hundred and twenty-eight Albanians to be bound, conducted out of the city, and in the very church of St. Basilic, in which OmerVrioni had lodged, caused them to be stripped to their shirts, taking from them all they possessed; not one had less than 8000 Turkish piastres; some had even 20,000. Captain Macri presided over this infamous transaction. At length they were led out by a different door, bound two and two, and compelled to sit down on the ground, that they might all be put to death at once. It is impossible to describe the courage of these Albanians, when they were thus stripped and bound for the slaughter; many of the Missolonghites taunted them, and told them that they would be all massacred in an hour. The Albanians replied: "What a noble act will this be! We take your word of honour, and you rob and murder us; but we must bear it with patience; we ought to have fought to our last breath; and instead of trusting to you, have taught you to know the Albanians." Fifty were already stripped; when an order arrived from Mavrocordato, forbidding any prisoner to be put to death, or his property to be touched; and reserving to himself the power of applying it to public purposes, if he should think proper. Macri then suspended his orders for that day, and sent those who had not been stripped, to the church of Missolonghi; but allowed the people to kill, at their pleasure, the remaining fifty. It is impossible to express the fury with which the people threw themselves upon these unfortunate men, and the terrible sufferings they inflicted in putting them to death. Early the next morning, Captain Macri ordered his men to convey three or four of them at a time into the fields, and dispatch them in the same manner as the fifty. This was accomplished with so much precaution, to prevent opposition, that the Missolonghites were not even aware of it. The twelve superior officers still remained; and as Macri knew that they possessed great wealth, he sent his men to transport all their property to his own house.

This was not seen by the Missolonghites without indignation. They expected their share of the plunder, according to the agreement before the surrender of the vessel: they, therefore, determined to go to Macri's house, from which intention they were not dissuaded without great difficulty, nor till he had promised that he would show them all he had taken, and divide it among them; with this, however, they were at length satisfied, proposing to Captain Macri to spare the lives of the twelve superior officers, and to demand a sum of money for their ransom, or to exchange them for Greek prisoners, and particularly for Bassano, who had conducted himself so well towards the Missolonghites. Captain Macri, to appease the tumult, promised this at the moment; but thinking afterwards, that by saving the lives of these officers, he should be unable to conceal the knowledge of what they possessed, he determined to get rid of them; he therefore ordered his men to take them away, but to leave the two beys, for fear of alarming the Missolonghites. The reason he alleged was, that they had treated the Greeks so ill at Patras, that their death was merited; and, in fact, they were led out of the city, and underwent the same fate as the others. They met death with a haughty intrepidity worthy of men, showing by their looks their scorn of Greek perfidy and cow

ardice. The Missolonghites would have opposed the death of the two beys, and conveyed them to another house, but Macri, who had resolved on their destruction, ordered a hundred of his men to seize them, and to fire upon any one who should offer to resist his orders. The two beys were, therefore, led out of the gates, when one of the subordinate officers of Macri said to them: "You recollect how ill you treated the Christians at Patras, and the great numbers of them you put to death." The younger of the beys replied: "I then did my duty as commandant of Patras; it is now for you to do yours:

strike." With these words he bowed his head to receive the stroke. The other bey said: "Tell Captain Macri, that if all his conquests are like this, I would advise him to return to his former profession.". The treasure of these two beys amounted to an immense sum, as they had boxes full of jewels. Captain Macri, conscious of the atrocity of the act he had committed, and unwilling to be present at the arrival of Mavrocordato, summoned several Missolonghites, to whom he gave two hundred thousand Turkish piastres, to be distributed among the inhabitants, saying that this sum was all he had taken from the prisoners, and that he was now obliged to leave them. The Missolonghites, although they knew that this was not the twentieth part of what he had taken, were compelled to submit. Macri repaired to the mountains to bury the treasures he had acquired, unconcerned for the distress suffered by his country, and particularly Missolonghi, which had sustained the blockade, and was under an engagement to pay the ships, which were daily threatening to quit the service, unless they received the stipulated pay. Such has been the conduct of the heroes of Greece.

