Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine, Vol. 72, No. 442, August, 1852

by Various

Dies Boreales.

No. IX.
CHRISTOPHER UNDER CANVASS.

Camp at Cladich.

Scene—The Pavilion. Time—Sunset.

North—Talboys—Seward.

NORTH.

The great Epic Poets of Antiquity began with invoking superhuman aid to their human powers. They magnified their subject by such a confession, that their unassisted strength was unequal to worthily treating it; and it is perfectly natural for us to believe that they were sincere in these implorations. For their own belief was that Gods presided over, ruled, and directed, not only the motions of the Visible Universe, and the greater and outward events and destinies of nations and individuals, but that the Father of Gods and Men, and peculiar Deities under him, influenced, inspired, and sustained, gave and took away the powers of wisdom, virtue, and genius, in every kind of design and in every kind of action.

SEWARD.

They would call down the help, suggestion, and inspiration of heavenly guides, protectors, and monitors;—of Jupiter, to whom even their dim faith looked above themselves and beyond this apparent world, for the incomprehensible causes of things;—of Apollo, the God of Music and of Song;—of those divine Sisters, under whose especial charge that imaginative religion placed Poets and their works, the nine melodious Daughters of Memory;—of those three other gentle deities, of whom Pindar affirms, that if there be amongst men anything fair and admirable, to their gift it is owing, and whose name expresses the accomplishing excellence of Poesy, if all suffrages are to be united in praise: bright Sisters too, adored with altar and temple,—the Graces.

NORTH.

Milton, who had unremittingly studied the classical Art of Poetry, and who brought into the service of his great and solemn undertaking all the resources of poetical Art, which prior ages had placed at his disposal, whose learning, from the literature of the world, gathered spoils to hang up in the vast and glorious temple which he dedicated—He might, without offence to the devout purpose of his own soul, borrow from the devotion of those old pagan worshippers the hint, and partially the form, of those exordial supplications.

SEWARD.

He opens the Paradise Lost with Two Invocations. Both implore aid. But the aid asked in one and in the other is different in kind, as the Two Powers, of whom the aid is asked, are also wholly different. Let us look at these two Invocations in the order in which they stand.

“Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

Sing, heavenly Muse, that, on the sacred top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,

In the beginning how the heavens and earth

Rose out of chaos: or, if Sion hill

Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d

Fast by the oracle of God; I thence

Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,

That with no middle flight intends to soar

Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer

Before all temples the upright heart and pure,

Instruct me, for Thou know’st: Thou from the first

Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,

Dove-like, sat’st brooding on the vast abyss,

And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark,

Illumine: what is low, raise and support;

That to the height of this great argument

I may assert eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to men.”

The First is taken, hint and form both, from Homer. Homer, girding up his strength to sing the war of confederated Greece against Troy and her confederates, makes over his own overpowering theme to a Spirit able to support the burden—to the Muse.

Sing, Goddess, he begins, the Anger of Achilles.

NORTH.

Even so Milton. After proposing in a few words the great argument of his Poem—that fatal first act of disobedience to the Creator, by which our First Parents, along with His favour, forfeited Innocence, Bliss, Immortality, and Paradise, for themselves and their posterity, until the coming of the Saviour shall redeem the Sin and loss—he devolves his own task upon a Muse, whom he deems far higher than the Muse of his greatest predecessor, and whom he, to mark this superiority, addresses as the Heavenly Muse.

TALBOYS.

She is the Muse who inspired on the summit now of Horeb, now of Sinai; when for forty years in retreat from his own people, yet under their Egyptian yoke, he kept the flocks of his father-in-law Jethro—the actual Shepherd who, from communing with God and commissioned by God, came down into Egypt again to be the Shepherd of his people and to lead out the flock of Israel.

SEWARD.

She is the Muse who, when the Hebrew tribes were at length seated in the promised land—when Zion in the stead of Sinai was the chosen Mountain of God—inspired Psalmists and Prophets.

TALBOYS.

And the reason is manifest for the distinguishing of Moses. For all critics of the style of the inspired Writers distinguish that of Moses from all the others, as antique, austere, grave, sublime, as if there were in him who conversed personally with God greater sanctity of style, even as his face shone when he came down from the Mount; as the whole character and office of Moses was held by the Hebrews, and is held, perhaps, by us, as lifting him above all other prophetic leaders.

NORTH.

He was the founder of the Nation, and the type of the Saviour.

TALBOYS.

Milton desires for his work, all qualities of style, as the variable subject shall require them. Not only the high rank of Moses as the author of the Pentateuch required that he should be named, but this in particular, that Moses was the historian of the Creation and Fall.

NORTH.

One might for a moment be tempted to confound the inspiration here meant with that highest inspiration which was vouchsafed in those holy places, and which we distinguish by the unequivocal name of revelation. But on reflection we perceive it not possible that Milton should have ascribed such an office to an Impersonation—those awful Communications which distinguished those persons chosen by the Almighty to be the vessels of his Will to the Children of Men. His revelations, we are instructed to believe, are immediately from himself.

TALBOYS.

Somebody said to me once that Milton’s First Invocation to the Muse is oppressed with Mountains; that it is as if he had shaken out what he had got under the head Mountains, in his Common-Place Book; and—

NORTH.

Somebody had better have held his tongue. No. They occur by natural association. He wants aid of the Muse who inspired Moses—I suppose, who sustained—that is, gave his style—of the other writers in the Old Testament. To suppose her visiting Moses on either peak of the Sacred Hill where he had his divine communions, is obvious and inevitable, and, I hope, solemn and sublime too. To suppose her accompanying the migration of the Israelites, and as she had devoutly affected their Sacred Mountain of the Wilderness, also devoutly affecting their Holy Mountain at the foot of which they built their Metropolis, is a spontaneous and unavoidable process of thought. Sinai and Sion represent, as if they contain embodied, the religion and history blended of the race. And if the divine Muse has two divine Hills, how can Milton help thinking of the quasi-divine Hill on which were gathered the nine quasi-divine Sisters? Doubtless, three distinct Mountains in the first sixteen lines, if absolutely considered, may seem cumbrous and overwhelming. But accept them for what they are in the Invocation; the two first localisings of the one Muse, they are easy. Why should not her wing skim from peak to peak? and Parnassus looms in the distance on the horizon.

SEWARD.

A more urgent and trying question is, what does he invoke? We have a sort of biographical information respecting the Address to the Spirit. Milton did believe himself under its especial influences, and the Address is a direct and proper Prayer. But what is this Muse? To us the old Muses—whatever they may have been to the Greeks—are Impersonations, and nothing more, of powers in our own souls. If name attest nature, such is the muse of Milton—a power of his own soul—but one which dwelt also in the soul of the great Hebrew shepherd. Say, for the sake of a determining notion, the power of the austere and simple religious sublime. A human power, but moved by contact of the soul with divine subjects. Perhaps I say too bluntly that those old Muses were mostly but impersonations of human powers. An abstruse, difficult, and solemn part of our existence is touched, implicated. We find when we are deeply moved that powers which slept in us awake;—Powers which have before awaked, and fallen back in sleep;—Powers, too, that have never before awaked.

NORTH.

But what do we know of what is ultimate? If there is a contact of our spirits with the universal Spirit, if there are to us divine communions, influences, how do we know when they begin and end? It seems reverent and circumspect to view poetical inspiration as a human fact only, but we are not sure that it is not even more religious to believe that the unsuspected breath of Deity moves our souls in their higher and happier moments. Be they motions of our own souls, be there inferior influences mingled, those Muses were names for the powers upon this view—for the powers and mingled influences upon another. On the whole, I think that the distinction is here intended generally; and that the heavenly Muse represents the human soul exalted, or its powers ennobled by contact with illuminating and hidden influences—as the prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, have each quite the style of their own humanity in writing under the governance of the Spirit.

SEWARD.

I consider the free daring with which all Poets of the modern world, at least, have, for the uses of their Art, converted Powers and Agencies into imaginary beings. I consider the respects in which the Poet has need of aid. He wants aid if he is to penetrate into regions inaccessible to mortal foot or eye—if he is to disclose transactions veiled since the foundations of the world; but this aid the Muse cannot afford to the Christian Poet, and we shall presently see that he applies for it to a higher Source. But the Poet who undertakes to sing of Heaven and Earth, of Chaos and of Hell, who comprehends within his unbounded Song all orders of Being, from the Highest and Greatest to the Lowest and Least—all that are Good and all that are Evil, and all that are mixed of Good and Evil—and all transactions from the date, if we may safely so speak, when Time issued from the bosom of Eternity to the still distant date, when Time shall again merge in that Eternity out of which it arose, and be no more:—That Poet, if any, needs implore for a voice equal to his theme, a power of wing measured to the flight which he intends to soar; he needs for the very manner of representation which he is to use—for the very words in which he is to couch stupendous thoughts—for the very music in which his pealing words shall roll—aid, if aid can be had for supplication.

NORTH.

Yes, Seward. We consider these things. We consider the laborious, learned, and solemn studies, by which we are told, by which Milton tells us, that he endeavoured to qualify himself for performing his great work, and I propose this account of this first Invocation, stripped of its Poetical garb. In the first place, that the subject of desire to the Poet—the thing asked—is high, grave, reverend, sublime, fitted Style or Expression. As for the addressing, and the power of the wish, you may remember that, as we hear, employing human means, he assiduously read, or caused to be read, the profane, and his native, and the Sacred Writers—drawing thence his manner of poetical speech.

TALBOYS.

“Heavenly” Muse is opposed to “Olympian” Muse; as if “Hebraic” to “Hellenic;” as if “Scriptural” to “Classical;” as if “Sacred” to “Profane;” as if Muse of Zion to Muse of Pindus. Therefore we must ask—What “Muse” ordinarily means? We know what it meant in the mouth of a believing Greek. It meant a real person—a divine being of a lower Order. But Milton is a Christian—for whom those deities are no more. They are, in his eye, mere imaginations—air.

“For Thou art heavenly! She (the Hellenic) an empty dream.”

And so already—

“The meaning, not the name, I call.”

To wit, the Hellenic is to him a name—air.

SEWARD.

We must ask—What does, in ordinary Verse, not in sacred poetry, a Christian poet mean, when He names, and yet more when he invokes, the Muse—the Sacred Sisters nine? And we are thrown upon recognising the widely-spread literary fact—not unattractive or quite unimportant—that Christendom cherished this reminiscence of Heathendom; that, in fact, our poetry seems to rest for a part of its life upon this airy relic of a fled mythology—varied in all ways, Muse, Helicon, Hippocrene, &c. Greatest Poets, not poetasters, the inspired, not the imitative and servile—and at height of occasion.

Thus Shakspeare—

“O for a Muse of fire that would ascend

The highest heaven of invention!

A kingdom for a stage!” &c.

Spenser—at entering upon his vast Poem—

“Me all too mean the Sacred Muse areeds.”

And the master of good plain sense in verse, Pope, acknowledges the ineradicably rooted expression—

“Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”

I put these together, because I doubt not but that Milton in choosing and guarding (just like Tasso) the word, looked this practice of Christian, or christened poets, full in the face; and spoke, founding upon it. Muse, to his mind inventing his Invocation, had three senses. Imaginary Deity of a departed belief—An Authoritative Name, thence retained with affection and pride by Poets of the Christian world—Or, something new, which might be made for his own peculiar purpose, or which Tasso had begun to make, undertaking a Poem after a sort sacred.

TALBOYS.

I cannot believe that the word which has held such fond place in the minds of great poets, and all poets, can have been a dry and bald imitation of antiquity. Doubtless it had, and has, a living meaning; answers to, and is answered by, something in their bosoms—the Name to which Shakspeare and Spenser clung, and which Milton put by the side of the Holy Spirit and transplanted into Heaven.

NORTH.

Our attention is first reflectively directed upon recognised Impersonations in Poetry. But we are very much accustomed to misunderstand the nature of Poetry; for we are much accustomed to look upon Poetry as an art of intellectual recreation, and nothing more. Only as a privileged Art—an Art privileged to think in a way of its own, and to entertain, for the sake of a delicate amusement and gratification, illusory thoughts which have never had belief belonging to them. And meeting with Impersonations in poetry, we set down Impersonations amongst the illusory thoughts thus imagined and entertained for intellectual pleasure, and which have never been believed. It is a mistake altogether. Poetry has its foundation in a transient belief. Impersonations have held very durable belief amongst men. When we reflect and take upon us to become cognisant of our own intellectual acts, we are bound to become cognisant of these illusions—to know that they must have temporary belief—that they must not have permanent belief.

SEWARD.

“Sing, Heavenly Muse.” Milton redeems the boldness of adventurously transplanting from a Pagan Mythology into a Christian Poem, and thus imparts a consecration of his own to a Heathen word; but the primitive cast and colouring remain, satisfying us that we must here understand an Imaginary Being.

NORTH.

The Seventh Book again opens with an Invocation for aid, and again to the same person.

We find in the opening verses the personality attributed with increased distinctness, and with much increased boldness. A proper name is given, and a new imaginary person introduced, and a new and extraordinary joint action attributed to the Two.

“Descend from Heaven, Urania—by that name

If rightly Thou art called—whose voice divine

Following, above the Olympian hill I soar,

Above the flight of Pegasean wing!

The meaning, not the name, I call: for Thou

Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top

Of old Olympus dwell’st; but, heavenly born,

Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed,

Thou with Eternal Wisdom didst converse;—

Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play

In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased

With thy celestial song.”

She is now named—Urania. (The former title given her—“Heavenly Muse”—is equivalent.) But because one of the Nine Muses was named Urania, he distinguishes—

“The meaning, not the name, I call.”

She is described as conversing before the creation of this Universe, and playing with her Sister Wisdom, in the presence of God, who listens, pleased, to her song.

In this bold and tender twofold Impersonation, I seem to understand this.

Wisdom is the Thought of God respectively to the connection of Causes and Effects in his Creation, or to the Laws which constitute and uphold its Order: considered as Useful.

This Thought is boldly separated from God, and impersonated as One Sister.

Urania is the Thought of God, relatively to the Order and Harmony of his Works:—considered as Beautiful.

When God sees that his Creation upon each day is “good,” (which expression Milton is careful to repeat upon each day,) we must understand that he regards it in both respects.

The Invocation is, therefore, placed with a perfect propriety at the beginning of the Book which is occupied in describing the Creation.

For the meaning here attributed to Urania playing with Wisdom before the pleased Father, compare the passage where the dance of the Angels has been compared to the motions of the stars, and the Speaker, the Archangel Raphael, adds:

“And in their motions harmony divine

So smooths her charming tones, that God’s own ear

Listens delighted.”

Where the audible harmony of the spheres and the song of Urania seem to be as nearly as possible one and the same thing—namely, Music—which is The Beautiful in one of its kinds, used, with extremely profound and bold imagination, for expressing The Beautiful in all its kinds.

Who is it that, in presence of the Everlasting Throne, converses with her sister, Eternal Wisdom; plays with her—singing, the while, so that the awful Ear of Omnipotence bends from the Throne, listening and pleased?

The majestical Invocation opens the Seventh Book of the Paradise Lost; and the Seventh Book of the Paradise Lost is occupied from beginning to end in amplifying, with wonderful plenitude, exactness, beauty, and magnificence of description, the First Chapter in the Book of Genesis. In other words the Seventh Book of Paradise Lost describes the Week of Creation—the six days of God’s working, and the seventh of His rest.

Milton moulds, at the height of poetical power, into poetical form thoughts that are universal to the Spirit of Man. What then, we must ask, are the two Thoughts that rise in the Spirit of Man, looking with its awakened and instructed faculties upon the Universe of God? Assuredly one is, wonder at the adaptation of Means to Ends—that fitness of which all human Science is nothing but the progressive, inexhaustible revelation. This is that Eternal Wisdom, whom the Poet daringly finds a distinct inhabitant of the Empyrean. The other thought, insuppressibly arising upon the same contemplation, is, wonder of the overwhelming beauty that overflows the visible creation. This is the Heavenly Muse, Urania. The purpose of the Divine Mind to create the Useful Order of Things is impersonated as Eternal Wisdom. The purpose of the Divine Mind to create the Beauty of Things is impersonated under a name which the Poet boldly and reverently supplies. Milton’s description of the six days completely displays the two notions: it impresses the notion of Useful Order and Beauty.

SEWARD.

These verses, which introduce the Creation of Man on the sixth day, impress the two distinctly—

“Now Heaven in all her glory shone;”

—that is, for the Beautiful:

——“and roll’d

Her motions, as the first great Mover’s hand

First wheel’d their course;”

—that is, for Useful Order.

“Earth in her rich attire

Consummate lovely smiled;”

—that is, for Beauty.

“Air, water, earth,

By fowl, fish, beast, was flown, was swum, was walked,

Frequent.”

Here is again the Adaptation, the Useful Order,

“Of all yet done;”—

namely, Man;—again Design, Order, Wisdom.

And when the whole work is finished, the two characters are set side by side, as answering, in the Mind of the Creator, to His antecedent purpose.

“Here finished He, and all that he had made

View’d,—and behold all was intensely good;

So even and morn accomplished the Sixth day:

Yet not till the Creator, from his Work

Desisting, though unwearied, up returned,

Up to the Heaven of Heavens, his high abode,

Thence to behold this new-created world,

The addition of his empire, how it showed

In prospect from his Throne, how GOOD, how FAIR,

Answering his great Idea.”

Here good expresses the Useful Order—fair the Beauty.

TALBOYS.

The Heavenly Muse descended upon Earth is then the God-given Intelligence, in the Human bosom, of The Beautiful. It is the Faculty, as we are more accustomed to speak, of the Sublime and Beautiful;—a human ability, raised in the sacred writers by divine communions—Milton desires, but can hardly be thought in that first Invocation, or in this, (Book VII.) directly to pray, that the powers of his mortal genius may receive similar exaltation.

NORTH.

Speak boldly.

SEWARD.

I do.

TALBOYS.

The Heavenly Muse, in Heaven, is God’s thought of the Beauty which shall be in the Universe to be created. The heavenly Muse, upon Earth, is the Thought or the Faculty of Beauty, as originally given to the soul of man, as nourished by all human ways, and specifically and finally as attempered and exalted by expressly religious contemplations and communions—in Moses by converse with God face to face, as a man with his friend. You remember Jeremy Taylor, sir—

NORTH.

I do.

TALBOYS.

In Milton, by reading the Scriptures, by prayer and meditation, by the holiest consciousnesses, in which he seems to have apprehended even for himself some afflux vouchsafed of spiritual help, light, and support more than ordinarily has been understood in the Protestant Church, if less than enthusiasts have claimed. In a word, the Heavenly Muse upon Earth is the Human Sense of Beauty fashioned to the uttermost, hallowed by the nearest approaches to the Deity that are permitted to the individual human person who happens to be in question, but who must be understood as one living under the revelation of the true God. In strictness of speech, Heavenly Muse upon Earth is at last, as I said, Scriptural Muse opposed to Classical Muse.

