justice, the sobriety and gentleness, which historians and travellers speak of; but, in spite of all that has been done for them by nature and the world, Tartar still is the staple of their composition; and their gifts and attainments, whatever they may be, do but make them the more efficient foes of faith and civilization.

*

'I might allude, if I dare, but I dare not, nor does any one else dare, else allusion might be made to those unutterable deeds which brand the people which allows them, even in the natural judgment of men, as the most flagitious, the most detestable of nations. I might enlarge on the reckless and remorseless cruelty which, had they succeeded in Europe as they succeeded in Asia, would have decimated or exterminated her children; I might have reminded you, for instance, how it is almost a canon of their imperial policy for centuries, that their Sultan, on mounting the throne, should destroy his nearest of kin-father, brother, or cousin, who might rival him in his sovereignty; how he is surrounded, and his subjects according to their wealth, with slaves carried off from their homes, men and boys, living monuments of his barbarity towards the work of God's hands; how he has, at his remorseless will, and in the sudden breath of his mouth, the life or death of all his subjects; how he multiplies his despotism by giving to his lieutenants in every province a like prerogative; how little scruple those governors have ever felt in exercising this prerogative to the full, in executions on a large scale, and sudden overwhelming massacres; shedding blood like water, and playing with the life of man as if it were the life of a mere beast or reptile. I might call your attention to particular instances of such atrocities, such as that outrage perpetrated within the memory of many of us, how, on the insurrection of the Greeks at Scio, their barbarian masters carried fire and sword throughout the flourishing island, till it was left a desert, hurrying away women and boys to an infamous captivity, and murdering youths and grown men, till, out of 120,000 souls in the springtime, not 900 were left them when the crops were ripe for the sick!e.”1

The same writer reminds us of some particulars of facts which some persons among us seem bent upon forgetting or explaining away :

*

* How, when the Ottomans added an infantry-I mean the Janissaries-to their Tartar horse, they formed that body of troops, from first to last, for near 500 years, of boys, all born Christians, a body of at first 12,000, at last 40,000 strong, torn away, year by year, from their parents, circumcised, trained, corrupted to the faith and morals of their masters, and becoming, in their turn, the instruments of the terrible policy of which they had themselves been the victims; and how when at length, lately, they abolished this work of their hands, they ended it by the slaughter of 20,000 of the poor renegades whom they had seduced from their God. I might remind you how, within the last few years, a Protestant traveller tells us that he found the Nestorian Christians, who had survived the massacre of their race, living in holes and pits, their pastures and tillage land forfeited, their sheep and cattle driven away, their villages burned, their ministers and people tortured; and how a Catholic missionary has found in the neighbourhood of Broussa the remnant of some

1 Lectures on Hist. of Turks, pp. 135, 136.

twenty Catholic families, who, in consequence of repudiating the Turkish faith, had been carried all the way from Servia and Albania across the sea to Asia Minor; the men killed, the women disgraced, the boys sold, till out of 180 persons but 87 were left, and they sick, and famished, and dying amongst their unburied dead.'1

We have ventured to warn the reader against lending too implicit credence to the minor publications of the day. One exception, however, must be made on behalf of a traveller who, if not among our profoundest thinkers, is at least an independent one, and never writes otherwise than as a scholar, a gentleman, and a Christian. The Diary in Turkish and Greek Waters' is being so extensively read, and quoted in newspapers, that it is enough for us to mention it. To Lord Carlisle, then, we refer the reader for hints concerning the shocking state of morals in Turkey, such as, if fully known, would tend much to arrest the 'somewhat profuse flow of English sympathy for the Ottoman 'race;' the thorough corruption of officials, the incredible ignorance of the mass of the people, the incurable indolence, the deserted villages, uncultivated plains, banditti-haunted 'mountains, torpid laws, and disappearing people.'

Surely, not all the heroism of France and England can ultimately save a race like this. The ambition of Russia, the guile of Greece, may have prolonged their term of European existence, but can it be more than a prolongation? They may be saved from external enemies, but can they be saved from themselves? The Sultan (even a Turk, Lord Carlisle tells us, has suggested the possibility of such an event)-the Sultan might become a Christian. But what, we must ask, in this case, would his Asiatic subjects say? what all those other Mahometan tribes, who, being Sonnites, recognise in him the spiritual successor of Mahomet? And yet, without such a conversion (which we regard for the moment in a temporal and political point of view, apart from its higher import), how can the Turks in Europe become civilized, and how, if uncivilized, can they hope to retain their position? They, and they perhaps alone, among the proselytes of Mahometanism, have been constantly and solely the enemies, not of paganism, but of Christianity; they have brought out, not the better, but the worst features of the creed of Islam; they, for the last 800 years, have been troubling, and, whenever they dared, persecuting the Church of Christ; and they are reaping at length their sad and bitter reward. In their fatalistic book-in the Koran, they find it

Lectures on Hist. of Turks, pp. 137, 138.

written: Each nation has its allotted period: when that period has arrived, men can neither hasten nor retard it.' That text of their self-styled prophet they may well be called upon to ponder now. But the Christian knows of righteous laws which, even upon earth, bring woe upon rebellious races; he knows of chastisements denounced upon unrelenting foes of the Lamb's Bride; he opens the Book of God's truly inspired Prophet, and reads: "The nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted.