One of the fifty Albanians who had received a pistol wound in his arm, and another wound in the shoulder, pretended to be dead, and for three days remained naked and exposed to the rain, among the dead bodies of his comrades. He was driven by hunger to venture among the vineyards in quest of food. Here he remained five days longer with his wounds open. Some Greeks at last took him in, and conducted him to Missolonghi, where he was ordered to be clothed and taken care of, for it was thought almost a miracle that he had survived eight days, during the winter, in so deplorable a state. It will probably be scarcely believed that Macri, being informed that the Missolonghites had saved this Albanian, and cured him of his wounds, sent by night and caused him to be murdered, lest he should reveal what was the extent of his comrades' property. Mavrocordato returned to Missolonghi: he was extremely indignant at Macri's conduct; but he was by this time sufficiently acquainted with the character of the Greek chiefs, to know that they would even sacrifice their own parents for money.

DIARY

FOR THE MONTH OF NOVEMBER.

5th. THOUGH We heartily despise the sycophancy and abhor the frequent malignity of the John Bull, we have never concurred with those who consider it as an instrument of unmixed mischief, and we believe that our occasional commendations of it, or qualified censures, have alarmed some of our friends and caused them to look upon us as little better than the ungodly. We would however proceed on the principle of doing as we would be done by, or, to express it more profanely, of giving the Devil his due, and therefore, while we have not been slow to remark on the vices of the Bull, we have been ready to allow it all fair credit on the other hand for its merits. It is our business to be critical; and in order to be that, we must be discriminative: it is our pride to be just, and we have as much pleasure in discovering matter for praise in an adversary, as Mrs. Candour has in finding a flaw in a friend. Lest in saying this it should be supposed that we mean to arrogate any extraordinary merit, we will frankly confess, that the virtue to which we lay claim is mainly attributable to a certain coldness of com- . plexion-indifference is at the root of it. Better men are better lovers and "better haters," and in the warmth of their indignation against the general abuse of an antagonist's powers, they reproach us for acknowledging them, and further for declaring that they are occasionally properly directed. We think that they are in error here: allowing that the instrument with which they have to cope has generally a mischievous aim, still they gain nothing by denying the glitter of its metal and the fineness of its edge, and it cuts not the less keenly because they pronounce it blunt. The sounder policy is fairly to state its properties, to confess the truth, that it is a sharp tool for slight subjects, but ridiculously inoperative on great ones. We admit its efficiency when we see Mr. - cutting hairs, corns, and pimples with his razor, but we scoff when on the strength of these achievements we see him hewing away with it at the trunk of an oak. His is an instrument for persons, not things. He may trim a quack with it most worthily, or cut a throat with it most basely, but its uses and abuses stop here; they are strictly personal and extend not to things. The attempts at reasoning in John Bull are despicable; his strength lies in persiflage, and he has considerable dexterity in obscenity. Our idea of the writer is that of a man whose grand school has been a dinner table. There is the easy, not ungraceful chit-chat colloquy; the loose argument-mere babble when the disputant is cool, a brawl when he is, or thinks it behoves him to be, earnest-and lastly, the proneness to smut, and adroitness in turning all things to indecency. These are the mahogany features of the John Bull; and some of them are bad in themselves, aud some he applies to bad or good account indifferently. His persiflage often. makes fools laugh at the expense of worthy and respectable men, but sometimes it falls on a legitimate subject, a quack, to the great joy of our souls. Humbugs in authority are sacred in the eyes of the John

Bull, for he is abject in sycophancy; but it is delightful to see him worrying a genuine, an undoubted humbug, who has not this sanction; and on this talent, and an antipathy to one peculiarly odious description of cant, we have more than once complimented him; and by so doing, have, we are aware, given some offence to the most estimable and esteemed of our friends. But we have always argued that the Bull had its good points as well as its vices, and we rejoice that on this fifth day of November, in the year of our Lord 1826, he has furnished a most honourable evidence of the truth of our opinion, by showing himself free, in one instance at least, from the mean spirit of party animosity, and doing justice to the character of an adversary, placed on his defence under circumstances which rendered him peculiarly obnoxious to prejudice. We must avow that we read with extreme gratification, the article in the John Bull, declaring that the character of Mr. Hume was left sans tache et sans reproche by his explanation of the transaction in the Greek Loan which had subjected him to suspicion. Next to the sincere pleasure we felt at seeing Mr. Hume deliver himself from the charges which appeared to bear on him, was that of hearing the verdict of innocence pronounced by his old and most per-tinacious assailant.