NORTH.

Well said, my excellent Talboys.

TALBOYS.

Upon our thoughts, my dear sir, the distinctions, Heavenly Muse in Heaven, upon Earth, visiting Moses, visiting Milton, four different aspects of one thing force themselves. Are they all well comprehended under one Impersonation?

NORTH.

Yes—from the bold nature of Impersonation, which comprehends always a variable thought. For Imagination blends and comprehends rather than it severs and excludes. It delights in conceiving that as another manner of acting in some imaginary being which the analytical understanding would class as a distinct metaphysical faculty. It delights in unity of creation; and, having created, in bestowing power, and in accumulating power on its creature. I have heard people say that Collins, in speaking of Danger—

“Who throws himself on the ridgy steep

Of some low-hanging rock to sleep”—

confounds the Power, Danger, and the endangered Man. But I say he was right in such poetical confusion of one with the other.

TALBOYS.

Might one word, my dear sir, be dropped in, purporting or reminding, that the Beautiful, or Beauty, is here used, with its most capacious meaning, to comprehend many other qualities distinct from the Beautiful taken in its narrowest acceptation among critics. For example, the solemn, the sublime, and many other qualities are included, that are distinct from the Beautiful, taken in the mere sense that critics have attached to it; all such qualities agreeing in this, that they affect the mind suddenly, and without time given for reflection, and that they appear as a glory poured over objects as over the natural universe. The large sense of the term Beauty belongs to a perfectly legitimate use of language—a use at once high and popular; as every one feels that the beauty of creation includes whatever affects us with irreflective admiration—appears as a glory—stupendous forests—mountains—rivers—the solemn, boundless munificence of the starry firmament. Milton says there is terror in Beauty—and we may say there is a beauty in terror.

NORTH.

The holy Mind of the Poet has been represented from his life; the holy aspirations of his Genius have been shown from the record of his literary purposes; the holy meaning of the Paradise Lost from the Two Invocations. You may go on to examining the Poem well prepared; for you now know in what Spirit of thought it was entered upon and composed, and in what Spirit of thought you must engage in, and carry through, the examination of the Poem. You can understand that Milton, sanctified in Will by a dedicated life—intellectually armed and accomplished by the highest mere human learning, as a Scholar, as a Thinker, as a Master of his own sublime and beautiful Art—enriched by more solemn studies, whether of God’s written word or of its devout and powerful expounders, with all the knowledge, especially claimed by his task, which a Mind, capacious, profound, retentive, indefatigable, could bring to the celebration of this most stupendous theme;—finally, led—as he, in all reverence, believed himself,—upheld, and enlightened by the Spirit of supernal grace, prayed for and vouchsafed;—that He, coming,—by nature and by nurture such and so fitted,—to relate anew and at large—and as if He, the Poet, were himself enfolded with the garb of a Prophet,—as if He were himself commissioned from on High, and charged with a second, a more explicit and copious, an ampler and more unbosoming revelation,—that History, full of creating Love and provoked Wrath,—full of zeal and loyal truth, in pure angelical creatures, and of hateful revolt—full, in the lower creature, Man, at first of gracious and ineffable glory and bliss, and native immortality, then of lamentable dishonour, sin and misery, and death—You can readily conceive that Milton approaching to begin this Work, to which alone the desires, to which alone the labours, to which alone the consecration of his genius looked—that he, indeed, felt in his now near, in his now reached undertaking, a burthen overwhelming to his mortal strength; and that his prayer, put up for support, rose indeed from his lips as men pray who are overtaken with some sharp fear and sore constraint.

TALBOYS.

Yet, sir, irreverence has been felt, and will be felt, by those who take low and narrow views, in the treating of sacred subjects, as themes of poetry.

NORTH.

Shall we stand back awed into silence, and leave the Scriptures alone, to speak of the things which the Scriptures declare? This is a restraint which the Human Spirit has never felt called upon to impose upon itself. On the contrary, the most religious Minds have always felt themselves required in duty to dedicate their best faculties of reason to the service of religion—by inquiring into, and expounding, the truths of religion. But Reason is not the sole intellectual power that God has given to Man, nor the sole faculty by the use of which he will be glorified. Another power native to the same spirit, granted to it now in more scant and now in overflowing measure, is the faculty of verse and of poetical creation; and it is no more conceivable that we are bound to withhold the efforts of this power from its highest avocations, than that we are under obligation to forbear from carrying our powers of rational investigation to the searching of the Scriptures.

SEWARD.

The sanctity of spirit in which Milton wrote hallows the work of Milton. He was driven back by no scruple from applying the best strength of his mind to the highest matters. Holding him justified for attempting the most elevated subjects in verse, we must bear in mind what is the nature of Poetry, and beware that we do not suffer ourselves to be unnecessarily alarmed or offended when we find the Poet, upon the highest occasions, fearlessly but reverently using the manner of representation inseparable from his Art.

NORTH.

What is this Manner of Representation?

TALBOYS.

It may be said in a word. Poetry represents the Inward and the Invisible by means of the Outward and the Visible.

The First great law of poetical Creation is this: that the Kingdom of Matter and of the bodily senses, transformed by the divine energy of genius, shadows forth and images out the Kingdom of the Mind and of Spirit.

NORTH.

Accordingly, in this great poem, the name Heaven continually meets us as designating the blissful abode where the Omnipresent God is imagined as from eternity locally dwelling in light uncreated—the unapproachable splendour of his own effulgence. There, the Assessor of his throne, the Divine Son, sits “in bliss embosomed.” And there, created inhabitants, are the innumerable host of happy Angels. At first, all—whilst all stand upright—and until the sin of Satan casts out one third part of the number. The Imagination of the poet supposes a resemblance to Earth; for beauty and delight—hills, rocks, vales, rivers and fountains, trees and Elysian flowers. Although he endeavours to dilate the fancy of his reader in speaking of Heaven with conceptions of immense extent, it is a limited, not a boundless, Heaven; for it is conceived as resting upon a base or firmament, and as being enclosed with crystalline walls. Palaces and towers, which the angels have built, are spoken of in Heaven.

The course of the Poem sometimes leads us into Chaos. We are to imagine an infinite abyss of darkness, in which the formless embryons and elements of things toss and war in everlasting uproar. A Ruler and other spirits of darkness will be found dwelling there. Here height, breadth, and time and place are lost. But the tremendous gulf is permeable to the wings of angels. A more important seat of the transaction to which we shall be introduced is, “the place of evil,” made, after the rebellion of the Angels, their habitation and place of punishment—“the house of wo and pain”—Hell. It is described as having various regions—fiery and frozen; hideous mountains, valleys, and caves. Five rivers, named and characterised from those that flow through the Hell of classical antiquity—and, in particular, a boiling Ocean, into which the rebel Angels are supposed to fall. Notwithstanding the flames, a heavy gloom prevails throughout. It is immensely extended, but has a solid ground—“a dungeon horrible,” walled and overvaulted. The whole of the Fallen Angels are at first imprisoned in Hell. But they escape. Hell has Gates kept by Sin and her Son Death. The Fallen Angels build in Hell a palace and city called Pandemonium. Hell is situated in the lowest depth of Chaos, out of which it has been taken.

This Visible Universe is represented as built subsequently to, and consequently upon, the Fall of the Angels. You are to imagine this Earth of ours, the Moon, the Sun, the planets, the fixed stars, and the Milky Way—all that sight can reach—as enclosed in a hollow sphere: that is, firmly compacted. Satan alights upon its outside, and walks about it: and it serves to defend this enclosed visible Universe from the inroads of Chaos and primeval darkness. On the Earth, created in all the variety that we behold in it, excepting that the climates are all happy, our Two first Parents live in the Garden of Paradise, planted by God. The unimaginably vast enclosing Sphere hangs by a golden chain from the battlements of Heaven.

SEWARD.

Yes, sir, Poetry represents:—

Things of the Mind by Things of the Body—the Spiritual Kingdom by the Kingdom of Matter, or of the Senses.

TALBOYS.

So the world of metaphors, which express the powers and acts of the mind by organs and actions of the body, or by images from nature.

So, expressly, Allegory.

NORTH.

So, here, Spirits are clothed in visible human form. They walk, they fly with wings. Their disagreeing becomes a War waged with violent weapons. High and Low in space have a moral meaning. So ocular light and darkness. Even the omnipresent God appears as having a local divine residence, and speaks with a voice. The Eternal Eye sees, the Eternal Ear hears. He sits, invisible through brightness, on a Throne.

These modes of thinking, or of representing rather, follow our minds. We may, by a great effort of abstraction, throw them off. It is for a moment. They return, and hold habitual dominion in our thoughts.

TALBOYS.

Milton has boldly given such determinate Shape, as to constitute a seeming reality, without which he would be without power over us—who know by our senses, feel by our senses—i. e. habitually attach feelings moved by things inward to things outward; as our love, moved by a soul, to a face.

NORTH.

It is remarkable that Poetry, which above all human discourse calls out into our Consciousness the Divinity that stirs within us, at the same time casts itself with delight into the Corporeal Senses, as if the two Extremes met, or that either balanced the others. We see a reason in this. Passion cleaves to the perceptions of the Senses. Upon these impressions Imagination still feeds and lives.

SEWARD.

Moreover, Nature herself shows us Man, now half as the Child, now half as the victim, now half as the victor—of his place.

TALBOYS.

Therefore, great Poetry, that will most potentially represent Man’s innermost spirit, sets out, often, from his uttermost circumstances.

In the Philoctetes, and Œdipus at Colonus, what pains to delineate place!

What pains to make you present in the forest of Arden,—and in the Island!

NORTH.

This outward Picturesque, embosoming the Human Pathetic and Sympathetic, is known to the great Father of Poetry.

Homer paints for eye and ear; but usually with brief touches.

TALBOYS.

The predominance given in Verse to the Music over the Sense—the conspicuous power of the Music, perhaps calls the Soul into the Senses.

NORTH.

But there is a more comprehensive view. The Mind in the treatment of its Knowledge ranges between two Extremes. It receives the original givings of Experience, at the utmost particularised and individualised, determined under conditions of time, Place, Individuals. It reduces individuals into Kinds, actions into Laws, finds Principles, unveils Essences. These are the ultimate findings of Reason. The Philosophical Mind tends to these—dwells in these—is at home in these—is impatient of its knowledge whilst unreduced. This is the completed victory of Intelligence over its data. It is by Comprehension and Resolution the Reduction of Multitude into Unity. At the same time, the Mind leaves the turbulent element of Sense, and passes into a serene air, a steadfast and bright and cold sky. Now, then, Poetry dwells or makes a show of dwelling at the other extreme—in the forms as they were given. What semblance, what deception, may be in this, is another question. But this is her ostentation. She imitates to a deception, if she does not copy these original givings. She represents Experience, and this she does for the sake of the Power of Affection which attends the forms of Experience. For the most part these original givings are involved in sensible perceptions, Eye, Ear, Hand, and beating heart. How will you escape from them? Eye, above all, the reigning faculty of communing with Earth and Sky. So as that he who is shut out from the world of sight, seems to us to be shut out from the world; but he who is shut out from the world of Sound: not equally so. Nevertheless, that which Poetry requires is not——

TALBOYS.

You were going a few minutes ago to say something more about Impersonations, sir.

NORTH.

Nothing new. We are warranted by universal human experience in assuming it as a psychological fact, that we are formed with a disposition irresistibly carrying us to see in things out of ourselves, ourselves reflected—in things that are without life, will, and intelligence, we conceive life, will, and intelligence; and, when the law of a stronger illusion swaying our faculties constrains us to bestow an animated form, we bestow our own. By these two intellectual processes, which in one way or another are familiar to our experience, but which seem strange when we reflect upon them, and try to understand them, we make human-shaped Impersonations of inanimate things, and of abstract notions! If we would know the magnitude of the dominion which this disposition constraining us thus to Impersonate has exercised over the human mind, we must go back into those ages of the world when this disposition exerted itself, uncontrolled by philosophy, and in obedience to religious impulses, when Impersonations of inanimate Objects and Powers, of Moral Powers, and of notions formed by the understanding, filled the Temples of the nations with visible Deities, and were worshipped with altars and incense, hymns and sacrifice.

TALBOYS.

If not new, how beautifully said, sir! These for the second time.

NORTH.

If we will see how hard this dominion is to eradicate, we must look to the most civilised and enlightened times, when severe Truth has to the utmost cleansed the understanding from illusion, and observe how tenaciously these imaginary beings, with imaginary life, hold their place in our Sculpture, Painting, Poetry, and Eloquence; nay, and in our quiet and common speech; and if we should venture to expatiate in the walks of the profounder emotions, we shall sometimes be startled with the sudden apparition of boldly-impersonated thoughts, upon occasions that did not seem to promise them, whereof one might have thought that interests of overwhelming moment would have effectively banished the play of imagination!

SEWARD.

Impersonation is the highest poetical figure. It is in all degrees and lengths, from a single expression up to the Pilgrim’s Progress and Fairy Queen.

TALBOYS.

Good, Seward.

SEWARD.

It is, as you say, strongly connected with this disposition in the human mind, to produce—and believe in Power in external nature—Nymphs, Genii, Fairies, Neptune, Vulcan, Apollo, and every belief in mythology. This disposition is, the moment it sees effects which strongly affect it, to embody upon the spot the cause or power which produced them. In doing this in the old unenlightened world, it filled Nature with Deities, and not Nature only, but the human mind and life. Love was a Deity; Fear and Anger were; Remorse was in the Furies; Memory was Mnemosyne; Wisdom was in Pallas; Fortune was, and Ate; and Necessity and Death were Deities.

TALBOYS.

I seem to have heard all that a thousand times before.

SEWARD.

So much the better. In some of Homer’s descriptions, names that look like Impersonations are mixed with acknowledged Deities—Remorse, for instance, with Fear and Flight, which Virgil copies. Now, I don’t know what he meant. I hope, for the sincerity and simplicity of his poetry, that they are not his own Impersonations for the occasion, walking with Deities of national belief.

TALBOYS.

Eh?

SEWARD.

The moment you allegorise fabulous poetry—that is, admit it to have been allegorically written, you destroy from it the childlike verity of belief.

TALBOYS.

Eh?

NORTH.

Now in whatever way we are to understand these Impersonations, the result as to our question is much the same.

SEWARD.

What question, sir?

NORTH.

What question? If they are meant as real, though not Impersonations of the Poet, they were Impersonations of the human mind from an earlier and more believing time. Whether they were simply and purely from human feeling, in the bosom of human society, or were framed for the belief of others by the skilful artificers of belief, is not of positive moment as to the evidence to the operations and dispositions of the human mind. Those who presided over the national life of every religion might deliberately contrive, and might deliver over to the credence of their nation, imaginary powers, conceived with inventive imagination, as a Poet conceives them. But the very inventions, and still more the simple faith that received the inventions, show the intellectual disposition to embody in living powers the causes of effects. The faith of the people shows further the disposition and ability of the human mind to attribute reality, and that by force of feeling, to the creations of its own intellect, and particularly its aptitude to cleave to those creations in which it embodies power of which it strongly feels the effects. But I would rather believe that such faith has often formed itself in the bosom of simple societies without devisers—that men have conceived and felt till they believed; that they felt delight and beauty in a gushing fountain till they believed in a presiding spirit as fair—that the sun, the giver of light and warmth, of the day and of the year, could not appear to them a mere star of day, a larger, brighter fire. They felt a gift in his rays, and in their influence, and deified the visible orb. They thought of—they saw the terrors of war, and believed that some Power delighting in blood stirred up the hearts of men to mutual destruction.

TALBOYS.

If those ancient poets in whom this mythology remains, are to be received sometimes as delivering known and accepted names as beings, sometimes as supplying from their momentary inventions unreceived names, then this view of the case also affords proof of the same disposition we have spoken of. It shows the disposition of men to believe in powers the immediate causes of impressive effects; and the Poet must be conceived as suggesting and delivering the shape and name of Powers which it is already believed must be, though themselves are not known—not as inventing them deliberately and ornamentally, nor as declaring them from an assured and assumed knowledge. This disposition to produce shapes of powers which in early ages is attended with positive belief, afterwards remains in imagination—art, though not extinct in the work of our mind for dealing in realities. Do we, sir, ever divest ourselves of a belief in Death, Chance, Fate, Time? But a strong belief overrules with us all such illusions of fancy, withdrawing all power to the great source of power. Therefore, such a disposition, though it continues, is in real thought much oppressed and stifled, and shows itself almost accidentally, as it were, rather than in any constant opinion, for in deliberate opinion it cannot hold. But in Poetry, even in Eloquence, it remains. There we allow ourselves in illusion; and the mind leaps up with a sort of rejoicing, to recover its old liberty of deceiving itself with splendid fictions.

SEWARD.

Which is again an instance of the two different forms in which Imagination is seen in the earlier and later age—in the first, realised in belief—in the last, having its domain in the avowedly ideal world of Poetry.

NORTH.

I confess, my dear friends, it appears to me not easy to explain how the mind is enabled, desire it as much as it will, to pour its own capacities into insensate things. When Lear says, “Nature, hear! dear Goddess, hear!” his passion will not believe but that there is a hearer and executor of its curse; and it imagines nature capable of hearing. “If prayers can pierce the clouds and enter heaven, why then, give way, dull clouds, to my quick curses.” Does not all Passion that addresses itself to inanimate objects throw into them a feeling? Would not the Invocation be idle to the unresponsive and unhearing? This, then, is the nature of human passion, that, when vehement, it cannot conceive that its will is not to be fulfilled. If there are no adequate ministers, inadequate ministers must take their place. Inanimate things must become agents. “Rise, rise, ye wild tempests, and cover his flight.”—“Strike her young bones, ye taking airs, with lameness.” This is one demand, then, of passion, the execution of its purposes. Another demand of passion is sympathy. This, we know, is one of its first and strongest demands. If, then, men will not, or are not present to sympathise, that which surrounds must. The boiling passion finds it easier to believe that winds and rocks feel with it, than that it is sole, and cut off from all participation. Hence the more exuberant passion animates things, our own gladness animates nature.

SEWARD.

