prison,) and every reader must acknowlege the skill with which its secrets are unfolded: The vast and high enclosure of the Bagnio, situated contiguously to the arsenal and the docks, contains a little world of its own, but a world of wailing! One part is tenanted by the prisoners made on board the enemy's ships, who, with an iron ring round their legs, await in this dismal repository their transference on board the Turkish fleet. This part may only be called a sort of purgatory. The other is hell in perfection. It is the larger division, filled with the natural subjects of the Grand Signor whom their real or supposed misdemeanors have brought to this abode of unavailing tears. Here are confined alike the ragged beggar urged by famine to steal a loaf, and the rich banker instigated by avarice to deny a deposit; the bandit who uses open violence, and the baker who employs false weights; the land robber and the pirate of the seas, the assassin and the cheat. Here, as in the infernal regions, are mingled natives of every country- Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Gipsies; and are confounded individuals of every creed the Mohammedan, the Christian, the Hebrew, and the Heathen. Here the proud and the humble, the opulent and the necessitous, are reduced to the direst of equalities, the equality of torture. But I err: for should some hapless victim- perhaps guilty of no other crime but that of having excited the Sultan's cupidity, still wear on his first entrance the livery of better days, his more decent appearance will only expose him to harsher treatment. Loaded with the heaviest fetters, linked to the most loathsome of malefactors, he is compelled to purchase every alleviation of his burthen, every mitigation of his pain, at the most exorbitant price; until the total exhaustion of his slender store has acquired him the privilege of being at least on a level with the lowest of his fellow-sufferers; and spared additional torments, no longer lucrative to their inflictors. - Every day a capital fertile in crimes pours new offenders into this dread receptacle; and its high walls and deep recesses resound every instant with imprecations and curses, uttered in all the various idioms of the Othoman empire. Deep moans and dismal yells leave not its dismal echoes a moment's repose. From morning until night, and from night until morning, the ear is stunned with the clang of chains, which the galley-slaves drag about while confined in their cells, and which they still drag about when toiling at their tasks. Linked together two and two for life, should they sink under their sufferings, they still continue thus linked after the death of either; and the man doomed to live on drags after him the corpse of his dead companion. In no direction can the eye escape the spectacle of atrocious punishments, and of indescribable agonies. Here perhaps you see a wretch whose stiffened limbs refuse their office, stop suddenly short in the midst of his labour, and, as if already impassible, defy the stripes that lay open his flesh, and wait in total immobility the last merciful blow that is to end his misery; while, there, you view his companion foaming with rage and madness, turn against his own person person his desperate hands, tear his clotted hair, rend his bleeding bosom, and dash to pieces his head against the wall of his dungeon.' The breaking out of the plague in the same place would aggravate its horrors, if they were susceptible of increase: The scourge had been expected for some time. By several of the prisoners had the frightful hag, its harbinger, been distinctly seen hovering with her bat's wings over our drear abode, and with her hooked talons numbering one by one her intended but still unsuspecting victims. In the silence of the night she had been heard leisurely calling them by their names, knocking at their several doors, and marking with livid spots the damp walls of their cells. • Nothing but the visitation of this destructive monster seemed wanting to complete the horrors which surrounded me: for if even, when only stalking forth among men free to fly from its approach, and to shrink from its contact, the gaunt spectre mows down whole nations like the ripe corn in the field, it may be imagined what havoc ensues when it is permitted to burst forth from the inmost bowels of hell, in the midst of wretches closewedged in their dungeons, or linked together at their tasks, whom it must trample down to the last, ere it can find a vent in space. It is there that, with a focus of infection ready formed, a train of miasma ready laid on every side, though this prime minister of death strike at random, it never misses its aim, and its progress outstrips the quickness of lightning or of thought. It is there that even those who thus far retain full possession of health, already calculate the hours they still may live; that those who today drag to their last abode their lifeless companions, to-morrow are laid beside them; and that those who are dying, make themselves pillows of the bodies not yet cold of those already dead. It is there that finally we may behold the grim destroyer, in one place awaited in gloomy silence, in another encountered with fell imprecations, here implored with anxious cries, there welcomed with eager thanks, and now perhaps received with convulsive laughter and mockery, by such as, trying to drink away its terrors, totter on the brink of the grave, from drunkenness as well as from disease.' A heart-withering picture is given of the ills of famine: 'I had left a storm gathering in Egypt, of which I since have thanked God I witnessed not the bursting. Already previous to my departure the consequence of the scarcity had begun to appear in many places: but it was only after I left the country that the famine attained its full force; and such was, in spite of every expedient of human wisdom, or appeal to Divine mercy, the progressive fury of the scourge, that at last the Schaichs and other regular ministers of worship, supposing the Deity to have become deaf to their entreaties, or incensed at their presumption, no longer themselves ventured to implore offended Heaven, and hence 198 henceforth only addressed the Almighty through the interceding voices of tender infants; in hopes that, though callous to the sufferings of corrupt man, Providence still might listen to the supplications of untainted childhood, and grant to the innocent prayers of babes, what it denied to the agonising cry of beings hardened in sin. Led by the Imams to the tops of the highest minarets, little creatures from five to ten years of age there raised to Heaven their pure hands and feeble voices; and while all the countless myriads of Cairo, collected round the foot of these lofty structures, observed a profound and mournful silence, they alone were heard to lisp from their slender summits entreaties for Divine mercy. Nor did even they continue to implore a fertility, which no longer could save the thousands of starving wretches already in the pangs of death. They only begged that a general pestilence might speedily deliver them from their lingering and painful agony and when, from the gilded spires, throughout every district of the immense Masr, (Cairo,) thousands of infantine voices went forth the same instant