The above we wrote on the 5th, as Bartley says, actuated by" a sudden impulse." On the 12th, a long article in the John Bull, headed" Mr. Hume," commenced with this paragraph:

"We are very much surprised that some of our readers have misunderstood our sentiments upon Mr. Hume's transactions in the Greek Loan. We should be mortified indeed, if we thought that Mr. Hume himself, dull as he is, did not justly appreciate the bitter irony of our expressions."

We are silenced. The John Bull has given our friends and its enemies, the laugh against us this time; but we have learned a lesson which will prevent us from ever again being betrayed into a similar error by any kind of faith in the infidus scurra.

12th. Some well-meaning individual, who has probably derived his ideas of the world from the pages of the circulating library, has written a letter, rather in the Cambyses vein, to the editor of the Examiner, on the subject of Seduction, which crime he lays mainly to the account of the higher orders, and for the correction of which he calls for a sturdy moralist "to declaim in accents of severe reprobation," &c.

"Is it enough to tell the world that such things are, unless some bold and sturdy moralist has courage to denounce the state of society as it at present exists; and especially to declaim in accents of severe reprobation on the conduct of those fashionable sensualists, who daily boast of conquests which ought to hurl them to perdition, when they reflect that they are followed by such consequences as have lately been brought to light! It is in vain I have examined the modern periodicals for some pen more caustic, more sententious than my own, who would animadvert on the villainy of man as it deserves,-who would expose in glaring colours the perfidy of those promises which

lead the weaker sex astray. * ** Must all the odium be cast upon the poor deluded victim of love, while the fell betrayer, unscouted and unexposed, is at liberty to go to the assembly to-morrow, and with unblushing front to talk, to laugh, to dance, as if his fame was white as driven snow? No; let us drag the monster into light, strip him of his peacock mask, and write his crime in characters that never die; or, if we cannot trace his real name, let us at least give such publicity to his guilt, that no man feeling he deserves the stigma shall dare to show his face in public."

The worthy writer proceeds throughout on a false assumption. He lays the main blame on fashionable sensualists, and men "who go to assemblies," and these undoubtedly are the seducers in the tales of the circulating libraries; but those who know the world, know that there is infinitely more seduction practised by clowns than by gentlemen. Your Hodge, your pastoral character, your simple peasant, your Damon or Colin of poetry, is the great destroyer of chastity; nor has he ordinarily to encounter any very vigorous resistance, for the parish policy has caused in the provinces an extreme relaxation of female virtue. Girls yield on speculation, calculating that their seducers, having the fear of a sentence of affiliation before their eyes, will be compelled to marry them, and that thus, by surrendering their honour, they will secure a husband-their virtue is the sprat which they readily throw out to catch a herring. For the truth of this representation I appeal to any one who knows the country. It is lamentable in every point of view; but it is true, and the fault is with the administration of the bastardy-laws, which has introduced infinite immorality, and caused a boundless propagation of the very mischief intended to be repressed. It offers a premium to frailty, and though the reward is not obtained perhaps in seven cases out of ten, the frailty is hazarded, and the mischievous consequences of it fall on the party and the public. The idea may shock sentiment, but it nevertheless is true, that if marriages between the seducer and the seduced were discouraged, there would be fewer cases of frailty in humble life. In Flanders, the female peasantry think nothing of having had one child, which they phrase a malheur-the scandal is in a plurality. I remember being much surprised on first visiting that country, when some very young unmarried girls applying to a lady of my acquaintance for the place of nursery-maid, recommended themselves, by saying, that they had had a malheur, and were consequently the better qualified for the situation. This will soon be the case in our provinces; the first child being a mere trading speculation, a venture in the matrimonial lottery, will be considered no dishonour. To have more will probably be accounted infamous, as the consequence, not of the commercial greatness of the organ of acquisitiveness so largely tolerated in this trading country; but of the paw-paw proportions of the bump of amativeness, for which there would not be the same pardon, as we excuse sins of profit, but not sins of

taste.

Next to the clowns, perhaps, the soldiers are most chargeable with seduction. But who are the Lotharios of a regiment? Not the officers, but the privates. For one poor girl seduced by the officers,