And how well has Adam Smith said how our sympathy includes the dead! Of all that feel not, it may with the readiest illusion embrace those who once felt; and what do we know that they do not yet feel? Now, if this can be granted as the nature and power of passion, that, without any better ground than its own uncontrollable efflux, it can blend itself into that which is around it—that it believes lightnings and floods will destroy, merely from the intensity of will with which it wills them to destroy—though here the fitness for destruction is a reason; but if it imagines that, undestroying, they will rise to destroy, that peace shall be converted into danger, and sleep into anguish, that food shall not nourish, and winds shall not waft, rather than it shall be left without vengeance, or baffled; then may we say that there is in Passion an absolute power of carrying itself out into other existence, and that no other condition, in such existence, is necessary, save that it shall become obviam to passion in its mood. If so, then, of course, any reason from analogy or causation becomes a very potent one to attract such passion and opinions formed by passion. Let this be established in passion at its fiercest, wildest height, and the principle is obtained. It is then the disposition of the mind under emotion to diffuse its emotion, bending the things around to suit its purposes, or at least filling them with sympathy with itself. In either case, upon this reason, that only so can the will which rises with its emotion ever be satisfied. This principle given, strongest in strongest passion, but accompanying all emotion, is the root of Impersonation. All intellectual analogies, all coincidences of reality with the demands of emotion, will quicken and facilitate this act of the mind; but neither analogies nor coincidences, nor any other inclining reasons, are requisite. The emotion will reconcile and assimilate any object to itself, if it is reduced to them. Here then is a principle sufficient to animate all nature, all being, and to any extent or height. This seems to be the foundation of Impersonation—that it is the nature of man to fill all things with himself. It is plainly a radix for all poetical Impersonation. He makes and reads everywhere reflection of mind; he does this without passion, that is, not without feeling—for in all ordinary thought there is feeling—but without transported passion. His strong passions in their transport show us in plainer evidence how he involves all things with himself, and subjects all things to himself; and his gentler feelings do the same. He is almost the cause of a world of mind revolving round and upon himself—he makes himself such a centre; this is the constant temper and the habitual mode of conceiving and hearing of all minds.

TALBOYS.

We seem, sir, to be talking of Imagination?

NORTH.

If the act of imagination is the perception of the sublime—of the beautiful, of the wonderful—then pleasure is an element of the product;—for without pleasure, the Sublime, the Beautiful, the poetically wild or solemn, does not exist. All other ingredients, if pleasure be absent, leave the compound imperfect—the thing undone. Therefore Addison says boldly, the pleasure of Imagination, whom Akenside follows. But further, Talboys—I believe that in Imagination poetical, there is always—or almost always—Illusion. I cannot get it out of my head as a main element. In its splendour, this is past doubt—in Impersonation—Apostrophe to the dead, or absent, or unborn—Belief is in the power of your curses—seeing the past or future as present; and in the whole fiction of Epos or Drama, the semi-belief in the life and reality of the feigned personages.

TALBOYS.

A certain degree of passion, sir, appears to be requisite for supporting Illusion. We well know that in all the history of Passion, to produce illusion is the common operation. Why not in Imagination?

NORTH.

In natural passion, gentlemen, the Illusion reigns unchecked. In the workings of poetical imagination the Illusion is tempered and ruled, subdued under a Law, conformed to conditions and requisitions of art. Men resist the doctrine of Illusion. They dislike to know to what an immense extent they are subject to Illusions. I have no conception of Beauty or Sublimity that does not require, for effecting it, some transfusion of life and spirit from our own soul into the material object—some transmutation of the object. If so, the whole face of the Universe is illuminated to us by Illusion.

TALBOYS.

If you are asked in what parts of the Iliad Imagination assumes its most powerful sceptre, you cannot help turning to the supernatural. Everything about Gods and Goddesses—Olympus—Jupiter’s nod—Vulcan making armour—all the interpositions. The terrestrial action is an Isle that floats in a sea of the marvellous; but this is for us at least Illusion—fictitious creation—the top of it. So in Shakspeare; for we are obliged to think of the Ghosts, Witches—Caliban—Ariel.

NORTH.

Existences, which we accept in the sheer despite of our knowledge—that is, of reason. The rational king of the Earth, proud of his reason, and ignorant of his Imagination, grows ashamed when the facts of his Imagination are obtruded upon him—denies them—revolts from them. To restore the belief and faith in Imagination, and to demonstrate its worth, is an enterprise obligatory on philosophy. The world seems returning to it, for a while having abhorred it. Our later poets have seen both Cause and Effect. Do you believe that thinking a child like a flower does not increase your tenderness for him or her, and that the innocence of the flower does not quicken and heighten by enshrining its beauty? Child and Flower give and take.

TALBOYS.

Excellent. We put down, then, as the first stone in all such argument—that the act of Imagination—or the poetical act—be they one or two, is accompanied with belief.

SEWARD.

Fancy, Wit, have a touch of belief.

TALBOYS.

Even a play upon words has a motion towards belief.

NORTH.

No metaphysician has ever, that I have read, expounded belief. Has Hartley? This quasi-belief, or half-belief, against better knowledge, must be admitted as a sure fact or phenomenon. I don’t care how hard it may be to persuade anybody to believe as the foundation of a philosophy an absurdity, or self-contradictory proposition, “That you believe to be true, that which you know to be false.” There the fact is; and without it you build your house in the air—off the ground. Soften it—explain it. Say that you know for one moment, and in the next know the contrary. Say that you lean to belief—that it is an impression, half-formed—imperfect belief—a state of mind that has partaken of the nature of belief—that it is an impression resembling belief—operating partial effects of belief. But unquestionably, no man, woman, or child has read a romance of Scott or Bulwer or Dickens, without seeing their actions and sufferings with his soul, in a way that, if his soul be honest, and can simply tell its own suffering, must by it be described as a sort of momentary belief. What are the grief, the tears, the joy, the hope, the fear, the love, the admiration, and half-worship—the vexation, the hate, the indignation, the scorn, the gratitude, yea, and the thirst of revenge—if the pageant floats by, and stirs actually to belief? The supposition is an impossibility, and the theory lies on our side, and not on Johnson’s, who has nothing for him but a whim of rationalism. I take novels—because in them it is a common proof, though this species be the less noble. But take Epos from the beginning. Take Tragedy—take Comedy—and what is, was, or will it be, but a half-unsubstantial image of reality, waited upon by a half-substantial image of belief, the fainter echo of airy harps? My drift is, that our entire affection, passion—choose your word—attended with pleasure and pain of heart and imagination—the love, the hate in either, are the sustaining, actuating soul of the belief. Evidence, that as the passion thrills, the belief waxes, and that—

SEWARD.

Clear as mud.

TALBOYS.

As amber.

NORTH.

I see in Imagination a power which I can express to my own satisfaction by two terms, of which you, Seward, sometimes look as if you refused me the use, disabling me from defining for you. For myself, I see “Passion moulding or influencing Intellectual Forms.” As the language stands hitherto, I do not see my way of getting out of the two terms. You want, on the lowest steps, a very elementary description—something far below the Poet—something as yet far short of the sublime, the beautiful, and the wonderful. Tell me some one who has felt fear, or anger, or love, or hate—how these have affected for him the objects of simple apprehension or of conception; of sight, for instance—of sound? Has anything through his fear seemed larger—through his hate wickeder, than it is? For that differencing of an object by a passion, I know no name but Imagination. It is the transformation of a reality; that seems to me to be the ground of what we more loftily apprehend under the name Imagination.

The great differences in the different psychological states and facts arising out of the different passions or passionate moments, are various, endless. Such influences from pleasure and pain, from loves of some sort, and from hates of some sort, take effect for us in all the objects with which we have intercourse. They make what it is to us. They make man what he is to us. They are the life of our souls. They are given to all human spirits.

SEWARD.

We have, all of us, clean forgotten Milton.

Scene II.—The Van. Time—Midnight.
North—Talboys—Seward.

NORTH.

May the bond of Unity lying at the heart of the Paradise Lost, be said to be the following Ethical Dogma?

“The Good of the created rational Intelligence subsists in the conscious consent of his Will, with the holy Will of the Creator.”

His Good:—i. e. his innocence and original happiness, whilst these last:—his virtue and regained happiness, if he attain virtue and regain happiness:—these and the full excellence of his intellectual and natural powers—

TALBOYS.

It is Ethical, and more than Ethical.

NORTH.

The Innocence and Fall of the Rebel Angels:—The Bliss and Loyalty of the Upright:—(Consider Abdiel:) The Innocence and Fall and Restoration of Man:—are various Illustrations of this great Dogma. The Restoration, as respects Man himself:—and far more eminently as respects the person of the Uncreated Restorer.

SEWARD.

This central Thought, radiating in every direction to the circumference, cannot be regarded as a theological notion, coldly selected for learned poetical treatment. The various and wonderful shaping-out, the pervading, animating, actuating, soul-like influence and operation;—direct us to understand that in the Mind of Milton, through his day of life, a vital self-consciousness bound this Truth to his innermost being:—that he loved this Truth;—lived in and by this Truth. Wherefore the Poem springs from his Mind, by a moral necessity.

TALBOYS.

Four great aspects of Composition, or Four chief moods of Poetry appear in the Paradise Lost. 1. The Sublime of disturbed Powers in the infernal Agents:—fallen and, ere they fall, warring. 2. Heaven in humanity: while Adam and Eve are “yet sinless.”—A celestial Arcadia.—The purer Golden Age. 3. Man, Earthly: when they have eaten.

“I now must change Those notes to TRAGIC.”

4. Heaven;—extended, wheresoever the good Angels go.

These Four greatly dissimilar aspects are each amply displayed:—and much as they differ, are wonderfully reconciled.

SEWARD.

Milton sets before our eyes in utmost opposition, God and Satan—i. e. Good and Evil, namely—Good, as Holiness and Bliss inseparably united in God—Evil, as Wickedness and Misery united inseparably in Satan.

NORTH.

The Poem represents the necessary eternal War irreconcilable of the Two—throughout the Creation of God—namely, first in Heaven the abode of Angels—next upon Earth the abode of Men.

SEWARD.

The Poem represents in Heaven and upon Earth, God as the willing infinite Communicator of Good:—as, in Heaven and upon Earth the perpetual Victor over Evil.

TALBOYS.

And Evil—in Heaven and upon Earth as necessarily Self-Destructive: videlicet, in this visible shape: that from God’s Heaven and from God’s Earth all reason-gifted Doers of Evil—that is, all doers of moral Evil—are cast out into perdition.

NORTH.

The Poet himself has declared in the outset the purpose of his Poem. It is to establish in the mind of his readers the belief in the Two great Truths:—That the Universe is under the government of Eternal and Omnipotent Wisdom:—and that this Government, as far as it regards Mankind, is holy, just, and merciful. This essential truth, infinitely the most important that can be entertained, since it comprehends all our good, all our evil—all happiness, all misery—temporal—eternal;—all the destinies and conditions of the human race;—was worthy the taking-in-hand of such a Teacher. This truth He might have illustrated, from any part of human history;—and with great power and evidence from a great many parts—both for obedience and for disobedience—in the case of individuals and of communities.

But He found one part of human history, where this truth shines out in its utmost strength—namely, where the Obedience and Disobedience are those of two individuals, and, at the same time, of all Mankind;—and where the illustration of the truth is beyond all comparison convincing, since the conjunction of the Happiness and the Obedience is here promulgated—since the Happiness and the Obedience are here formally bound together—the Disobedience and the Misery—by the promising and the menacing voice of the Almighty.—The Disobedience takes effect;—and first creates human misery.

SEWARD.

Milton took then this instance, preferable to all others, because above all others it emblazons, as if in characters written by the finger of Heaven, the Truth which he would teach;—notwithstanding the stupendous difficulties of the attempt into which he plunged;—committing himself, as He thus did, to unfolding before mortal gaze the Courts of Heaven;—to divulging for mortal ears colloquies held upon the celestial everlasting Throne;—to delineating the War of Creatures (i. e. the Angels) against the Creator, &c. &c.

NORTH.

Observe, moreover, that, although Man’s Obedience and Fall from Obedience is the theme undertaken, yet the Truth undertaken has other illustration, in the Poem, and reaches into higher Orders of Being. For instance, in the Order of Angels, there occurs twofold illustration—namely,

1. By the Opposition presented of unfallen and fallen Angels.

2. And, amongst the rebellious Angels themselves, by the unspeakable contrast exhibited of their first happy and their second unhappy state;—their sinless glory and their horrible punishment.

Far higher yet,—immeasurably higher,—in the divine Messiah, the Obedience is the grace, the glory, and the happiness of his Being!

TALBOYS.

God is the Creator and Upholder—Satan, the Destroyer. God is the rightful Monarch of the Universe, unassailably seated on his everlasting Throne. Satan ever attempts Usurpation, and is ever baffled.

Pride is the inward Self-exaltation of a Creature. Observe that Exaltation is proper raising from a lower degree held to a higher degree, not before held. God is eternally the Highest;—a state which precludes the idea, strictly spoken, of Exaltation.

NORTH.

Therefore, to Satan, as proud, is opposed the Self-humiliation of the Son—whom God thereupon exalts.

Pride, in Satan, considered as undue Self-exaltation, stands (when we follow out the opposition in which he stands to God) opposed to due, legitimate, rightful height, or Supremacy, Sovereignty. Satanic Pride is undue self-exaltation, at the height, in the Creature.

But this, in the Creature, is a self-enthroning, a self-idolising, a self-deifying.

SEWARD.

The Creature depends upon the Creator. The Creature is bound to the Creator by a million of distinct relations.

If you ask for One Relation, that shall contain all the others, it is this One, Dependency. That is to say, that, so long as you own your dependency, so long is there no true relation that you can deny. But, if you deny your dependency, therewith and therein you deny all your other true relations. The first motion towards (i. e. in the direction of—i. e. relating to) God, of pride in the proud Creature, is the denial of dependency. Satan denies his dependency. Both in the Past—for he denies his Creation, and avers that he had never heard such a thing mentioned. And in the Present, by renouncing his allegiance, opening war, &c. He denies the Creature’s continual derivation from the Creator, when he says, (as if in the Future,) “our own right hand shall teach us highest deeds.”

NORTH.

If it should appear necessary to vindicate expressly and at length the character which has been affirmed as one main character of the Paradise Lost, namely, that it is an Ethico-didactic Poem, the proofs offer themselves to the hand more thickly than that they can easily be all gathered.

They are Implicit and Explicit. The Implicit or inferential Proofs—Proofs involved in the tenor of the displayed History, and which are by reflection to be drawn out and unfolded—are of several kinds, and, in each, of the highest description.

Thus, the Main Action of the Poem, or the Fall of Man, teaches us that the Goodness and Happiness of the Creature subsists in the inviolable conformity of his Will to the holy Will of the Creator. Thus again:—The great Action is inductive to this Main Action—that is to say, The Fall of the Angels, which, by an easily-springing sequence of Moral Causes and Effects, brings on the Temptation, and, too easily, the Seduction of Man—as loudly inculcates the same sublime and all-comprehending Ethical Truth. And thus again:—That Third highest Action, which is incorporated into the Main action—The Redemption of Man—provided, in the Counsel of God, as remedial to the fatal Catastrophe of the Fall, and, according to the reverently-daring representation of the Poet, as undertaken in Heaven even ere the need that asks for it has befallen in Paradise upon Earth—this awful Mystery of the Divine interposing Grace irresistibly preaches the same solemn doctrine. Hell, and Earth, and Heaven proclaim with One Voice:—“Cleave, Oh Child of dust and Heir of Immortality, cleave and cling inwardly, by thy love—by thine obedience, outwardly—to the all-wise and all-righteous Will, which has called the Worlds and their Inhabitants into Being, and has imposed upon the worlds, and upon those which inhabit them, its bountiful and upholding Laws!—O cleave and immovably cling to that holy and gracious Will, which the Angels forsook and they fell!—which Man deserted, and—He fell!—which the Son of Man fulfilled, and He lifted up fallen and lost, but now restored Man to the peace of God upon this Earth, and to the bosom of God in Heaven.”

SEWARD.

Such, explicitly worded, is the admonishment, grave and high, which continually peals amidst the majestic and profound harmonies of this consecrated Poem—the admonishment the most loudly, the most distinctly heard.

TALBOYS.

Milton represents inordinate Pride, or the temper, in excess, of inward self-exaltation, as the chief element in the personal character of Satan; yet the great Archangel has maintained his Obedience to the Almighty King. The opinion of wrong done to himself, of an imposed humiliation in another’s exaltation exasperating his haughty self-idolatry, first rouses him into active disloyalty and rebellion, and to the desire and endeavour of dispossessing the Monarch of Heaven, and reigning in his stead. The open outward war which Satan is represented as waging with sensible weapons and armoury, with innumerable spirits banded in confederacy upon his part—the setting up his own throne in the north—the march across heaven—the attempt, such as it is described, at invading the very throne of Omnipotence—amongst other lights in which they may be contemplated, may be contemplated in this light, namely, that the Outward expresses, depictures the Inward. The proud Apostate Spirit, in conceiving offence and displeasure at God’s rule and ordinance, has already within his own mind rebelled against God—he has made his own Mind the field of an impious war.—We must conceive within his mind a sovereign throne erected, whereupon,—so long as He remained obedient, loyal, good,—the rightful Monarch sate, in undisputed supremacy.—From that Throne within his mind, as soon as Satan rebels, in will, God is dispossessed:—and on that internal usurped Throne the rebel now sits;—in imagination, his own King, and his own God. That which outwardly he attempts, and in which outwardly he must fail:—that inwardly he has attempted—and in that—attempting it—inwardly He must succeed.

NORTH.

A Spirit created good and great has voluntarily foregone its native inborn goodness, and, in consequence, involuntarily foregoes its native inborn greatness. There is in the Universe but one fountain of all that is holy, divine, good, amiable or pure.—This left, we drink troubled waters. No one can tell the alliances of wrong with wrong. Truth, justice, good-will—alone are magnanimous. He who has been shown at the highest of self-power,—of intellectual strength—of empire over spirits—of their willing idolatry, which extols him equal to the Highest in Heaven,—He is gradually brought down low, lower, lowest—by voluntary and imposed humiliation:—self-incarnate in bestial slime—turned into a monstrous serpent on his belly prone, and hissing amongst hissing. Has Milton in painting the fallen Archangel changed his hand, and checked his pride? He has delineated for our admiration; he has delineated for our scorn—for our pity, also.

TALBOYS.

One meaning pervades the delineation. The pride which alienates Satan from God, alienates him at last from himself.—He is wicked, and the ways of wickedness are crooked and creeping. The haughtiest of spirits in seeking to revenge his just punishment stoops to the lowest abasement. A great lesson is written on the front of this great revolution. A mind has let go of its only stronghold, and it slips lower and lower. We have seen a Spirit exalted in the favour of the Creator;—high in rank, strong in power, rich in gifts, radiant with glory, seated in bliss;—and the same cast down into misery and into dishonour. The Cause is, that he has deserted Obedience and Love.

NORTH.

This is not a picture removed to a distance from us, to be looked at with wonder. It is a lesson for each of us.

Can we not imagine the Poet himself telling us this?

Can we not raise our thoughts, to fancy Milton drawing the moral of his astonishing picture?