to implore the same sad boon, the whole vast population below with half-extinguished voices jointly answered, "So be it!" : The following has all the charms of an eastern apophthegm: -- The reader may remember the dreadful famine which I left hanging over Egypt. Emin, on this occasion, was one of the provident. During the years of plenty he had laid by for those of want. But, like the ant, he laboured for himself, and cared not to share his savings with the idle. Though his granaries groaned under their loads of corn, he saw unmoved the thousands of wretches who every day perished with hunger under their very walls. When the bodies of the sufferers choaked up the entrances of his store-houses, he still refused to unbar their surly gates, until the corn had reached the exorbitant price fixed by his avarice. This it at last attained; — and now, exulting at the thoughts of the millions he should make in a few hours, Emin took his keys, and opened his vaults. But horror, O dismay! Instead of the mountains of golden wheat he had accumulated, he only beheld heaps of nauseous rottenness. An avenging worm had penetrated into the abodes fortified against famished man! A grub had fattened on the food withheld from the starving wretch! While the clamour of despair resounded without, a loathsome insect had in silence achieved within the work of justice. It had wrought Emin's punishment in darkness, while his crimes shone in the light of heaven! The miser's wealth was destroyed, the monster's hopes were all blasted! At the dire spectacle he uttered not a word. He only a few minutes contemplated the infected mass with the fixed eye of despair; then fell,- fell flat on his face upon the putrid heap. God had smitten him! On raising his prostrate body, life had fled. Like his corn, his frame was become a mass of corruption!' A singular community of beggars is described with much humour and sententious gravity: There is, gentle reader, a district in the Morea, whose inhabitants are, to a man, beggars by profession. Every year, as soon as they have sown their fields, these industrious members of society abandon their villages until harvest-time, and sally forth, on a begging circuit, through the different provinces of Roumili. The elders and chiefs of the community plan the route, divide the provinces, and allot to each detachment its ground. They shorten or prolong their sojourn in the different places they visit, according as the mine of charity is rich, and has been more or less explored. Through wastes where little is to be gleamed large troops travel in close order, but on approaching fruitful districts the swarms again divide and spread. According to his peculiar talent, each individual undertakes the heart-rending tale of mental woe, or the disgusting display of bodily suffering. "His wife and children died of hunger by the road-side, after being burnt out of house and home;"-or," he has an incurable leprosy in every joint;" or, "he is actually giving up the ghost for want of a morsel of food!" Old traders grown rich by their indigence, sell out to young beginners; and the children of the society remain in common, so that each female may in turns be provided with a pair of fatherless twins, to be duly pinched to tears, and made lustily to roar out whenever compassionate people are in sight. Unceasing warfare is kept up with interlopers from other quarters, who trespass on the domain of this regularly organised band. Among its members, a dislocated limb, or a disgusting disease, are esteemed peculiar blessings; an hereditary complaint is a sort of an estate, and if conspicuous, and such as to resist the officious remedies of the charitable, confers rank, and may be called a badge of nobility. But even those who have the misfortune to labour under the most incurable state of health and vigour, are dexterous, if not radically to correct this perverseness of nature, at least to remove its untoward external appearance. They excel in the manufacture of counterfeit wounds and mock diseases; and the convulsions of a demoniac are graceful movements to their spontaneous fits.' A crowd of mournful reflections throngs on us, when we give way to the contemplations that are almost every where suggested by this book. Some of the provinces now governed or rather wasted by the Turk, particularly one country whose sweets are rifled by that cruel spoiler, were formerly the most favoured regions of the globe. Physically, they are still the most richly endowed; they still smile with all the prodigalities of nature; diversified with beauteous landscapes, and blessed with a lenient climate and a teeming soil. Well might the father of poetry, as his eye glided over the prospects which laughed around him, exclaim, Γέλασσε δέ πᾶσα περί χθών. Even Even now they present themselves to the external view in the unfaded charms of their first creation, as the visible world appeared to the glance of its great Architect, "In prospect from His throne, how good, how fair, In a corner, as it were, of these regions, arose, the native of a rock, that beauteous commonwealth which, though so frequently endangered by the turbulence of demagogues, and at last overwhelmed in ambitious conquests, still survived long enough to utter in her own immortal idiom those oracles of philosophy and freedom, which have outlived so many vicissitudes of opinion and so many revolutions of empire. Within the short space of an hundred years, that bounded territory, as if to demonstrate the small extent of duration and of place into which almost all that ennobles and improves our species can be crowded, had produced the most shining lights of civil and ethical wisdom, of sculpture, poetry, eloquence, and history; the most splendid ornaments of peace, and the most invincible leaders of war. Then grew up a language, of which the endless varieties, adapted to every emotion of man and every combination of thought, formed, if we may so speak, that music of the mind which swells to every tone of passion, or harmonizes with every precept of wisdom. Even now, in its degraded Romaïc, it still retains its expression and its energy. It is a lyre which is unstrung, and of which the master-hands are gone that once awakened it to melody, but still it sometimes murmurs a sweetness, which reminds us of what its power must have been from the lips of Pericles or the muse of Euripides. We must, however, restrain our indulgence of these reflections, for which we now have not room. Yet, if any occasion could ever make it pardonable to indulge them, surely it is the present. We do not recollect a work which more forcibly illustrates the vices of the Turkish government, and for that reason the contrast must be most powerfully impressed. As to its general merits, we need only farther say that, independently of the fiction, it is admirably executed. Whether such be the primary or the incidental purpose of it, certainly the crimes and deformities of the Turkish government, and the folly and mummery of their religious ritual, are never absent from our eye. Probably, by those whose appetites for amusement are gratified with the food of our modern novels, the parasitic fungus which decom *The period, whatever may be its exact computation, between the defeat of Xerxes and the time of Alexander, poses |