkey with Wallachia and Moldavia; Turkey unspoliated, undegenerate, "unreformed," unspoilt, of which we speak; and not the Turkey, helpless, dependent, succumbing, and looking for pity to a pitiless pacha in the south and the east, and to the treaty of Unkiar Skelessi in the west and the north.

The decreasing power, as well as the diminished dimensions, of the Ottoman empire, are facts which we shall do well to examine at the outset of our investigations of the various points embodied in the Eastern question. We hear it repeated on all hands, that the Turkish empire is in a state of dissolution, and that "the Ottoman empire is at an end." But no one adduces his facts, no one comes forward with his figures. Aided in our task

by M. de Lamartine, we shall seek to fill up this void; being as brief, however, in our statements as circumstances will permit.

The Mussulman race is reduced to next to nothing, in the 60,000 square leagues of which its fertile domain is composed. Except in one or two capitals, there are really no more Turks. Let us run over those rich and admirable coasts, once so populous and so powerful, and we find them nowhere. The stupid administration, or rather the murderous inertia of the conquering race of the children of Osman, has made every thing deserted, or else has allowed those conquered races about to expire to become stronger and stronger every day. Africa and its coasts remember no longer their origin, or Turkish domination. The Barbary powers are independent; and have not even that fraternity, that sympathy of religion and of manners, which might otherwise constitute some semblance of nationality. The destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino produced no indignation at Tunis. The dethronement of the Dey of Algiers occasioned no sensation at Constantinople. The branch is separated from the trunk. The coast of Africa is neither Turk nor Arab. It is a vessel without a flag, against which all the world may fire: Turkey is not there. Egypt, peopled by Arabs, is formally detached from the Ottoman empire. Even the tributemoney, which for centuries was paid with regularity, and sent by a special emir to the court of Constantinople, is transmitted no longer; and when lately the Russian consul represented, in the name of his august master, that the payment must no longer be delayed, he received for reply, that the pacha was not disposed to furnish the sultan with the means of attacking him in return. Not only is the tribute-money not paid, but Mehemet Ali requires that the pachalick shall be hereditary, as preliminary to the yet stronger measure of Egyptian independence. In vain does the Porte protest against these measures. Great Britain, France, and Austria, have consented to the hereditary claim of the pacha; and when the sultan threatens to send out a fleet to depose Mehemet, and to destroy his marine, even the Russian ambassador objects to the measure, and requires, with the rest of Europe, the preservation of the statu quo. Egypt

is lost to Turkey for ever. Yet it were easy for Europe to rouse the Arab tribes, who perceive in Mehemet only a fortunate and rebellious slave, who wishes to leave to his posterity vast and profitable possessions. Bagdad contains a mixed population of Jews, Christians, Persians, and Arabs. A few thousand Turks, commanded by a pacha, who either revolts, or is driven away every three or four years, cannot constitute a Turkish nationality in this city of two hundred thousand souls. The pacha of Bagdad is, however, expected, with his small and inefficient forces, to assemble at Byr, with the corps of the Turkish army which has just crossed the Euphrates. Between Bagdad and Damascus reign the vast deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia, cut asunder by the mighty Euphrates. There are neither kingdoms, nor cities, nor dominions; all are tents. The tribes who travel on these immense plains will not acknowledge either country or master. But their ruler is now the pacha of Egypt; for the treaty of Kutahia has put him in possession of that Suristan which was, till seven years ago, a province of Turkey in Asia, bounded on the north by Caromania and Dearbeck, on the east by the deserts of Arabia, on the south by Egypt and Arabia Petrea, and on the west by the Mediterranean. From 1500 to 1832, Syria belonged to Turkey it is now the property of the pacha of Egypt. Aleppo, Tripoli, Damascus, Acre, and Gaza, are its five internal governments; and no wonder that the commander-in-chief should have crossed the Euphrates at Byr, to reconquer, aided by the pacha of Bagdad, and by the dissatisfied and persecuted Syrians, that mighty province of the Ottoman empire. The Turks, however, are not to be found in Syria.

Damascus, a great and magnificent city, the Holy City of the Mussulman, has a population of 150,000 souls; of which 30,000 are Christians, 8000 Jews, and 100,000 Arabs. There was, indeed, a handful of Turks who reigned there; but Damascus is independent of the Porte. So is Aleppo, the headquarters of Ibrahim Pacha, who has cut down all the trees in the environs, to fortify a city expiring from the reThe sults of repeated earthquakes. cities of Syria, from Gaza to Alexandretta, are peopled by Arabs, Syrian