“You are Spirits,” he might say to us—“the creation of the same hand. Heavenly gifts are yours, and heavenly favours; and notwithstanding the fall of man, gleams, vestiges are yours of heavenly glory. To you the same choice is offered of adhering, or of separating yourselves. In you is the same ground of temptation, the same difficulty of adhering, a misunderstood self-love. You too are tempted to enthrone self upon the usurped throne of the divine legislator. To obey the law of right—to follow out the law of love, is only difficult because we feel, in every instance of being called upon so to do, that we are called upon to make some sacrifice of ourselves. It is an error—a mistaken feeling. We are called upon to sacrifice not ourselves, but a present inclination, which self suggests. Make the sacrifice—obey, fulfil the law that makes the claim upon you, and you will find that you have relinquished a fallacious, for a real good. Follow the false inclination, and you will find that instead of enthroning yourselves in the despite of Heaven’s King, you have begun to descend steps of endless descent.—Be warned by terrible example.”

TALBOYS.

We see of mankind some that are lifted up in power and exalted by their native powers—mighty minds holding ascendancy over other minds—Kings—Conquerors—Philosophers—sitting upon the thrones of the Earth, or upon intellectual thrones. To them there is the same hazard. There is the same inward solicitation of pride—the same impulse to self-idolatry. They would usurp—would extend power. Adversaries of God and Man—and knowing themselves for such—the madness of Ambition seizes upon their hearts, and on they go. They seek Exaltation—they find abasement. The false aggrandisement which they have laboured to acquire may or may not be wrested from them. But assuredly the inward abasement will hold on its appointed way.

Their end is high, but their means will be low. Ambition disjoined from good is divorced from true greatness. The consciousness of right aims alone sustains the genuine self-respect of the mind, struggling its way through the obstacles which the strife of human affairs presents. One law—one principle—one rule of action—takes dominion of the spirit which has surrendered itself to the allurement of a selfish ambition:—It has One Motto—one war-cry—“To succeed!”—The character of the means can no longer be a reason for declining them—and the proudest of Men stoop the lowest.

SEWARD.

If we read the History of humankind, we see this in the slaves to the lust of earthly empire:—in the slaves to the lust of renown. They suffer a double change from the higher and better nature given them. They have hardened themselves against shame. They harden themselves too against pity.—What does the misery which he strews in his path trouble the famous conqueror?—His chariot-wheels crush under them the gardens of humanity—He rides over human heads.—And what does it concern him who uses the high gifts of intelligence not for extending the useful domains of human knowledge,—but for aggrandising his own name—what does it concern him though, to plant his proud reputation, and multiply the train of his adherents, he must pull down heavenward hopes, in millions of human hearts?—that he must wither in them the flowers of the affections?—that he must crush the sacred virtues, which repose upon received belief?—The hero of Infidelity recoils as little from these consequences of his fame as the hero of a thousand battle-fields.

NORTH.

There is withal a Pride, which, whilst dwelling with the mind, is rebellion. There is a Pride of the Creature, which reluctantly acknowledges, which refuses to acknowledge, benefits derived from the Creator.

TALBOYS.

Yes; self-contradictory as the mood of mind seems, there is a temper in man, which may be certainly recognised, that throws off the obligation of gratitude and the belief of dependence. Thus, the feeling of Pride in intellectual talents implies that he who is in this way proud, views his talents, in a measure, as originally his own. He refers them to himself, and not beyond. If he looked at them as given, there would be an end of Pride, which would give way to the sense of heavy responsibility.

NORTH.

What a great passage in Milton is that descriptive of——

TALBOYS.

Upon a day of the heavenly year the Almighty Father, upon his Holy Mount, before the assembled Angels, manifests the Son—proclaims the Son, the head over all Principalities and Powers, and requires to be paid him accordingly the homage and obedience of the whole angelical host. The whole angelical Host pay, as required, their homage. But not all gladly and sincerely. One of the highest Archangels—if not the highest—whose heavenly name is heard no more—but upon Earth and in Hell he is called Satan and Lucifer—envies and revolts in heart at this new vicegerency. He intends rebellion:—beguiles the next Angel in authority under him, and with him, pretending a command from the celestial King, withdraws the legions who are bound in service to his hierarchal standard into the northern quarter of Heaven. With such precision does Milton dare to imagine, even in the highest, the scenes and procedure of his Poem. There the false Archangel proposes to his followers that they shall resist the ordinance imposing a new reign over them. The followers thus addressed are one third part of the whole celestial host. One Seraph resists—refuses to forego his original, proper allegiance, and flies back. The rest march in arms against the Mount of God. They are encountered by an equal number of the faithful Angels. Two days the fight rages in the celestial fields. The second of the two days closes the unequal, hopeless conflict. The Messiah goes forth to war; and the rebellious angelical multitude are precipitated from the verge of Heaven into the fiery pit of Hell, newly created, and yawning to receive the vanquished and cast-out numbers without number from their unimaginable fall.

NORTH.

What, according to Milton, is Pride? Milton’s answer is in one word. Satan aspires to sit upon the Throne of God. Then in angel or in man there is but one meaning of the word Pride. He unseats God, and sets up another—namely, Self—in his place. The comparison of Man’s Sin to Satan’s, is by Milton distinctly affirmed. The Almighty says—

“——Man disobeying,

Disloyal breaks his fealty, and sins

Against the high supremacy of heaven,

Affecting Godhead.”

I suppose the meaning to be universally applied to man’s transgression—namely, to break a law is virtually to set aside the Lawgiver, and to legislate for yourself. The act may, indeed, be more or less conscious, wilful, reflective; may more or less intend siege and defiance to Heaven. Proud Sin most intends this; and even the Sin of Pride, simply as constituted in the Will, ere going forth into action. I understand that moral offences, into which impetuous passions hurry, however undeliberated, and although they intend simply the gratification of desires, and cannot well be said to include a proud scorn of the laws that they break—for there is often more rash oblivion of than stiff-necked opposition to the laws broken—yet partake of the character condemned in Satan; and condemned in man also by these words put into the mouth of the Almighty. Every the most thoughtless and reckless breach of a law sets aside the Lawgiver, and usurps legislation to the law-breaker. The law-breaker makes his own law. No doubt, however, there are more heedful offenders. There are those who look the law in the face, and with impious hardness of heart, and wilfully approaching God, break his laws. They are proud Sinners.

TALBOYS.

In the Seventh—the Book of the Creation—we are told

“The World was made for Man, and Man for God.”

This is not so much perceptive or demonstrative as it is enkindling: a dear and near tie—elation by consciousness of a high purpose in his Creation, and gratitude for the love which thus ennobled him in creating him. If he reverences himself he is bound to a Creator, whose designs in him are thus expounded. Related hereto, but distinct, and more incidental, is the Philosophy of Man’s nature, propounded by Raphael, who nevertheless propounds as if upon divine revelation made to himself at the moment. This philosophy, delivered in three words, appears to me exceedingly sublime, and profoundly true.

“There wanted yet the master-work, the end

Of all yet done; a creature who, not prone

And brute as other creatures, but endued

With sanctity of reason, might erect

His stature, and upright with front serene

Govern the rest, self-knowing; and from thence

Magnanimous to correspond with heaven,

But grateful to acknowledge whence his good

Descends, thither with heart, and voice, and eyes

Directed in devotion, to adore

And worship God supreme, who made him chief

Of all his works.”

Here Milton describes Man as being—1. Self-knowing. That is the root. 2. Thence, great souled, and communicating with Heaven. 3. Thence also acknowledges himself as dependent. 4. Still thence grateful for the good. 5. Still thence adoring, praising. 6. From his height of Being—as chief of God’s works here below.

SEWARD.

He knows himself.

That is to say, he knows the God-like and God-allied and God-tending in his nature.

He knows his Nature as exalted—as capable for divine communions and influences, aspirations, joys, desires.

And knowing this, he boldly cherishes these desires and joys—aspires to these communions.

As Milton says, he is—

“From thence

Magnanimous to correspond with Heaven.”

NORTH.

But knowing himself, he knows himself weak—unable to create—unable to furnish his own good. Hence

“But grateful to acknowledge whence his good

Descends.”

SEWARD.

And why should self-knowledge educe gratitude from dependence?

NORTH.

I imagine, because self-knowledge includes the distinct intelligence of his own good. But he cannot know his own highest good—cannot really understand his happiness, and be ungrateful. How can you to the Giver of Love be ungrateful for the gift of Love?—if you know truly the happiness of love—i. e., know yourself as a Spirit endowed for loving—and know him for the giver? It would be a self-contradiction in Spirit.

SEWARD.

And why do you, the self-knowing, adore and praise? I think that Milton expresses this—

“Thither with hearts and hands and eyes,

Directed in devotion to adore,

Who made him chief

Of all his works.”

NORTH.

As if the discernment of his own constitution as chief of creation peculiarly summoned him to acknowledge with adoration—i. e., with awful ecstasy of admiring—the Constitutor. Is it not a high, solemn, sublime, true thought, that Man’s discernment of his own exaltedness, immediately and with direct impulse, carries him God-ward—as on the summit of a high hill you are next heaven, or seem to be next it?

TALBOYS.

This passage beginning—

“There wanted yet the Master-work,”

contains an undoubted imitation of Ovid.

“Sanctius his animal, &c.

Deerat.”

And Ovid’s is surprisingly noble—for him—the Sanctius alone is quite enough. That is the heathen contemplation of Man. How many of us know ourselves and our fellows as holy? Nevertheless, Milton makes that which was high and impassioned—logical, comprehensive, and sublime.

SEWARD.

Sanctity of Reason is hallowed and hallowing Intelligence. It is implied that in the best and truest actions of our understanding, there is an afflux of Deity, and that, as Bacon says, we are akin to God by our Spirits.

NORTH.

Well alluded to.

TALBOYS.

The sublime passage, which describes Man’s creation, besides the moral influence and incitement of its main bearing—that Man is “the end of all yet done”—that he is made in the likeness of God—that here only the Father is distinctly and especially announced as consulting and co-operating with the Son—besides the call that is thus made upon Man to revere and guard the Spirit implanted in him—and besides the formal precept with which it concludes, inculcating compliance with the sole prohibition, is, in the following respect, also remarkable, when we look for testimonies to the frame of mind in which the Poem was written. To wit: The passage appears to embosom, in a very few words—in half-a-dozen verses—an entire system of Ethics in the germ, or general thought. Milton appears to lay as its basis the faculty which Man possesses of Self-Knowledge, which he seems nearly to identify with Reason. Hence, very loftily, but very summarily, he deduces the general moral condition of Man, and his highest, that is to say, his religious obligations. We must understand, no doubt, that the other inferior obligations are to be similarly deduced. But the bare fact, that Milton so places (and so compendiously) this high and comprehensive speculation in a striking manner, attests the temper of thinking in which the whole Poem has been composed. In such a fact we unequivocally read that which has been repeatedly here affirmed upon all kinds of evidence,—that the Paradise Lost was to Milton the depository (within room at once confined and ample) for his lifelong studies; and in particular, that, holding the office of a Poet at the highest—that is to say, seeing in every one upon whom the high faculties of Poetry are bestowed, a solemn and missioned Teacher to Men, Milton hoped, in this great Poem, to acquit himself of this responsibility laid upon his own Spirit.

NORTH.

In the Kingdom of God’s Love, to obey him and to promote happiness is one and the same thing. To disobey him and to destroy happiness is one and the same thing. If it were possible for a finite being to see the consequences of his actions as God sees them, he would perform precisely the same actions, whether he aimed at augmenting to the utmost the welfare of God’s Creation, or endeavoured to the utmost to conform his actions to God’s Will.

SEWARD.

Unable to penetrate consequences, should he have access to know God’s Will—he will by this means have a safe rule of effecting that which the right, loving disposition of his Mind desires, but which his imperfect foresight disables him from accomplishing by his own computation of results.

TALBOYS.

Nor is it unreasonable to say that nations unvisited by God’s Word have access to know, in some imperfect measure, his Will—and to use it for their guidance—and that they have done so;—for all the nobler nations, and perhaps all the nations—or all, with few exceptions—at least those high Gentile nations who have left us their own hearts disclosed and recorded in writings, have witnessed, as follows:—They have regarded the primary Affections by which the family is bound together within itself—and those affections by which a nation is bound as a brotherhood within itself—as Divine Laws speaking in their bosoms. Yet more solemnly they have acknowledged the voice of Conscience, dividing Right from Wrong, in each man’s innermost Thoughts, as a divine oracle, shrined in the human heart.

SEWARD.

Yes, Talboys; their Orators, their Historians, their Philosophers, their Poets, their Mythologies, and their Altars, witness to the fact of their having thus apprehended themselves to live under a Divine Legislation.

NORTH.

When, therefore, not idly and presumptuously arrogating to themselves to divine and calculate consequences removed from their faculties, they did, in simplicity of soul, follow out the biddings of these holy charities, and the dictates of this inwardly prophesying monitor, they were so far, in the light and in the eye of Reason—VIRTUOUS. They did so far—if we may dare so highly to pronounce—conform themselves to God’s will. They did this, designing—even in the dim light in which they walked—to do this. And so far conforming themselves, after their imperfect apprehension, to his laws, they were so far producers of happiness. Their conformity—their production of human happiness, and their virtue—flowed in one channel—were one and the same stream.

SEWARD.

Even this solemn conviction, which seems to carry its own evidence in itself, derives confirmation from weighing the connection of human happiness with human actions. The feelings which carry us to accept implicitly, and without the suggestion of a doubt, the Will of God as the law of our actions, are in themselves principal sources of Happiness—the Obedience itself is the firmest and only secure foundation of Happiness. He whose will we are to obey is the Sole Giver of Happiness. And if we could begin with searching our own Being into its depths—the laws of Happiness which we should there discover would point out to us, as the effectual and unfailing sources, and the necessary condition of happiness, those qualities of action, which we know as the immutable attributes of the Divine Will—Truth, Justice, Holiness, Love.

NORTH.

The Moral Nature of Man is to be regarded as something which may rise from very low to very high degrees. And what is manifestly true of it in one state may not be as manifestly true of it in another. To understand it, my dear friends, we must regard it in its nearest approaches to perfection. From that observation of it, we must endeavour to establish principles, and deduce Rules, which we may be able afterwards to apply to judging of its inferior states. We cannot equally expect, from observing its inferior states, to find the rule that will enable us to comprehend its highest.

SEWARD.

My Preceptor teacheth well.

NORTH.

The highest Moral State of the Human Mind is unquestionably that in which it knows Deity, in his perfections; in which his Known Law is adopted as the express and supreme Law of Life;—in which the affections due towards him are strong, pure, full, habitual;—in which all the other affections, under subordination to these, are directed, each in due degree, towards its due object; and in which Conscience is known, as a declarer of the Divine Will, when other testimony is silent, is revered as such, and holds authority sufficient to decide the choice whenever the Will fluctuates in its Obedience to its highest affections.

TALBOYS.

From this state, which is that to which every human being is bound to aspire, you would deduce grounds of judging of those inferior moral conditions which tend to the attainment of this highest?

NORTH.

I would; and it will be found that these are moral, either because they bear an imperfect and broken resemblance to this state, or because they have a visible tendency towards it.

TALBOYS.

Believing, then, that the Human Soul only reaches the fulness of its nature, and the exaltation of its powers, when it Knows itself in the presence of God, when it looks up to Him, and endeavours, not in hidden thought merely, but in action and life, to adore His Will, we must not allow as possessing the same excellence, and participating in the same Nature of Morality, any state in which we cannot discern footsteps of the same Deity, where the breath of the same spirit cannot be felt? That, on the other hand, we embrace with affection, and with moral anticipation, whatever seems even remotely to be animated with this influence, and to tend to this result?

NORTH.

Yes. To an observer looking in this spirit upon the affairs of men, there will be no difficulty in approving and condemning those who, in the same light as he himself enjoys, conform to or contemn what he acknowledges as the highest Law. The two extremes of virtue and crime fall distinctly and decisively under the test which he recognises. The nature of the merit, the nature of the Guilt, of those who in the highest degree conform to this Law, and of those who most audaciously trample upon it, cannot be mistaken.

SEWARD.

But between these there are infinite degrees, to which it may often be extremely difficult to apply the same rule of Moral Estimation.

NORTH.

Alas! alas! He who looks forth from himself with the views of human perfection which I have described, must regard the world with sorrow and compassion, perceiving how much the great body of mankind are departed from the happiest and fittest condition of their nature—how they are become immersed in passions and pursuits which disguise from their own knowledge the very capacities of their being, and degrade and destroy their powers by withholding from them even the prospect of their original destination!

SEWARD.

Such must, indeed, be his melancholy view of mankind at large, comparing them, as he needs must do, with the idea of that excellence of which they are capable, and which they ought to attain.

NORTH.

But when he descends from that height of contemplation, and, mixing with them, makes himself more intimate with their actual condition, he will look on them in some degree in a different light; for, my good Seward, he will then consider, not so much what they want of perfection, as those tendencies towards it, which are still actually undestroyed among them, and which are continually found exerting themselves—with irregular impulses, indeed, and with uncertain and variable direction; but which still do exert themselves, throwing gleams over human nature of its true happiness, and maintaining to Man, in the midst of all his errors, the name and dignity of a Moral Being.

TALBOYS.

Methinks, sir, what would appear to such a Mind most grateful and consolatory in the midst of the aberrations of the human Soul, and of its darkness as to the knowledge of its Chief Good, must be the sight of those beautiful Affections which fill the hearts of human beings towards one another, and the observations of the workings of that Conscience, which in its mysterious intimations admonishes men of their departure from the Eternal Laws, though they know not whence the voice comes, nor how profound is its significance. In these great and pure affections, and in the rectitude of conduct thus maintained, he would recognise the fulfilling of that Divine Will, in harmony with which is all Good, and in revolt from which is all Evil. To him, then, the Human Will would appear thus far to maintain its conformity with the Divine: and he would witness Obedience to the Universal Law, although those who fulfilled it did but imperfectly understand their own Obedience, or conceive to what authority it was paid.

NORTH.