ART. IV.-Selections, Grave and Gay. By THOS. DE QUINCEY. From Writings published and unpublished. Edinburgh: James Hogg.

But

AN autobiography, the subject of which still lives, presents some features of peculiar delicacy to the candid reviewer. It is easy, in the case of any other form of composition, to forget for the time that the writer has a private personal existence; for while we discuss the author we need never approach the man. if that author builds his hopes of interesting us in himself as a person, it is evident that he lays himself open to another and more intolerable form of criticism, to strictures on the most intimate and sensitive parts of his nature, what men can least bear to be touched and handled, except in the tenderest and most sympathising spirit. Fondly trusting to some particular grace and charm in the records of his own feelings and memories, he unconsciously, perhaps, incurs the risk of a rude shock to his sensibilities; and the critic is embarrassed by the fear of wounding, it may be, a heart, where he is only pursuing his vocation of passing judgment on what he has a right to consider an abstraction--a book.

6

It may be well then in the outset to state, that these curious, and in many parts interesting, volumes are, in spite of their real character, abstractions to us. We can recal the time when we regarded Mr. De Quincey and his Opium Eater,' as alike unrealities. In our childish ignorance, we never supposed these absorbing pages to be real genuine history, scenes actually passed through by flesh and blood, but a sort of grand dreamland; and the name of the writer, when it reached us, sounded in our ears just as feigned as the narrative. And though we are aware now of our mistake, the first impression remains undisturbed by any knowledge of the author or his history beyond what we learn from these pages; and all the vivid and most characteristic facts are still so dreamy-fading off on all sides into shadows--as happily still to sustain the original idea of unreality. We say happily, not that we have any very disagreeable things to discharge our conscience of, but as making our task easier and pleasanter to ourselves.

These volumes consist of autobiographical sketches, essays, and papers of a livelier strain ;-the autobiographical part being of far the most value; and of that part, whatever concerns the author's childhood and early youth, the most attractive and original. The greater part of these were contributed to periodicals

many years since, but have been collected and added to by large interpolations for the present republication.

We see no reason to doubt Mr. De Quincey's recollections of his infancy; and if so, he relates facts of a more prematurely developed intellect than we can recollect to have found recorded elsewhere so premature as to produce a painful impression. It is so evident that this precocity, this rapid growth of mind, this early maturity of the powers, all evident in the history of the author up to his sixteenth or eighteenth year, did leave a sort of blank. It was a promise that could not be fulfilled. The stage that succeeded so brilliant an opening brought the reaction of nervous bodily suffering, to which succeeded a weak and excessive indulgence in opium as a relief. This proved a most effective intellectual stimulant for a time, at the inevitable expense of impairing the mental powers, and of reducing what should be the mind's prime-the season of its most vigorous thought and action-to a period of mere retrospect; a time for dwelling upon, gathering up, amplifying the recollections of youth, its triumphs and its acquirements-but in which all original power is exhausted, the inventive faculty worn out, and what is worse, where the power of embracing the present, realizing its facts and throwing the mind into existing events or future contingencies, is lost. A diffusive rambling style is always fatiguing, but it is more painful when we regard it as a sign that the writer has no grasp of the subject that should engage him; that his mind is perpetually losing its hold of the point at issue, and slipping away into prolix disquisitions, the fruit of past thought; such untimely reminiscences showing that the past is more prominent to him than the present, and for ever pushing it out of its place. No display of learning, no appositeness in the recollection, can save these ramblings from an air of garrulity and failing power and who is so great a rambler in this sense as Mr. De Quincey? to whom the present-i. e. the to-day, the work in hand, the current question whatever it may be has but one prominent feature, as suggestive of the past-his past: his precocious observations, his youthful learning, his early visions, his experience of life; all having the additional remoteness that these acquirements were won at an age when others are yet children, with their course still before them, and their experience yet to learn.

These remarks apply only where the retrospect is an interference with the matter in hand. Where early recollections are the author's main subject, or vivid capricious impressions borrowed from childhood, and curiously influencing later opinions, as in 'The Opium Eater,' they are often more than commonly interesting. They form, indeed, in their right place, Mr. De