us, that he should mean to insult the wretchedleast of all, to insult the unhappy and much-suffering people of Greece. Under these circumstances, both the deliberative and the executive bodies of the Grecian government, assembling separately, have come to a resolution, without one dissentient voice, to invite you back to Greece, in order that you may again take a share in the Grecian contest—a contest in itself glorious, and not alien from your character and pursuits. For the liberty of any one nation cannot be a matter altogether indifferent to the rest, but naturally it is a common and diffusive interest; and nothing can be more reasonable than that the Englishman and the Grecian, in such a cause, should make themselves yoke-fellows, and should participate as brothers in so holy a struggle. Therefore, the Grecian government hastens, by this present distinguished expression of its regard, to invite you to the soil of Greece, a soil united by such tender memorials with yourself; confident that you, preferring glorious poverty and the hard living of Greece to the luxury and indolence of an obscure seclusion, will hasten your return to Greece, agreeably to your native character, restoring to us our valued English connection. Farewell!

"The Vice-President of the Executive,

"ATHANASIUS KANAKARES.

"The Chief-Secretary, Minister of

Foreign Relations,

NEGENZZ."

Since then, having in 1817 connected himself in marriage with a beautiful young lady of Armenian Greek extraction, and having purchased land and

built a house in Argos, Mr. Gordon may be consid ered in some sense as a Grecian citizen. Services in the field having now for some years been no longer called for, he has exchanged his patriotic sword for a patriotic pen—judging rightly that in no way so effectually can Greece be served at this time with Western Europe, as by recording faithfully the course of her revolution, tracing the difficulties which lay or which arose in her path, the heroism with which she surmounted them, and the multiplied errors by which she raised up others to herself. Mr. Gordon, of forty authors who have partially treated this theme, is the first who can be considered either impartial or comprehensive; and upon his authority, not seldom using his words, we shall now present to our readers the first continuous abstract of this most interesting and romantic war:

GREECE, in the largest extent of that term, having once belonged to the Byzantine empire, is included, by the misconception of hasty readers, in the great wreck of 1453. They take it for granted that, concurrently with Constantinople, and the districts adjacent, these provinces passed at that disastrous. era into the hands of the Turkish conqueror; but this is an error. Parts of Greece, previously to that era, had been dismembered from the Eastern empire; -other parts did not, until long after it, share a common fate with the metropolis. Venice had a deep interest in the Morea; in that, and for that, she fought with various success for generations; and it was not until the year 1717, nearly three centuries from the establishment of the crescent in Europe, that “the banner of St. Mark, driven finally

from the Morea and the Archipelago," was henceforth exiled (as respected Greece) to the Ionian Islands.

In these contests, though Greece was the prize at issue, the children of Greece had no natural interest, whether the cross prevailed or the crescent; the same, for all substantial results, was the fate which awaited themselves. The Moslem might be the more intolerant by his maxims, and he might be harsher in his professions; but a slave is not the less a slave, though his master should happen to hold the same creed with himself; and towards a member of the Greek church one who looked westward to Rome for his religion was likely to be little less of a bigot than one who looked to Mecca. So that we are not surprised to find a Venetian rule of policy recommending, for the daily allowance of these Grecian slaves, "a little bread, and a liberal application of the cudgel"! Whichever yoke were estab lished was sure to be hated; and, therefore, it was fortunate for the honor of the Christian name, that from the year 1717 the fears and the enmity of the Greeks were to be henceforward pointed exclusively towards Mahometan tyrants.

To be hated, however, sufficiently for resistance, a yoke must have been long and continuously felt. Fifty years might be necessary to season the Greeks with a knowledge of Turkish oppression; and less than two generations could hardly be supposed to have manured the whole teritory with an adequate sense of the wrongs they were enduring, and the withering effects of such wrongs on the sources of public prosperity. Hatred, besides, without hope, is no root out of which an effectual resistance can be

expected to grow; and fifty years almost had elapsed before a great power had arisen in Europe, having in any capital circumstance a joint interest with Greece, or specially authorized, by visible right and power, to interfere as her protector. The semi-Asiatic power of Russia, from the era of the Czar Peter the Great, had arisen above the horizon with the sudden sweep and splendor of a meteor. The arch described by her ascent was as vast in compass as it was rapid; and, in all history, no political growth, not that of our own Indian empire, had travelled by accelerations of speed so terrifically marked. Not that even Russia could have really grown in strength according to the apparent scale of her progress. The strength was doubtless there, or much of it, before Peter and Catherine; but it was latent: there had been no such sudden growth as people fancied; but there had been a sudden evolution. Infinite resources had been silently accumulating from century to century; but, before the Czar Peter, no mind had come across them of power sufficient to reveal their situation, or to organize them for practical effects. In some nations, the manifestations of power are coincident with its growth; in others, from vicious institutions, a vast crystallization goes on for ages blindly and in silence, which the lamp of some meteoric mind is required to light up into brilliant display. Thus it had been in Russia; and hence, to the abused judgment of all Christendom, she had seemed to leap like Pallas from the brain of Jupiter-gorgeously endowed, and in panoply of civil array, for all purposes of national grandeur, at the fiat of one coarse barbarian. As the metropolitan home of the Greek

church, she could not disown a maternal interest in the humblest of the Grecian tribes, holding the same faith with herself, and celebrating their worship by the same rites. This interest she could, at length, venture to express in a tone of sufficient emphasis; and Greece became aware that she could, about the very time when Turkish oppression had begun to unite its victims in aspirations for redemption, and had turned their eyes abroad in search of some great standard under whose shadow they could flock for momentary protection, or for future hope. What cabals were reared upon this condition of things by Russia, and what premature dreams of independence were encouraged throughout Greece in the reign of Catherine II., may be seen amply developed, in the once celebrated work of Mr. William Eton.

Another great circumstance of hope for Greece, coinciding with the dawn of her own earliest impetus in this direction, and travelling pari passu almost with the growth of her mightiest friend, was the advancing decay of her oppressor. The wane of the Turkish crescent had seemed to be in some secret connection of fatal sympathy with the growth of the Russian cross. Perhaps the reader will thank us for rehearsing the main steps by which the Ottoman power had flowed and ebbed. The foundations of this empire were laid in the thirteenth century, by Ortogrul, the chief of a Turkoman tribe, residing in tents not far from Dorylæum, in Phrygia (a name so memorable in the early crusades), about the time when Jenghiz had overthrown the Seljukian dynasty. His son Osman first assumed the title of Sultan, and, in 1300, having reduced the city of Prusa, in