If the great natural Affections were made at first in perfect harmony with the Affections of Religion, they will still bear that character. And they do so, for they still appear to us in themselves pure and holy. If that is their character, then their very presence in the soul will be in some degree a restoration of its own purity and holiness. And this also is universally felt to be true: to such a degree that, most strongly to describe those feelings, we apply to them terms derived from the language of religion. We call those ties sacred: we call those duties Piety. They re-induce upon the Soul that purer, loftier nature, which the ordinary course of the world has troubled; and in doing so, they not only bring the Mind into a State which is in harmony with the Divine Law, but they do, to a certain degree, begin Religion in the Soul. This intimate connection between the strongest feelings of the heart and its holiest thoughts, discovers itself when the whole heart is wrung by the calamities to which through those feelings it lies open. When the hand of Death has rent in one moment from fond affection the happiness of years, and seems to have left to it no other lot upon Earth than to bleed and mourn, then, in that desolation of the spirit, are discovered what are the secret powers which it bears within itself, out of which it can derive consolation and peace. The Mind, torn by such a stroke from all those inferior human sympathies which, weak and powerless when compared to its own sorrow, can afford it no relief, turns itself to that Sympathy which is without bounds. Ask of the forlorn and widowed heart what is the calm which it finds in those hours of secret thought, which are withdrawn from all eyes?—ask what is that hidden process of Nature, by which Grief has led it on to devotion? That attraction of the Soul in its uttermost earthly distress to a source of consolation remote from Earth, is not to be ascribed to a Disposition to substitute one emotion for another, as if it hoped to find relief in dispelling and blotting out the vain passion with which it laboured before: but, in the very constitution of the Soul, the capacities of human and of divine affection are linked together; and it is the very depth of its passion that leads it over from the one to the other. Nor is its consolation forgetfulness. But that affection which was wounded becomes even more deep and tender in the midst of the calm which it attains.

SEWARD.

Assuredly such a spectator of human nature as we have imagined could not be indifferent to such a tendency of these natural emotions. He could not observe with unconcern even the nascent streaks of light, the dawning of a religious mind. He would call that Good which, though it had no distinct and conscious reference to anything above the Earth, did yet, by the very preparation it made in the Soul for the reception of something more holy, vindicate to itself a heavenly origin.

NORTH.

Even the Ancients, contemplating that Power in the Mind which judges so supremely of Right and Wrong, could call it nothing else than a God within us. He then who, in the highest light of knowledge, contemplates the human mind, will be yet more strongly impressed with this Sanctity of the Conscience, which affected even minds lying under much darkness and abasement, and therefore alienated from such perceptions. He undoubtedly will regard this principle as a part of original Religion not yet extinct in the Soul: will, as such, esteem and revere it; and conceiving the highest perfection of human nature to consist in its known and willed Conformity to the Divine Will, will regard with kindred feelings even this imperfect and unconscious conformity to that Law, which is thus maintained by the human spirit, resolutely and proudly struggling, in the midst of its errors, against a yet deeper fall.

TALBOYS.

And, sir, it must be remembered that, as the degrees of moral goodness are different in the various dispositions and actions of men, though they all fall under the description of one morality; so, too, the feeling of moral approbation exists in very different degrees in different minds, though in all it bears a common name. If the moral sensibility is not enlightened and quickened by those feelings which belong to its most perfect state, its judgments will be proportionally faint and low. As in its virtue there is a lower virtue, which tends merely to a Harmony with the Divine Will, so, in the judgment of virtue, there is a lower judgment, which implies no more than that he who judges has his own mind brought into a state in which there is a tendency to the same sacred and solemn apprehensions.

NORTH.

The Moral judgments of men are vague and undefined; but they are accompanied universally with a solemn feeling: not merely of dislike—not, in the highest degree, of mere detestation and hate—not merely with reproach and resentment for violating the benevolence, and invading the happiness of human nature; but there is a sensation of awe accompanying the sentiment of condemnation, which visibly refers to something more than what is present to our eyes on the face of the smiling or the blasted Earth. Among all nations, the abhorrence and punishment of crime has always reference to some indignation that is conceived of among higher powers. Their Laws are imagined to be under a holier sanction, and in their violated majesty there is apprehended to be something of the anger of offended Deity. Hence the wrath of Punishments, which have been conceived of as fulfilling heavenly displeasure; and those who have inflicted signal retributions have imagined that they avenged their Gods as well as the broken laws of men.

TALBOYS.

This feeling of a superhuman authority present in the affairs of men shows decisively what is the tendency, in natural minds, of moral feeling, when it is aroused to its greatest height; the season in which it may be expected best to declare its own nature.

NORTH.

Nor did this awe of a superior power present in the consciences of men, and violated there, discover itself solely in the vindications of punishment; but the great acts of virtue also led men to thoughts above humanity; nor did they otherwise conceive of the impulses of the mind, in the noblest actions, than as inspirations from the divinity.

SEWARD.

These opinions and views have prevailed in nations ignorant of religion, but in whose powerful nature the native sentiments of the human spirit disclosed themselves in full force; among whom, therefore, its actual tendencies may best be ascertained.

NORTH.

The same truths, deeply buried in human nature, may be recognised in different forms wherever its voice speaks in its strength. If one people have believed that Furies rose from their infernal beds to dog the steps of the murderer, wandering upon the Earth, others, from the same source of preternatural feeling, have believed that the body would bleed afresh at his approach, and that his unappeased ghost would haunt the place where Guilt had driven it out from life. The very conception of such crimes dilates the spirit to conceptions of the unseen powers which reign over human life, which walk unperceived among the paths of men, and which are universally believed to be enemies or punishers of human wickedness. If the history of superstition might be told at large, it would represent to us the conscience of man laid open by his Imagination, and would disclose, in fearful pictures, the reality of that connection which subsists in our nature between the apprehension of Good and Evil in the soul of man, and the apprehensions cognate with it of a world of invisible power, of which it is the eternal law that Good is required, and Evil hated and pursued.

TALBOYS.

These evidences attest that, even among those who have the least knowledge of Religion, whose judgments are least moulded by its spirit, there is an inseparable connection between Conscience and Religion; that its strong emotions always carry the soul to those conceptions which are most akin to its powers.

NORTH.

If, under the circumstances which produce the strongest feeling, such a tendency shows itself distinctly and in remarkable forms, then, under all circumstances, there will be fainter and more indistinct perception of this tendency?

SEWARD.

Even so, sir.

NORTH.

For this is the nature of the human Mind. Our feelings are not always determined by distinct thought; but there is a sort of presaging faculty in the soul, by which it foresees whither its own conception tends, and feels, in anticipation of those thoughts, into which the imagination would run if it were left free.

SEWARD.

I am not sure, sir, that I fully understand you.

NORTH.

Thus certain strains of thought are felt to be joyous or solemn when they are barely touched, and in the ready sensibility, feeling begins to arise, though no ideas are yet distinctly present to which such feeling fitly belongs. The mind shudders or is gladdened at the distant suggestion of what it knows, if pursued, would shake it with horror, or fill the blood with joy.

TALBOYS.

Every human being must have had such experience.

NORTH.

This is a fact of our nature too well understood by those whose mind labours with any store of fearful or bitter recollection, into which they dread to look. The approach to some place hideous to the memory produces the shivering of horror before it is beheld; and even within the spirit, in like manner, the approach to those dark places of thought where unsoothed sorrows lie buried, startles the mind, and warns it to turn the steps of thought another way.

TALBOYS.

The feeling that “that way madness lies;” and the recoiling from it, through a forefeeling of the pain which lies in the thoughts that might arise, is common to all strong passion that has held long possession of the mind.

NORTH.

A similar state is known in these imitations of passion, the works of art;—Music has power over us, not by the feelings which it produces distinctly in the mind, but by those many deep and passionate feelings which it barely touches, and of which it raises up, therefore, from moment to moment, obscure and undefined anticipations. In Painting, the Imagination is most powerfully excited often not by what is shown, but by what is dimly indicated. What is shown exhausts and limits the feelings that belong to it; what is indicated merely, opens up an insight into a whole world of feelings inexhaustible and illimitable.

SEWARD.

Such, indeed, is the nature of our mind; and these are examples of a general principle of thought and feeling.

NORTH.

This capacity of the Mind to be affected in slighter degree, but in similar manner, by anticipated feeling, is to be noticed in respect to all its more fixed and important emotions. It enters as a great element into all its moral judgments. The judgment of right or wrong is quick and decisive, but is rather unfrequently attended with very strong emotion. Those strongest emotions belong to rare occurrences; for the greater part of life is calm. But they have been felt, nevertheless, at times; so that the soul distinctly knows what is its emotion of moral abhorrence, and what its emotion of moral veneration. When lesser occasions arise, which do not put its feeling to the proof, it still is affected by a half-remembrance of what those feelings have been: a slighter emotion comes over it—an apprehension of that emotion which would be felt in strength, if it could be given way to. Thus even the very name of crimes affects the mind with a dim horror, though the Imagination is still remote from picturing to itself anything of the reality of acting them. Whatever great conceptions, then, are so linked in actual Nature with our moral emotions, that under the passionate strength of these emotions they must arise, some slight shadow of the same conceptions, some touch of the feelings which they are able to call up, will be present to the mind whenever it is morally moved.

SEWARD.

Ay, sir, I now see the meaning—of the application—of all your discourse. If there is in the depth of our Nature such a connection between our Moral and our Religious conceptions, that our moral feelings, when exalted or appalled in the highest degree, will assume a decidedly religious character, then even in their slighter affection they will be touched, even from a distance, with that religious temper.

NORTH.

And does not this appear to be precisely the case?

SEWARD.

It does appear that the two kinds of feelings are so connected, that in the strongest moral feeling Religion is sensibly present, and that in its weaker emotion there is a slight colouring of the same feeling—faint and indistinct indeed, but such as to give to all our judgments of right and wrong a something of solemnity that is distinct from the ordinary complexion of human affairs, from the ordinary judgment of human interests or passions.

NORTH.

This connection which is perceived in individual Minds may be observed in considering the differences of national character. The different nations of the earth have exhibited the moral nature of man in very different degrees of strength. It will be found that they have also possessed in very different degrees the spirit of Religion; and that the two have risen or declined together. This is true both of the nations of the old world who were enlightened, and of the Christian nations, who have preserved their Religion in various degrees of purity and truth, and whose morals have always borne a corresponding character. If there is a people light and fickle in their moral character, the same unfixedness and levity will be found in their religion. But whatever nation has embraced with deep and solemn feeling the tenets of their faith, will be found to be distinguished in proportion by the depth of their moral spirit. The dignity of their Mind appears not in one without the other, but in the two united.

TALBOYS.

Thus, then, in those minds in which the two are imperfectly unfolded, they are united, as in those in whom they are most perfectly unfolded. But with this difference:—that where Religion in its most perfect form is known, there it enlightens and exalts the moral feelings. Under its imperfect and erroneous forms, conscience applies to men’s hearts in some degree the defects of religion.

FROM STAMBOUL TO TABRIZ.[^[1]]

Politics, since the year 1848, have engrossed so unwonted a share of the attention of the reading world, that there can be no doubt that, in more than one European country, books of great literary and scientific interest have been withheld from publication until more tranquil days should give them a better chance of the welcome they merit. Such has avowedly been the case with Dr Wagner’s latest work, the fourth and most important of a series suggested to him by several years of Oriental travel and study. It was, if we rightly remember, in the second book of this series, relating to Armenia,[^[2]] that he announced his intention of reserving for a final work the more important results of his rambles and observations. Previously to the Armenian volume he had published his account of Caucasus and the Cossacks,[^[3]] to the general reader more interesting than any of its successors. Third in order of appearance came the Journey to Colchis;[^[4]] and now, believing that his countrymen’s taste for books of foreign travel and adventure is reviving, he puts forth two copious volumes, containing all that he has to say, and that he has not previously published, concerning his Eastern journeyings and residence.

Dr Wagner is one of the most experienced, indefatigable, and, as we believe, one of the most trustworthy and impartial of foreign literary travellers. On a former occasion we explained how his strong natural bent for travel and scientific research had overcome many and great obstacles, and had conducted him not only through various European countries, but with a French army to Constantina, and afterwards over a great part of Western Asia. His present book is comprehensive and somewhat desultory in its character. It details the author’s residence in the Alpine region of Turkish Armenia, his travels in Persia, and his adventurous visits to certain independent tribes of Kourds, whose country is immediately adjacent to that interesting but unsafe district of Kourdistan, where Schulze, the German antiquarian, and the Englishman Browne (the discoverer of Darfour) met a bloody death, and rest in solitary graves. Dr Wagner is sanguine that, now that the revolutionary fever has abated, many will gladly quit the study of newspapers, and the contemplation of Europe’s misty future, to follow him into distant lands, rarely trodden by European foot, and some of which have hitherto been undescribed “by any German who has actually visited them.” As the most novel portions of his book, he indicates his visits to the mountain district south of Erzroum, and his excursions east, south, and west of the great salt lake of Urumiah, the Dead Sea of Persia. A keen politician, and this book being, as we have already observed, a sort of omnium-gatherum of his Eastern experiences, political, scientific, and miscellaneous, he devotes his first chapter to what he terms “a dispassionate appreciation of Prince Metternich’s Oriental policy,” (chiefly with respect to Servia,) which chapter we shall avail ourselves of his prefatory permission to pass unnoticed, as irrelevant to the main subject of the book. Equally foreign to the objects announced in the title-page are the contents of Chapter the Second, in which, before taking ship for Trebizond, he gives a hundred pages to the Turkish capital, promising, notwithstanding all that has of late years been written concerning it, to tell us something new about Constantinople, and bidding his readers not to fear that he is about to impose upon them a compilation from the innumerable printed accounts of that city, which have issued from female as well as male pens, “from the days of Lady Montague down to Mrs Ida Pfeiffer the far-travelled, and Madame Ida Hahn Hahn the devotee.” He fulfils his promise. His sketches from the Bosphorus are not only amusingly written, but novel and original. Dr Wagner, it must be observed, set out upon his Eastern wanderings well provided with circular letters of recommendation from Lord Aberdeen and M. Guizot to the various British and French agents in the countries he anticipated visiting. From the Russian government he also obtained, although with greater difficulty, similar documents. The natural consequence was, that, at Constantinople, and elsewhere, he passed much of his time in diplomatic and consular circles, and to such intercourse was doubtless indebted for much useful information, as his readers unquestionably are for many pungent anecdotes and entertaining reminiscences.

Upon an early day of his stay in Constantinople, Dr Wagner was so fortunate as to enjoy a near and leisurely view of his Highness Abdul Meschid. It was a Friday, upon which day the Grand Seignior is wont to perform his devotions in one of the principal mosques of his capital. In the court of the great Achmet mosque, Dr Wagner saw a crowd assembled round a group of twenty horses, amongst which was a slender, richly-caparisoned, silver-grey Arabian, of extraordinary beauty and gentleness. It was a favourite steed of the Sultan’s. Presently the door of the mosque opened; the grey was led close up to the lowest step; a slender Turk came forth, descended the steps stiffly and rather unsteadily, was assisted into saddle and stirrup by black slaves, and rode silently away through the silent crowd, which gave back respectfully as he passed, whilst every head was bowed and every hand placed upon the left breast. No shout or cheer was heard—Turkish custom forbidding such demonstrations—nor did the sovereign requite by salute or smile his subjects’ mute reverence. At that time Abdul Meschid was but twenty years old. His appearance was that of a sickly man of thirty. Early excesses had prematurely aged him. His cheeks were sunken; lines, rarely seen in youth, were visible at the corners of his eyes and mouth; his gaze was fixed and glassy. Dr Wagner is witty at the expense of another German writer,[^[5]] who saw the Sultan since he did, and sketched his personal appearance far more favourably.

“It is possible, however,” he says, “that with improved health the Sultan’s figure may have improved and his countenance have acquired nobility, so as to justify the description of the genial author of the ‘Fragments.’ Possible is it that Dr Spitzer’s[^[6]] steel pills, combined with the seraglio-cook’s strong chicken broth and baths of Burgundy wine, may have wrought this physical marvel, have given new vigour to the muscles, have braced the nerves, and have imparted to his Highness’s drooping cheeks that firm and healthful look which the learned German declares he noted on the occasion of his audience. Abdul Meschid has still youth on his side; and when such is the case, nature often willingly aids the physician’s inadequate art. At the time I speak of, it is quite certain that the young Sultan looked like a candidate for the hospital. His aspect excited compassion, and corresponded with the description given to us of him by the German sculptor Streichenberg, who certainly contemplated his Highness more closely and minutely than the ‘Fragment’ writer, seeing that his business was to carve the Padisha’s likeness in ivory. As an artist, Mr Streichenberg was not particularly edified by the lean frame and flabby countenance of so young a prince. Not to displease his sublime patron, he was compelled to follow the example of that other German sculptor, who, commissioned by his royal Mæcenas to model his hand and leg for a celebrated dancer, adopted, instead of the meagre reality, the graceful ideal of the Belvidere Apollo, and so earned both praise and guerdon. The person of the Grand Seignior appeared to Streichenberg, as it did to me, emaciated, relaxed, narrow-breasted, and faded. Two years later, when I again saw the Sultan, in the solemn procession of the Kur-ban-Beiram, a renegade, who stood beside me, exclaimed, ‘Were I the Sultan, and looked as he looks, I would never show myself in public.’”

Close behind the Sultan rode the chief of the eunuchs, a fat negro from Sudan, mounted upon a horse as black as himself; and behind him came a young Turk of remarkable beauty, whose thick raven-black beard contrasted with the whiteness of his complexion, as did his whole appearance with that of the sickly sovereign, and with the dingy, monkey-like physiognomy of the Kisslar Aga. Beside such foils, no wonder that the picturesque young Oriental, with his profile like that of some Saracen warrior, and his dreamy thoughtful eyes, found favour with the fair. Riza Pasha was his name; he was then the seraglio-favourite, the lover of Valide, the mother of the Sultan. He alone pulled the strings of Turkish politics, and made the lame old Grand Vizier, Rauf Pasha, dance like a puppet to whatever tune he piped.

The Sultan and his suite were attired in the reformed costume—in blue frocks of Polish cut, red trousers, and the red fez, with its abundant blue tassel drooping over it on all sides. Scarcely had they ridden out of sight when a group of very different character and appearance issued from the chief gate of the mosque, gathering on its way far more demonstrations of popularity than did Abdul Meschid and his Kisslar Aga. It was composed of Turkish priests and doctors—Ulemas, with their Mufti at their head—all in the old Turkish garb, with ample turbans and huge beards. The sympathy of the people with these representatives of the old régime was expressed by far lower bows, by more fervent pressure of hand on heart, than had greeted the Sultan’s passage. The holy men looked kindly upon the crowd, amongst whom the Mufti occasionally threw small coins, which naturally augmented his popularity, and secured him many followers and good wishes. Dr Wagner remarks upon the present contradictory and anomalous state of Turkish dress. At the festival of the Kurban-Beiram he saw the Sultan and all the state officials, from the Grand Vizier downwards, in European uniforms—narrow trousers, gold epaulets, tight-buttoned coats, collars stiff with embroidery. But at the collar the Frank ceased, and the Oriental reappeared. There was the long beard, and the brimless fez. With this last item of costume, the boldest Turkish reformer has not as yet dared to interfere. The covering of the forehead with a peak or brim to the cap is an innovation for which the Turks are not yet ripe. It is considered the outward and visible sign of the Giaour, and a Turk who should walk the streets of Constantinople in a hat, or in a cap with a peak, would be stoned by the mob. The prejudice springs from the duty stringently enjoined upon every true believer, to touch the ground with his forehead when praying. Hence, to wear a vizard over the brow appears to the Turk like contempt of a religious law. A bold European in the service of the Porte advised Sultan Mahmoud to put leathern peaks to his soldiers’ caps. On duty they would keep off the sun; at prayer-time the caps might be turned round upon the head. But Mahmoud, passionate reformer though he was, shrank from offering so deadly an affront to Turkish fanaticism. Neither did he dare, like Peter the Great, to crop his subjects’ beards. The well-intended changes which he did introduce were sufficiently startling, and to many of them, even at the present day, the nation is scarcely reconciled. In a picturesque point of view, the new style of dress, intended as the signal of a general change in Turkish usages and institutions, is anything but an improvement upon the old one. The physical prestige of the Oriental departed with his flowing robe, with his shawls and his rich turban.

“These fat-paunched, crooked-legged pashas,” exclaims Dr Wagner, “what caricatures they appear in their buttoned-up uniforms! Formerly, when the folds of their wide garments concealed bodily imperfections, the Turks were held to be a handsome race. Now, in Constantinople, a handsome man, in the reformed dress, is an exception to the rule. The Turks of the towns are rarely slender and well-built; and the tall, muscular figures which one so commonly finds amongst Arabs, Persians, and Tyrolese, are scarcely ever to be seen in Turkey. Neither do we see in Turkish cities anything to remind us of the fine knightly figures of the Circassians—although, from the female side, so much Circassian blood runs in the veins of the higher classes of Turks. The indolent manner of life, the bringing up of boys in the harem until the age of puberty, too early indulgence in tschibouk-smoking and coffee-drinking, and premature excesses of another kind, have all contributed to enervate and degrade an originally vigorous and handsome race.”

In the whole Beiram procession, Dr Wagner declares, there were, besides Riza Pasha, but two handsome men amongst all the Turks of the higher class there present. Of the numerous array of officers and soldiers, it was but here and there that he saw one tolerably well-made, and athletic figures were still more rarely observable. Worse than any looked the debilitated Sultan, cramped in his tight coat, oppressed by his heavy epaulets and gold lace, his diamonds and his plumes, and leaning languidly forward on his fine charger. What a contrast with the portrait of the Emperor Nicholas, which Dr Wagner saw when visiting the summer seraglio of Kadi-Köi! Opposite to a divan upon which Abdul Meschid was wont to repose—whilst his tympanum was agreeably tickled by the harmony of half-a-dozen musical boxes, playing different tunes at the same time—stood two costly porcelain vases, whereon were painted likenesses of the Emperor and Empress of all the Russias. They were presents from Nicholas to the Sultan. “The Emperor’s gigantic and powerful frame and martial countenance were admirably portrayed. The painter had given him a mien and bearing as though he were in the act of commanding his grenadiers. As a contrast, I pictured to myself the Turkish monarch reposing his feeble frame upon the luxurious velvet divan; the harmless ruler who prefers ease in his harem to a gallop at the head of his troops; the trill of his musical boxes, and the flutes of dancing dervishes, to the clatter of cuirasses and the thunder of twelve-pounders.” Russia and Turkey are well typified by their rulers. On the one hand, vigour, energy, and power; on the other, weakness, decrepitude, and decline. What wonder if, as Dr Wagner relates, the young Archduke Constantine, when visiting the city that bears his name, gazed wistfully and hopefully from the lofty gallery of the Galata tower on the splendid panorama spread before him, as though dreaming that, one day, perhaps, the double eagle might replace the crescent upon the stately pinnacles of Stamboul!

After passing in review several of the most remarkable men in Turkey, Reschid Pasha, Omar Pasha the Renegade, Tahir Pasha, the fierce old admiral who commanded the Turkish fleet at Navarino, and who—never well disposed towards Christians—regarded them, from that disastrous day forward, with inextinguishable hatred, Dr Wagner speaks of the representatives at Constantinople of various European courts, briefly retracing some of the insults and cruelties to which, in former times, the ambassadors of Christian sovereigns were subjected by the arrogant Porte, and noting the energy and success with which Great Britain alone, of all the aggrieved powers, and even before the empire of the seas had become indisputably hers, invariably exacted and obtained satisfaction for such injuries. He remarks with admiration upon the signal reparation extorted by Lord Ponsonby in the Churchill case, and proceeds to speak in the highest terms of that diplomatist’s able successor.

“The most prominent man, by his political influence, as well as by his spirit, character, energy, and nobility of mind, in the diplomatic world of Pera, was and is, to the present day, the Englishman Stratford Canning. With external advantages, also, Nature has endowed this man more richly than any of his colleagues, whether Turks or Franks. He is of a very noble figure, and possesses that innate, calmly dignified majesty which characterises Britannia’s aristocracy. Totally free from affectation or theatrical manner, he has a thoughtful brow, marked with the lines of reflection and labour, and fine deep blue eyes, whose meaning glance seems to reveal a host of great qualities, and to tell, at the same time, that with the highest gifts of a statesman is here combined a warm, a generous, and a sympathetic heart.”

Dr Wagner was presented to Sir Stratford Canning by a German friend, and the ambassador seems completely to have won his heart, partly by the admiration he expressed of Circassia’s heroic struggle against the overwhelming power of the Czar, and by his sympathy with the Nestorian Christians of Djulamerk—at that time persecuted and cruelly handled by Beder Khan—but still more by the general liberality of his views, and by his un-diplomatic frankness of speech and manner. The Doctor pays a warm tribute to his high qualities, and to his success and diplomatic triumphs at Constantinople; and Dr Wagner’s eulogiums are, in this instance, the more to be valued that he does not often bestow them upon our countrymen, but more frequently dwells upon their less amiable qualities. As a philanthropist and man of high honour, he says, Sir Stratford Canning is really a rarity in old Byzantium, where, for so many centuries, tyranny and servility, corruption and lies, have established their seat. And he proceeds to exhibit the less favourable side of the character of the diplomatic corps at Constantinople, bearing with particular severity upon an Austrian envoy, concerning whom he tells some good stories—one, amongst others, of a diamond ornament, which brought great ridicule and discredit upon the internuncio. When Ibrahim Pasha was driven out of Syria, the Sultan, in token of his gratitude, ordered the court jeweller to manufacture costly diamond ornaments for the ladies of the British and Austrian ambassadors. Lady Ponsonby (we abridge from Dr Wagner) duly received hers, but Count Stürmer intimated, on behalf of his lady, that she would prefer ducats to diamonds. The cunning Austrian well knew that upon such occasions the jewellers were wont to take large profits. So he had it mentioned at the seraglio, by one of his dragomans, that the ambassadress was no lover of trinkets, but would willingly receive their value. To this there was no objection, and the pleasant sum of half a million of piastres was transferred from the Sultan’s treasury to the internuncio’s strong box. If the Austrian flattered himself that the transaction would be unknown, he was terribly mistaken. Pera is the Paradise of evil tongues, and next day the ambassadress’s dealings in diamonds were the talk of the town. Count Stürmer had many enemies and no friends; even his attachés had little attachment for him; the story was too piquant to be lost, and it was repeated with a thousand good-natured embellishments and commentaries, until it came round to the ears of the person principally concerned. Thereupon, the wily ambassador devised a plan to outwit the gossips. The finest diamond ornaments in the best jeweller’s shop in the bazaar were ordered to be sent to the Austrian embassy, on approval. An order for diamonds had been received from Vienna. The jeweller, anticipating a prompt sale and good profit, hastened to send the best he had. Meantime a number of the members of the different embassies were asked to dinner. At dessert, Count Stürmer led the conversation to the Sultan’s generosity and gallantry to ladies, and, turning to the Countess, asked her to show their guests the beautiful set of diamonds she had received as a present from his Highness. Great was the company’s admiration of the costly jewels—far greater their astonishment at this ocular refutation of the current tale which had transformed the brilliants into piastres. They had thought the sources of their information so sure! The ambassador noted and enjoyed their confusion. But, clever as the trick was—in political matters its author had never exhibited such ingenuity and inventive talent—its success was but temporary. The sharp noses of the Pera gossips smelled out the truth. Having served their purpose, the jewels were returned to the jeweller, and one may imagine the shout and halloo that resounded through the drawing-rooms, coffee-houses, and barbers’ shops of Pera and Galata, when the real facts of the case were at length verified beyond a doubt.

The admission made by Dr Wagner in another place, that the hotel of the Austrian internuncio was remarkable for its hospitality, and was the chief place of meeting in Constantinople for foreigners and natives of distinction, should perhaps have induced him to take a more indulgent view of Count Stürmer’s dealings in diamonds. Go where you will, says a French proverb, you shall always be welcome if you take with you a fiddle and a frying-pan. Dinners and dances are amongst the most important of diplomatic duties; and the Austrian may have thought he could better dispense with diamonds than with these. At his hotel, during one of Dr Wagner’s visits to Constantinople, that singularly successful soldier of fortune, General Jochmus, was a constant guest. This fortunate adventurer, of insignificant family at Hamburg, who has been indebted, for his remarkable rise, partly to his gallantry and talents, partly to extraordinary good luck, and who has passed through half-a-dozen services, always with more or less distinction, began his career in Greece, afterwards joined the Anglo-Spanish Legion, passed thence into the native Spanish army with the rank of general, quitted it on account of an insult received from a French tailor settled in Spain, and for which the feeble and Afrancesado Christino government dared not give him the satisfaction he justly demanded, and, at the time referred to by Dr Wagner, was Ferik-Pasha in the Turkish service—subsequently to become Imperial minister under the brief rule of the Archduke John. His skill as a chess-player, Dr Wagner informs us, is still more remarkable than his military talent. When in command of the Turkish army in Syria, at the time that Ibrahim Pasha and his Egyptians were about to retreat through the desert, Jochmus, entering Damascus—long a stronghold of chess—challenged the best players in the place to a match, and carried off the victory. From this officer, and from other Europeans of high rank in the Turkish service, Dr Wagner, who loves to speculate on the political future of the East, and on the probable or possible infringements of Russia upon the territories of her weaker neighbours, gathered opinions, valuable although very various, as to the military power of Turkey, and her means of resistance to Muscovite aggression. The Doctor entertains a very high respect for the power of Russia, strikingly illustrated by the recent crisis, when, with one army guarding Poland and another warring in the Caucasus, she was able to lend a third—not far short of two hundred thousand men—to the neighbouring empire, which was on the point of being overturned by an insurgent province. In his second volume he talks ominously of the result of an anticipated conflict between an Anglo-Indian and a Russian army, predicting victory to the latter, even whilst recognising the justice of the high encomiums passed by another German writer on the corps of British officers in India. “An impartial and competent observer and judge of most of the armies of Europe, Leopold von Orlich, who has written a valuable book of travels in India, assures us that that numerous body of officers (eight hundred and twenty staff officers, and five thousand five hundred of inferior rank) has not its equal in the world with respect to military spirit and efficiency, and that he never witnessed in any army so much mutual self-devotion as amongst the officers and soldiers of the British Indian host. Thirst for action, high spirit, self-confidence and practical good sense, are the special characteristics of the English officers.” Than this, nothing can be truer. Dr Wagner proceeds to theorise on the probable defection of the Sepoys, in the event of a Russian army showing itself on our Indian frontier. Theories referring to such remote and improbable contingencies we need hardly be at the pains to combat; and, indeed, were we to take up the argumentative cudgels every time that Dr Wagner’s frequent political digressions hold out temptation so to do, we should get to the end of our paper and have got never a step from Constantinople. Our present object being the general examination of a book of travels, we prefer accompanying the Doctor on board the Austrian steamer Stamboul, bound for Trebizond. Thence his road was by land, south-eastward to Erzroum, travelling with Turkish post-horses—not in a carriage, but in the saddle and with baggage animals—at first through a garden of azaleas and rhododendrons, of geraniums and ranunculuses; afterwards through an Alpine district, over dangerous mountain-paths, unequalled, he declares, for the hazards of the passage, by anything he ever met with in the European Alps. Whilst traversing these bridle-roads, which are often scarcely two feet broad, with precipices of giddy depth now on the right hand and then upon the left, travellers keep their saddles and trust to the good legs, prudence, and experience of their horses. Dr Wagner witnessed more than one accident. A pack-mule fell over a precipice, but escaped with the fright and a few bruises. A Turkish official had a very narrow escape. His horse slipped upon a wet rock, fell, and lay where he fell. The Turk found himself with half his body under the horse, the other half hanging over a gulf which gaped, in frightful profundity, at the edge of the road. “I had passed the dangerous spot,” says the Doctor, “but one minute before him; I heard the fall, looked round, and saw the Turk just below me, in that horrible position. The horse lay with the saddle turned towards the precipice, down which it seemed inevitable that, at the first effort to rise, he and his rider must fall. But the animal’s fine instinct saved both itself and its rider. Snorting, with dilated nostrils and ears erect, the brave horse gazed down into the chasm, but made not the slightest movement. The Turk remained as motionless; he saw the peril and dared not even shout for aid, lest he should scare his horse. The utmost caution was necessary in approaching him. Whilst the Pole and I quickly alighted and descended to his assistance, the Turk’s companions had already got hold of his bridle and coat skirts, and soon horse and man stood in safety upon their six legs.”

The Pole here referred to—John Saremba was his name—accompanied Dr Wagner from Constantinople as a sort of guide or travelling servant, and was his stanch and faithful follower during very long and often dangerous wanderings. He spoke Turkish and Italian, could cook a good pilau, and handled his sabre, upon occasion, with dexterity and effect. The story of his eventful life, which he related to his employer after dinner at Gumysh Haneh, a town between Trebizond and Erzroum, whilst their companions enjoyed the Kef, or Oriental idleness after meat, is unquestionably the most interesting digression of the many in Dr Wagner’s book. Wonderful to relate, Saremba, although a Pole and a refugee, claimed not to be either a count or a colonel. His father had been a glazier in Warsaw, and brought his son up to the same trade. When the Polish revolution broke out, in November 1830, young Saremba entered the service as a volunteer, was present at the battles of Grochow, Praga, Iganie, Ostrolenka, but neither received wounds nor obtained promotion. It is rare to meet a Pole who has not been at least a captain, (the Polish army lists of that period being now out of print.) Saremba admitted that he had never attained even to a corporal’s worsted honours. After the capture of Warsaw, his regiment retreated upon Prussian ground. Their hope was that the Prussian king would permit their passage through his territory, and their emigration to America. This hope was unfulfilled. They were disarmed; for a few weeks they were taken good care of; then they were sent back to Poland, there to be drafted into various Russian regiments, or sent, by troops, to the interior, or to Caucasus. The latter was Saremba’s lot. Incorporated in a Russian regiment of the line, and after many changes of garrison, he found himself stationed at the camp of Manglis, in the neighbourhood of Teflis.

In Saremba’s company there were sixteen Poles besides himself. Seven of them had fought in the revolutionary war; the others were recruits, enlisted since its conclusion. One of the number was married. Their treatment by the Russian officers was something better than that of the other soldiers, Russians by birth. This proceeded from no sympathy with the Polish cause, but from an involuntary feeling of compassion for men superior in breeding and education to the Russian boors, and who were condemned for political offences to the hard life of a private soldier. More dexterous and intelligent than the Russians, the Poles quickly learn their duty, and would monopolise most of the chevrons of non-commissioned officers, had not the colonels of regiments instructions on this head from the Czar, who has little confidence in Polish loyalty. Saremba was tolerably fortunate in his commanding officer; but the latter could not always be at his subaltern’s elbow, and the poor Poles had much to put up with—bad food, frequent beatings, and extra duty, as punishment for imaginary offences. When to these hardships and sufferings was added the constant heimweh—the ardent and passionate longing after home, which has often driven Swiss soldiers, in foreign services, to desertion, and even to suicide—no wonder that every thought of the Poles was fixed upon escape from their worse than Egyptian bondage. There is peculiar and affecting interest in Saremba’s narrative of this portion of his adventures, which Dr Wagner gives in substance, he says, but, as we are disposed to believe, pretty nearly in the Pole’s own words.

“When off duty, we Poles often assembled behind the bushes of the forest that encircles the camp of Manglis; sang, when no Russian was within earshot, our national Polish airs, which we had sung, during the revolution, in the ranks of our national army; spoke of our homes, of days gone by, and of hopes for the future; and often, when we thought of all we had lost, and of our bitter exile in a wild foreign land, we all wept aloud together! Well for us that none of our officers witnessed that. It would have gone hard with us.

“We formed innumerable plans of flight into Turkey, but, lacking any accurate knowledge of the country, we for a long time dared not come to a positive resolution. Meanwhile, we took much trouble to acquire the Tartar tongue, and to extract information from the inhabitants concerning the way to Turkey. One of our comrades helped a Tartar peasant in the neighbourhood of Manglis to cultivate his fields, receiving no payment, in order to make a friend of him, and to question him about the country. The Tartar soon divined his project, and willingly lent himself to facilitate our escape. Flight to Persia would have been easiest; but the Tartar would not hear of that, for he was a Sunnite, and detested the heretic followers of Ali. He advised us to fly to Lasistan, as easier to reach than Turkish Armenia. My comrade was compelled to promise him that, once beyond the Russian frontier, we would adopt Islamism. The Tartar minutely explained to him the bearings of the heavens, taught him the names of all the mountains and rivers we should have to cross, and of the villages in whose vicinity we must cautiously conceal our passage. Should we find ourselves in extreme difficulty or danger, he advised us to appeal to the hospitality and protection of the nearest Mollah, to confide to him our position, and not to forget to assure him of our intention to become good Mussulmans as soon as we were on Turkish territory. After we had quite made up our minds to desert at all risks, we required full three months for preparation. Wretched as was our pay, and scanty and bad our rations, we husbanded both, sold our bread and sought to accustom ourselves to hunger. Some of us were mechanics, and earned a few kopeks daily by work in our leisure hours. I worked as glazier for the Russian officers. Our earnings were cast into a common fund. The summer drew near its end: already the birds of passage assembled and flew away in large flocks over the high mountains of Manglis. We watched their flight with longing and envy. We lacked their wings, their knowledge of the way.

“More than once we faltered in our resolution. Some Russian deserters, who had been captured and brought back to camp by Cossacks, when attempting to desert into Lesghistan, were condemned to run the gauntlet thrice through a thousand men, and we Poles were compelled to assist in flogging the poor wretches almost to death. Deep and painful as was the impression this made upon us, hope and the ardent longing for freedom were yet more powerful. We fixed the day for flight. Only one Pole of our company, who was married to a Cossack’s widow, and had a child by her, detached himself from us and remained behind. With knapsacks packed, and loaded muskets, we met, at nightfall, in the forest. There we all fell upon our knees and prayed aloud to God, and to the blessed Virgin Mary, that they would favour our design, and extend over us their protection. Then we grasped each other’s hands, and swore to defend ourselves to the utmost, and to perish to the last man sooner than submit to be taken back to camp and flogged to death by the Russians.

“We were fourteen men in all. Some had suffered from fever; others were debilitated by bad nourishment. But the burning desire for liberty, and dread of the fate which awaited us in case of failure, gave vigour to our limbs. We marched for thirteen nights without intermission. By day we concealed ourselves in the forests; during the darkness we sometimes risked ourselves in the vicinity of the roads. When the provisions we had in our knapsacks were exhausted, we supported ourselves partly with the berries we found in the woods, and partly with half-raw game. Fortunately, there was no want of deer in the woods. Towards evening we dispersed in quest of them, but ventured to fire at them only when very near, in order not to squander our ammunition and betray our hiding-place to the Cossack piquets. For this latter reason we dared not light a fire at night, preferring to suffer from cold, and to devour the flesh of the slain beasts in a half-raw state.

“After our thirteen nights’ wanderings, we had reached the neighbourhood of the river Arpatschai, but did not rightly know where we were. From the high and barren mountain peaks on which we lay, we beheld, in the far distance, the houses of a large town. We knew not whether it was Russian or Turkish. Without knowledge of the country, without a compass, without intercourse with the inhabitants, whom we anxiously avoided, because we constantly feared discovery and betrayal, we roamed at random in the mountains, ignorant what direction we should take to reach the frontier. Latterly the chase had been unproductive, and we suffered from hunger, as well as from fatigue and severe cold. We saw a herd of wild goats upon the heights, but all our attempts stealthily to approach them were unsuccessful; with extraordinary swiftness they scoured across the fields of snow which covered those lofty mountains, and we lost a whole day in a fruitless pursuit. The sharp mountain air, the toilsome march on foot, increased our hunger. Driven almost to despair, we resolved to run a risk and approach the first village we saw, calling to mind the oath we had taken to defend ourselves to the last drop of our blood, and rather to put each other to death than to fall alive into the hands of the Russians.

“On the upper margin of the forest we discovered the minarets of a Tartar mosque. At dusk we cautiously approached and fell in with two Tartars, cutting bushes. From them we learned that we were about thirty versts from the town of Gumri, where the Russians were building a great fort. The frontier was but a short day’s journey distant, and the long blue line which we had seen from the mountain tops was really the river Arpatschai, whose farther bank is Turkish. We did not conceal from the Tartars our condition and design. The state of our uniforms, all torn by the brambles, and our wild hungry aspect, would hardly have allowed us to be taken for Russian soldiers on service, and they had at once recognised us for what we were. Mindful of the advice of the old Tartar at Manglis, we told them it was our firm resolution to become good Mahometans as soon as we got to Turkey. We adjured them, in the name of Allah and the Prophet, to send us provisions from the village, into which they themselves advised us not to venture. According to their account, there was a Cossack post in the neighbourhood, and the banks of the Arpatschai were, they assured us, so strictly watched by Russian piquets, that there was little hope of our getting across the frontier in that direction.

“At a rapid pace, the Tartars returned to their village. One of our party, well acquainted with the Tartar tongue, followed them, concealing himself behind the bushes, in order to overhear, if possible, their conversation, and to satisfy himself whether they were honest people, in whom we might confide. But the Tartars exchanged not a word upon their way home. In an hour they came to us again, bringing three other men, one of whom wore a white turban. As they passed before some brushwood in which our comrade lay concealed, he heard them in animated conversation. Following them stealthily through the thicket, he caught enough of their discourse to ascertain that they were of different opinions with respect to the line of conduct to be adopted with respect to us. One of them, who, as we subsequently learned, had served at Warsaw in Prince Paskewitch’s Oriental body-guard, would at once have informed the Cossacks of our hiding-place. But the man in the white turban sought to restrain him, and wished first to speak with us.

“The Tartars found us at the appointed place. The White Turban was a Mollah, a fine grey-haired old man with a venerable countenance. To him we frankly confided the history of our sufferings and the object we had in view. After hearing us, he remained for some time buried in thought. To our great surprise one of the Tartars now addressed us in broken Polish, and told us that he had been at Warsaw. At this we were so overjoyed that we were near embracing the man. But the comrade we had sent out to reconnoitre had rejoined us. He seized the Tartar furiously by the beard, upbraided him with the treacherous advice he had given to his countrymen, and threatened to kill him. The old Mollah interfered as peacemaker, and assured us of his assistance and protection, if it were seriously our intention to escape into Turkey and become converts to the creed of Mahomet. We protested that such was our design, although we mentally prayed to our God and to the Virgin to forgive us this necessary lie, for our design was to escape from the Russian hell, but not to become faithless to our holy religion. Before the Mollah departed, he had to swear by his beard and by the Prophet that he would not betray us. We made the others take the same oath. The ex-life-guardsman we proposed keeping as a hostage. But the Mollah begged us not to do so, and to trust to his word, which he pledged for the man’s silence. Above all we wanted provisions. The Tartars had unfortunately come empty-handed. The pangs of hunger almost drove us to accompany them into the village. But the Mollah warned us that we should there find families of Armenian peasants, who would certainly betray us to the Russians. Fluctuating between hope and fear, we saw them depart. The Mollah’s last advice was to be vigilant during the night, since our presence might have been observed by others, who might report it to the Russians.

“Two heavy hours went by. Night had set in, and the stillness was broken only by the occasional howling of the village dogs. As the distance to the village was not great, and as the Mollah had so positively promised to send us food immediately, our suspicions were again aroused, and we mutually reproached each other with having been so foolish as to trust to the oaths of the Tartars and with having suffered them all to depart, instead of keeping the Mollah and the Warsaw man as hostages. Taking our muskets, we stationed ourselves upon the look-out. Our apprehensions were not unfounded. Soon we heard through the darkness the neighing of horses and distant voices. Those of our comrades who were strongest on their legs went out to reconnoitre, and came back with the terrible intelligence that they had plainly distinguished the voices of Russians. Meanwhile the noise of horses’ feet died away; once more all was still as the grave; and even the vigilant dogs seemed sunk in sleep.

“Before the first grey of morning appeared, one of the Tartars whom we had met the day before, in the wood, came to us, with three others whom we had not yet seen. They brought us a great dish of rice, and half a roasted lamb; also bread and fruit. Our presence in the neighbourhood, they said, had been disclosed to the Russians by an Armenian of the village. The Cossack captain had sent for the Mollah and threatened him, but the old man had revealed nothing. The Cossacks did not know our exact hiding-place, and one of the Tartars had led them in a wrong direction. As we were already considered as Mahometans, no Tartar would betray us, unless it were that man who had been in Warsaw, and who was an object of contempt with the people of the village on account of his dissolute and drunken habits.

“Our fierce hunger appeased, our spirits and courage revived, and we decided to continue our march at once. The Tartars advised us not to cross the Arpatschai, which was too closely guarded by the Russian frontier piquets, but to move more northwards, across the mountains of Achalziche, in which direction we should find it far easier to reach Turkish territory. We bade them a grateful farewell. But with the first beam of morning we heard the wild hurra of the Cossacks and saw them in the distance, galloping, accompanied by a number of Tartar horsemen, to cut us off from the valley. We drew back amongst the bushes, and fired a full volley at the nearest group of horsemen, as it tried to force its way into the thicket. Two Cossacks and a Tartar fell, and the rest took to a cowardly flight. We retreated forthwith to the mountain summits whence we had so recently descended, and did not even wait to search the fallen men. Soon a single horseman rode towards us, waving a green branch. We recognised one of the Tartars who had brought us food. He said that the Mollah was at the old place in the wood, and wished to speak with us. We had nothing more to fear from the Cossacks. They took us to be twice as numerous as we really were, had returned to their post and sent to Gumri for reinforcements, which could not arrive before evening. Observing that we harboured mistrust, the man offered to remain as a hostage. I and three of my comrades went to the appointed place. The others remained on the mountain, with the Tartar in custody. The Mollah was really waiting for us, with two of the men who had accompanied him the previous evening. We learned, to our astonishment, that the Tartar whom we had shot was the same old soldier who had been at Warsaw and had spoken Polish to us. We held this to be a judgment of God. For, notwithstanding his oath, the man had betrayed our hiding-place to the Russians, who were already aware of our vicinity. The other villagers had been compelled to mount and follow the Cossacks, but, at the first volley, gladly joined the latter in their flight.”

The Mollah gave the unfortunate Poles directions as to the road, and as to how they should act if they fell into the hands of the Pasha of Kars, who was well disposed towards Russia, and might deliver them up through fear or greed of gain. All that day they toiled over the rude mountain peaks, and next morning they were so lucky as to kill a wild goat; but on those barren heights not a stick of wood was to be found, and they had to eat the flesh raw. After a few hours’ rest they continued their arduous journey. It was bitterly cold, the snow fell in thick flakes, and a cutting wind beat in their faces. Towards evening, guided by a light, they reached the wretched huts of some poor Russian frontier settlers, who were cooking their food over fires of dried cow-dung. From these people they obtained meat and drink, gave them the few kopeks they had left, which they knew would not pass current in Turkey, and departed, their flasks filled with brandy, and bearing with them the best wishes of their poor but hospitable entertainers. Their march next day was through a dense fog, which covered the high ground. They could not see ten paces before them, and risked, at every step, a fall over a precipice. On the other hand, they flattered themselves that they could pass the frontier—there marked by the mountain chain—unseen by the Russian troops. To guard against smuggling and the plague, as well as against military desertion and the flight of the natives into Turkey, the frontier line had latterly been greatly strengthened. But, once on the southern slope of the mountains, the fugitives had been assured, they would meet no more Cossacks and would be on Turkish ground. Accordingly they gave themselves up to unbounded joy at being out of Russia and of danger.

“How great was our horror,” continued Saremba, “when, on descending into the valley, the fog lifted, and we found ourselves close to a post of Cossacks. It was too late to retreat. We marched forward in military order, keeping step as upon parade. The stratagem succeeded. The Cossack sentinel took us for a Russian patrol. We surrounded the house, made prisoners of the sentry and of seven half-drunken Cossacks, and learned from them that in the fog we had missed our way over the frontier. The piquet was thirty men strong, but two and twenty had marched that very day on patrol duty. The report of our flight had been received from Gumri, as well as information that the Cossacks should be reinforced by a detachment of infantry. The sentry had taken us for this expected detachment. We were well pleased with the issue of our adventure. The contents of the Cossacks’ larder revived and strengthened us, and we packed the fragments of the feast in our knapsacks. We also took their horses, and finally, at their own request bound them hand and foot; for, now that they were sober, they trembled for the consequences of having allowed themselves to be surprised and unresistingly overpowered. They anticipated a severe punishment, and consulted together how they should best extenuate their fault. The dense morning fog was a good circumstance to plead, and so was our superiority of numbers, and also the expectation of a Russian infantry piquet from Gumri. But when all was said, the poor fellows were still pretty sure to get the stick. At their request we fastened the door of the piquet-house before marching away with our booty. That afternoon we crossed the mountains, and reached, without further adventure, a Turkish military post.”

The sufferings and disasters of these fourteen hardy Poles were not yet at an end. After their arms had been taken from them, their arrival was reported to the Pasha of Kars, to whom the Russian commandant at Gumri forthwith sent a threatening letter, demanding the bodies of the fugitives. Four days of anxious suspense ensued, during which orderlies rode to and fro, carrying the correspondence between the Pasha and the commandant, and at last the Poles were told that their only chance to avoid being delivered up was instantly to become Mahometans. In this perplexity they accepted the secret offer of the son of a Lasistan bey to aid their flight into the Pashalik of Trebizond. They started in the night with a caravan of armed mountaineers. On the first day they were divided into two parties, which were separated from each other. On the second day, four, out of the six who were with Saremba, disappeared, although they entreated to be left together. Finally, when Saremba awoke upon the third morning, he found himself alone. Thus torn from the true and steadfast friends in whose brave companionship he had faced and surmounted so many perils, his courage deserted him; he wept aloud, and cursed his fate. There was good cause for his grief when he came to know all. The rascally Turk who had facilitated their flight had sold them into slavery. For six months Saremba toiled under a cruel taskmaster, until fever robbed him of his strength; when his owner, Ali Bey, took him to Trebizond, where the Pole had invented the existence of a brother who would pay his ransom. There he obtained the protection of the French consul, was forwarded to Constantinople, married a Greek woman, and managed to eke out an existence. Of the thirteen comrades who had fled with him from Manglis he had never seen or heard anything, and tears fell upon the honest fellow’s weather-beaten moustache as he deplored their probable fate—that of numbers of Polish deserters, who drag out a wretched existence, as slaves to the infidel, in the frontier provinces of Asiatic Turkey.

Dr Wagner found his follower’s narrative so striking, and so illustrative of the characteristics of the inhabitants of the trans-Caucasian frontier, that he at once wrote it down in his journal; and he did quite right, for certainly Saremba’s adventures equal, if they do not exceed, in interest, any of the Doctor’s own.

After Gumysh Haneh, the next town on the road to Erzroum is Baiburt, once noted for its inhabitants’ fanaticism and hatred of all Europeans. Poverty, misery, and the visit of the Russians in 1828, have broken their spirit, and humbled them to the dust. Theirs was the last effort of resistance against Paskewitch, but all their fierce fanaticism did not qualify them to cope with the well-drilled Russian troops. “Is it true,” asked Saremba, with a little irony in his tone, of a white-bearded Turk, in the expression of whose hard and furrowed features something of the old spirit was still plainly to be read—“is it true that the Moskof has come as far as this?” “Geldi!” (he came) was the old man’s laconic but melancholy reply. At Baiburt the traveller has a foretaste of the impoverished, decayed, half-ruined towns which extend thence through the whole of Asiatic Turkey to the Persian frontier, and to whose deplorable condition Erzroum constitutes the sole exception. Journeying south-east from Baiburt to the latter city, the first day’s march brings the traveller, by the usual caravan road, to no regular halting-place for the night. At Baiburt Dr Wagner parted from his Turkish travelling companions, and proceeded with only Saremba and a horse-guide, “a man of most horrible physiognomy, who professed to be a Turk, but whose long distorted visage, great crooked nose, bushy brows, dingy complexion, puffy turban, and ragged clothes, gave him more the look of a Kourd or Yezidee. The fellow spoke a Turkish,” continues the Doctor, “of which I understood nothing, and my servant, although well acquainted with the language of Stamboul, but little. He was very taciturn, and replied to the questions I occasionally put to him by croaking out inarticulate guttural sounds, something between the cry of a screech-owl and the snarl of a jackal. Then he twisted his ugly face so strangely, and grinned and ground his teeth in so hyena-like a fashion, that I was reminded of that horrible Texas Bob, whom Charles Sealsfield, in his Cabin-Book, has so graphically sketched.”

The most unsuspicious and confiding of men, Dr Wagner here remarks, will become mistrustful, and prone to suspect evil, before he has been long a resident or rambler in the East, and will acquire a habit of constant caution and vigilance in a country where all classes, from the Pasha to the horse-keeper, lay themselves out to plunder and overreach Europeans. The Doctor had been for three years wandering in Oriental lands, where he had encountered some perils and innumerable attempts at imposition. He was much upon his guard, and kept a sharp eye upon his hyena-looking guide, especially when the latter, under pretence of conducting him to quarters for the night, struck off from the road, and led him over crag and fell, through rain and darkness, into a wild, cut-throat district, where he every moment expected to be handed over to the gentle mercies of a band of Kourd brigands. Putting a pistol to the fellow’s ugly head, the Doctor swore he would shoot him at the first sign of treachery. The Turk said nothing, but presently—“Here is the village,” he quietly remarked, as he led the drenched travellers round the angle of a mass of rock, whence they perceived the lights of the village of Massat, where Hamilton had passed a night some years previously, and where they soon were comfortably seated by a fire, and supping on a very tolerable pilau; whilst Dr Wagner was fain to atone for his ill-founded suspicions by a double bakshish to his uncouth but trustworthy guide. The next day, the Doctor, whilst riding over the mountains with loaded pistols in his belt, and a double gun across his shoulders, fell over a precipice nearly a hundred feet high. The soil of a narrow ledge, softened by the rain, had given way under his horse’s feet. Man and beast rolled over and over five or six times in the course of the descent. Fortunately there were no rocks in the way—nothing but soft earth. They reached the bottom bruised and bleeding, but without broken bones, and were able to continue their march.

The journey from Erzroum to Persia, through the Alpine district of Armenia, is usually made with a caravan or with post-horses—more rarely in company with a Tartar in the employ of the Turkish government, who rides courier-fashion, changes his horse every four or five leagues, goes at a gallop, never rests for more than an hour, rides many horses to death, and performs the distance from Erzroum to Tabriz (nearly a hundred leagues) in the extraordinarily short time of two days and a half. Dr Wagner had no taste for travelling in such true Tartar fashion. Would he go post? There are no postmasters in Turkey, nor post-horses, nor posting-stables, nor even postilions, properly so called. Posting in the East has nothing in common with European posting. But on presentation of a firman from the Sublime Porte or the Pasha of the province, every town or village is bound to supply the traveller with the needful horses, and with a horse-guide, at moderate charge. The expense is greatly augmented by the necessity of being accompanied by a Turkish cavass. Without such escort the journey from Erzroum to the Persian frontier is unsafe, and, even with it, all danger is not removed; for in the neighbourhood of the Alpine passes of Armenia lurk the lynx-eyed Kourds, watching for prey. Less daring and dangerous than they were, they are still sufficiently audacious. When pursued by the Pashas—who occasionally make expeditions, at the head of bodies of the Nizam soldiery, to chastise them, and to wrench from them their booty—they take refuge upon Persian ground, send a present to the Sardar of Tabriz, and are suffered to pasture their flocks amongst the mountains of Azerbijan, until they again give way to their predatory propensities, and are threatened or pursued by the Persian authorities. Over the rugged summits of the Agri Dagh they then fly to Russian territory, where the gift of a horse to the Cossack officer in command usually procures them tolerance upon the grassy slopes of Ararat. When driven thence, for a repetition of their lawless raids, they have still a last refuge in the high mountains of Kourdistan, where they purchase the protection of a chief, and whose inaccessible fastnesses defy Turkish pursuers.

“Not long before my departure from Erzroum,” says Dr Wagner, “Mr Abbott, the English consul at Teheran, had fallen into the hands of Kourd robbers, and, with his travelling companions, had been stripped to the shirt, inclusively. It was a serio-comic affair. They were attacked near Diadin. Mr Abbott, a man of great personal courage, fired a pistol at the first Kourd who rode at him with his long bamboo lance, and missed—fortunately for him, for had he killed or wounded him, his own life would assuredly have paid the penalty. Two vigorous lance thrusts, which fortunately pierced his burka, not his body, cast the courageous Briton from his horse. His Oriental servants and companions had no portion of his combative spirit, but laid down their arms, terrified by the jackal-like yells and hideous figures of the Kourds. The robbers were tolerably generous, after their manner. They took away horses, baggage, and clothes, stripping their victims stark naked, but they left them their lives. And if Mr Abbott had a taste of lance staves and horse-whip, that was only in requital of the pistol-shot. His Armenian servants, who resisted not, received no injury. Amidst the infernal laughter of the Kourds, the naked travellers set off for the nearest village, where they were scantily provided with clothes by compassionate Armenians. Consul Brant at Teheran made a great noise about this business, and the Pasha had to make compensation. But the Kourds retreated southwards to the high mountains, and there, in inaccessible hiding-places, laughed alike at the British consul’s anger, and at the Turkish Pasha’s threats.”

With such a warning before him, Dr Wagner preferred adopting the safest, and at the same time the most convenient, although the slowest mode of travelling in those regions—namely, per caravan. Almost weekly a commercial caravan starts from Erzroum for Tabriz. It consists of from 300 to 900 horses, laden chiefly with English manufactures, also with Bohemian glass, furs, and cloth from the Leipzig fair, and even with toys from Nuremberg. If the convoy be particularly valuable, the Pasha sends with it a cavass, who rides a head, a horse’s tail at the end of his long lance, as a warning to predatory Kourds not to meddle with that which is under the high protection of the muschir of Erzroum. But the caravan’s own strength is its best protection. There is a man to every three or four horses, armed with a gun, often with sabre and dagger also; and the Armenians, although tame enough in general, will fight fiercely for their goods, or for those intrusted to their care. Of course there is no security against nocturnal theft, at which the Kourds are as skilful as North-American red-skins, or as the Hadjouts of the African Metidja.

A rich Armenian, by name Kara Gos, (Black-eye,) led the caravan to which Dr Wagner annexed himself. Half the 360 horses comprising it were his. A considerable rogue was Kara Gos, who asked the Doctor double the fair price for the use of six horses, a place under the principal tent, and daily rations from his kitchen. When the Doctor pointed out the overcharge, Kara Gos turned away in silence and in dudgeon, and spoke no word to him during the whole journey. Dr Wagner made his bargain with another Armenian, one Karapet Bedochil, and the journey was prosperously accomplished in twenty-seven days from Erzroum to Tabriz. This was rather slow work—scarcely twelve miles a-day on an average; but Dr Wagner was well pleased to have leisure during the long hours of repose—rendered necessary by hot weather and scanty pasturage—to pursue his geological researches, to go shooting, and to collect rare insects and beautiful Alpine plants. He took interest, also, in observing the habits and intelligence of the horses of the caravan. These were as disciplined as any Russian soldiers, and understood their duty almost as well as their human masters. When, at two in the morning, the Karivan-Baschi gave the signal to march, they responded by a general neighing, snorting, and tinkling of the bells hung to their necks. Notwithstanding the thick darkness, every horse found his right place, his owner, and his groom, and stood motionless till pack-saddle and bales were placed upon his back. The load duly balanced, he instantly started off of his own accord. The march was in file, two abreast. The oldest and most experienced horse took the lead, seemingly proud of the distinction, and displaying an instinct almost amounting to reason. No danger was there of his going astray, or shying at some oddly-shaped rock, dimly seen through the twilight, or at a corpse upon the road, or even at the passage of camels, to which horses have a special antipathy. If stream or torrent barred the way, he halted, unbidden, until the nearest horseman had sought out a ford, and then calmly entered the water, his example giving confidence to his followers. These caravan horses love society, soon attach themselves to their companions, whether biped or quadruped, but are very inhospitable, and do not easily admit strange horses to their company. They dislike separation from the caravan, just as cavalry chargers often object to leave the ranks. Karapet Bedochil gave up his best and youngest horse to Dr Wagner for the journey. This was a well-shaped brown mare, of excellent paces, and easy to govern, so long as her habits were respected. But it took some time to accustom her to quit the caravan, and carry Dr Wagner on his rambles off the road.

“To ride in the rank and file of a caravan,” says the Doctor, “is wearisome enough. When morning dawned, and the first sunbeams illumined the green Alpine plateau, I loved to ride up some rising ground by the wayside, to contemplate the landscape, and to enjoy the picturesque aspect of the Kourd camps, and of the long-line of the caravan. My horse did not share my enjoyment. Much spurring did it cost me to habituate him to even a few minutes’ separation from his friends. Love of society, and aversion to solitude, are amongst the most striking and affecting characteristics of these animals. At times I remained behind the caravan, when I found an interesting spot, where the geological formation or the mountain vegetation invited to examination and collection. My horse, well secured near at hand, kept his gaze immovably fixed upon the vanishing caravan. When the last straggler had disappeared, he still pricked up his ears so long as he could hear the bells. When these were no longer audible, he drooped his head, and looked inquiringly and reproachfully at his botanising rider. If it cost me trouble to detach him from the caravan, he needed no urging to rejoin it. Suddenly displaying the fire of the Oriental courser, he galloped with winged swiftness, till the bells were once more heard, and broke into loud and joyous neighings on again joining his friends.”

The gregarious and sociable propensities of Armenian horses are a great obstacle to the designs of the Kourd thieves, who at nightfall prowl around the camp. To lessen the difficulty they come mounted upon stolen caravan horses, which they train to the work. A noose is flung round the neck of a grazing horse, and whilst one thief pulls the animal along, another drives it with a whip. The Armenian horse-keepers fire their guns to give the alarm, and mount their best horses to pursue the marauders. If they overtake them, they at first endeavour to obtain restitution by fair words or by threats. Only at the last extremity do they use their firearms, for they have a not unfounded fear of Kourd vengeance for bloodshed.

Less dreaded, and far less frequent than these depredations, are attacks upon caravans by wolves. These occur scarcely once in ten years, and then only in very severe winters, when long frosts keep the flocks from the pastures. Under such circumstances, the wolves, spurred by extreme hunger, sometimes overcome their natural cowardice, and make a dash at a caravan, breaking suddenly into the column on the march, pulling down horses, and tearing them in pieces, before there is time to drive them away with bullets. But these cases are of extremely rare occurrence. It more often happens that, in summer, a single wolf will sneak down upon the grazing caravan horses, whose instinct, however, soon detects his approach. They form a circle, heads inwards and heels out, and if the wolf does not succeed, at a first spring, in fixing upon one of their throats, his best plan is to decamp, before he gets shot. The attacks of these wolves are always nocturnal. From other beasts of prey the caravans between Erzroum and Tabriz have nothing to fear. The jackals are weak and timid, and content themselves with dead horses; and bears are few in number, and confine their feeding to sheep and goats. Southwards from Tabriz to Teheran, and thence to Ispahan, the danger increases. Kourds are replaced by Turkomans; wolves by panthers and tigers. But even from these, so far as Dr Wagner could gather from repeated conversations with caravan leaders, the peril is trifling, except far south, towards Shiraz, or eastwards in the deserts of Khorassan, where tigers are more numerous and aggressive.

Of other animals accustomed to follow caravans, the Doctor particularly mentions ravens and carrion birds, which in winter consume the excrement, in summer the carcasses, of horses. In Armenia and Persia, he recognised an old friend whom he had often seen hovering over the expeditionary column which he had accompanied to Constantina. The white-headed vulture (Vultur fulvus) floated in the air at a prodigious height above the caravan, and as often as a horse fell dead, dozens of the loathsome birds lowered their powerful pinions, and sank plumb-down upon the carrion. The beasts of the caravan, even the dogs, were pretty good friends with these obscene creatures; or at least, from the force of habit, usually endured their proximity. Dr Wagner speculates on the possibility of some eccentric sympathy between the horse and his future coffin. He often saw the little carrion kite (Cathartes percnopterus,) when it had gorged itself with the flesh of some dead animal, settle down, its feathers all puffed out, upon a horse’s back, there to digest its copious meal—a process which the horse, by his immobility, seemed studiously to avoid disturbing. Grouped together in the great heat, from which they sought to shelter their heads under their neighbours’ bellies, the horses stood, each one with his plumed and impure rider. “Sometimes,” says the Doctor, “I saw ravens sitting in the same confidential manner upon the backs of horses and dromedaries. In North Africa I observed similar intimacy between kites and cows, ravens and swine. Dr Knoblecher relates that in the Nile districts of Central Africa he often saw waterfowl, particularly herons and ibises, sit upon the backs of elephants. Only to one kind of animal has the Armenian caravan-horse a natural hatred and strong aversion—namely, to the camel, who, on his side, detests the horse. Even in caravans composed of both kinds of beasts, long accustomed to each other’s presence, this antipathy endures. Horses and camels, if left in any degree to their own free will, go separately to pasture. Long habit of being together restrains them from hostile outbreaks, but I never witnessed, during the whole period of my Oriental travels, an example of even a tolerably good understanding between them.”

On the 20th of June—so cold a morning, that, in spite of cloak and mackintosh, Dr Wagner was half-frozen—the caravan reached the Kourd village of Yendek, and encamped in a narrow valley, the mountains around which had been reckoned, a few years previously, amongst the most unsafe in Kourdistan, a caravan seldom passing unassailed. Towards evening a Kourd chief came into camp. “He wore no beard, but thick and long moustaches—as formerly the Janissaries—a huge turban, a short burka, very wide trousers. He had his horse shod by one of our Armenians, took a fancy to Karapet-Bedochil’s pocket-knife, and asked him for it as a keepsake. He did not pay for the shoeing, and rode off, with small thanks, amidst the courteous greetings of all the Armenians—even of our haughty Karivan-Baschi. I afterwards laughingly asked the Kadertshi why he had not demanded payment from the Kourd for the shoes and his work. ‘Laugh away!’ was his reply; ‘if ever you meet that fellow alone, you won’t be quite so merry.’ The Kourd, who was armed with pistols, gun, and sabre, certainly looked the very model of a captain of banditti.”

Before reaching Persian territory, where the risk from robbers diminishes, some pack-horses were cleverly stolen by the Kourds; and two men, who were sent, well mounted, to overtake the thieves and negotiate for the restoration of the property, returned to camp despoiled of clothes and steeds. Ultimately, the Pasha of Erzroum extorted the bales from the Kourds, who are too prudent to drive things to extremities. But, for the time, Kara Gos had to pursue his journey minus his merchandise, and greatly cast down at the loss, which he merited for his griping effrontery, and for the poltroonery with which, a few days before, he had deviated from his direct road on the rude demand of some Kourds, who sought to pick a quarrel with him—a sort of wolf-and-lamb business—for riding through their pastures. He forgot his loss, however, when reckoning at Tabriz the full sack of sounding gold tomauns received for carriage of goods; and in the joy of his heart he even condescended to speak to Dr Wagner, and to extend to him his forgiveness for having refused to be imposed upon, so that they parted in amity at last.

Tabriz, in size the second, in population the first city of the Persian empire, was the limit of Dr Wagner’s travels in an easterly direction. Thence he made excursions; and finally, turning his steps southwards, made the circuit of that extremity of Lake Urumia, and so got back to Bayasid in Turkish Armenia; so that he visited, in fact, but a nook of Persia—including, however, one of its most important cities and some rarely-explored districts. His first visit at Tabriz was to Mr Bonham, the English consul-general, with whom he found a Maltese physician, Dr Cassolani—then the only European medical man resident in the place—who offered him, in the kindest manner, an apartment in his house. Here Dr Wagner interpolates a gentle stricture on British hospitality in Asia. Mr Bonham, he says, “was certainly also very obliging, but seemed less hospitable; and although he had a very roomy house and a very small family, he, like his colleague, Mr Brant at Erzroum, was not fond of putting himself out of his way. I confess that I have not formed the most favourable opinion of English hospitality in the East. My letters from Lord Aberdeen and Sir Stratford Canning had not the effect which might have been reasonably expected from the high position of those statesmen. In Russian Asia, less exalted recommendations generally procured me a friendly and truly hospitable reception. On better acquaintance, and after repeated interviews, the dry, thoroughly English reserve and formal manner gave way, in Mr Bonham, to a certain degree of amiability. He took a particularly warm interest in my communications from the Caucasus, and gave me in return valuable information concerning Persian matters. Mr Bonham was married to a niece of Sir Robert Peel’s, a beautiful, amiable, and accomplished lady.”

In Dr Cassolani’s house Dr Wagner made the acquaintance of a great number of Persians, who besieged the learned hekim for advice, and he thus had excellent opportunities of noting the peculiarities of Persian character, manners, and morals. But the most favourable place for the pursuit of such studies, on a large scale, he found to be the Tabriz bazaar, which is composed of a number of bazaars, or spacious halls full of shops. Thither daily repaired Dr Wagner, escorted by one of Dr Cassolani’s Persian servants, a fellow of herculean proportions, whose duty it was to open a passage through the curious crowd which at first thronged round the European. Here were displayed prodigious masses of merchandise, chiefly English, only the coarser kinds of goods coming from Germany and Russia, glass from Austria, amber from Constantinople. Here were children’s watches from Nuremberg, with a locomotive on the dial, and the inscription, “Railway from Nuremberg to Furth;” lithographed likenesses of the Shah of Persia, taken and printed in Germany; snuff-boxes from Astrakan, with the Emperor Nicholas’s portrait; and portraits of Benkendorf, Paskewitch, Neidhard, and other Russian generals distinguished in recent wars. There were shawls and carpets from Hindostan, and sabre-blades, of wonderful temper and finish, from Shiraz. Of these latter Dr Wagner saw some, adorned with beautiful arabesque designs in gold, and inscribed with passages from the Koran, whose price was two hundred tomauns, or Persian ducats. Made of strips of metal, hammered together cold, these excellent blades are the result of prodigious labour, much time, and great skill. The chief value of such weapons is usually in the steel, for the hilt and mounting must be unusually rich to exceed the cost of the blade itself. Hitherto the armourers of Tabriz, Teheran, and Ispahan have vainly endeavoured to rival those of Shiraz.

Dr Wagner soon found himself at home in the European circle at Tabriz, which consists chiefly of the members of the Russian and English consulates, and of the managers of four Greek commercial houses, branches of Constantinople establishments. The English consul-general, as already hinted, lived rather retired, gave a dinner or two each half-year to the Europeans, and took but small share in the pleasures and amusements after which most of them eagerly ran. An old Greek gentleman, named Morfopulo, was the great Lucullus and Amphitryon of the place. Introduced to him by his Maltese friend, Dr Wagner was at once cordially invited to a dinner, which gave him the first idea of the sumptuous manner of living of Europeans in Tabriz. Nothing was spared; Oriental delicacies were embalmed and ennobled by the refinements of Western art. There were fish from the Caspian, game from the forests of Ghilan, grapes and mulberries from Azerbijan, the most exquisite pasties, and the cream of the vineyards of Champagne cooling in abundant ice. The guests were as motley, the talk as various, as the viands. From East to West, from Ispahan to Paris, the conversation rolled. The Russian Consul-general sketched the Persian court at Teheran; Dr Cassolani gave verbal extracts from his life and experience at Erzroum and Tabriz; an Italian quack, who had just arrived, and who had long led a roving existence in Asiatic Turkey—professing alternately to discover gold mines, and to heal all maladies by an infallible elixir—related his adventures amongst the Kourds; whilst a young Greek diplomatist, named Mavrocordato—a relation of the statesman of that name—just transferred, to his no small regret, from Paris to Tabriz, was eloquent concerning the balls, beauties, and delights of the French capital.

The domestic arrangements of the European residents in Tabriz are peculiar, and may possibly account for the limited nature of the intercourse maintained with them by the gentleman who filled the post of British consul-general at the time of Dr Wagner’s visit. Some of the managers of the Greek houses—few of whom remain more than half-a-dozen years, which time, owing to the profitable nature of the trade, and especially of the smuggling traffic with the trans-Caucasian provinces of Russia, usually suffices to make their fortunes—were married, but had left their wives in Constantinople. Most of them, as well as the members of the Russian consulate-general, were bachelors. All, however, whether married or single, had conformed to the custom of the place, by contracting limited matrimony with Nestorian women. This Christian sect, numerous in Azerbijan, entertains a strong partiality for Europeans, and has no scruple, either moral or religious, in marrying its daughters to them for a fixed term of years, and in consideration of a stipulated sum. There is great competition for a new-comer from Europe, especially if he be rich. The queer contract is known in Tabriz as matrimonio alla carta. Very often the whole of the lady’s family take up their abode in the house of the temporary husband, and live at his charges; and this is indeed often a condition of the bargain. The usage is of such long standing amongst Europeans in Persia, and especially in that particular province, that it there scandalises no one. Every European has a part of his house set aside for the women, and calls it his harem: the ladies preserve their Persian garb and manner of life, cover their faces before strangers and in the streets, frequent the bath, and pass their time in dressing themselves, just like the Mahomedan Persians. Handsome, but totally uneducated and unintellectual, they make faithful wives and tender mothers, but poor companions. When the term stipulated in the contract expires, and if it be not renewed, they find no difficulty in contracting permanent marriages with their own countrymen; the less so, that, in such cases, they take a dowry with them, whereas, in general, the Nestorian has to purchase his wife from her parents. The children of the European marriage almost always remain in possession of the mother; and Dr Wagner was assured that she testifies even stronger affection for them than for those of her second and more regular marriage; whilst the stepfather rarely neglects his duty towards them. “Still more remarkable is it,” continues the Doctor, “that the European fathers, when recalled to their own country, abandon their children, without, as it would seem, the slightest scruple of conscience, to a most uncertain fate, and trouble themselves no further concerning them. But a single instance is known to me, when a wealthy European took one of his children away with him. Even in the case of men otherwise of high character and principle, a prolonged residence in the East seems very apt gradually to stifle the voice of nature, of honour, and of conscience.”

Dismissing, with this reflection, the consideration of European society and habits in Persia, Dr Wagner turns his attention to the natives, and to an examination of the curious incidents and vicissitudes of modern Persian history, to which he allots an interesting chapter—based partly on his many conversations with British and Russian diplomatic agents, with French officers who had served in Persia, and with French and American missionaries, partly on the works of various English travellers—and then commences his wanderings and explorations in the mountains of Sahant, and along the shores of Lake Urumiah. In these and other investigations, occupying his second volume, the length to which our notice of his first has insensibly extended forbids our accompanying him, at least for the present. Judging from the great number of books relating to Western Asia that have of late years been published in this country—many of them with marked success—the number of readers who take an interest in that region must be very considerable. By such of them as read German, Dr Wagner’s series of six volumes will be prized as a mine of entertainment and information.

KATIE STEWART.
A TRUE STORY.