root up an enormous population, and re-plant it in another quarter of the world; and that his colossus of clay could scarcely be lifted up by Minerva, and quietly set down in Anadoli. And if it cannot be done quietly, how will he effect it? Would he have the horrors of Navarin, Tripolitza, and Yanina, a thousand fold multiplied? For the warfare of two armed populations is far more dreadful than the regulated destruction of stipendiary armies; and the soldier, who is paid to kill his fellow-creatures, whether at twelve kreutzers, or twelve pence a day, is the least terrible of belligerent animals.

But Mr. Hughes not only approves of this sweeping clause, this vast cathartic for a diseased country; he holds that all European nations, and we in particular, are bound to assist in administering the dose : "I do not hesitate to affirm, that the atrocities committed by the Infidels against their Christian subjects, ought to put them under the ban of the European confederation." The Allied Powers, during the worst scenes of the French Revolution, never pretended to drive the French out of France, because their crimes put them under the ban of Europe; the tendency of their doctrines and conduct to revolutionise other governments, was the pretext for war; and, until this result was apprehended, they were suffered to indulge their propensity to noyades and fusillades, and to enjoy their mechanical discoveries of the guillotine and the soupape in all peace and quietness. Is Mr. Hughes then prepared to say, that the enormities of the Turkish Government will augment the disaffection of Ireland?

Suppose the Mufti (or Mahometan "Primate of all Turkey") had, in 1649, declared by a fetfah, that the cruelties which the British conquerors, under their chief Cromwell, were committing on the Irish,' put them under the ban of all Islamism, and that Mahomet the IVth, then as powerful as George the IVth now, ought to send a fleet of Caravels and an army of Janizzaries, not merely to assist in obtaining for the Irish what has been subsequently granted them, but to drive the savage Normans, who, six centu

"He entered the city of Drogheda by storm, and indiscriminately butchered men, women, and children; so that only one escaped the dreadful carnage to give an account of the tragic scene."

GOLDSMITH, vol. iv. p. 322.

2 At the time of Cromwell's Irish campaign, the Ottoman power was in its full vigor, and from thence advanced in the gradation of the capture of the Venetian islands in the Archipelago, the defeat of the Austrians in 1663, and the conquest of Candia in 1670, to that acme of their triumphs, the siege of Vienna, which was saved by Poland in 1683: of course not that Poland from whom Austria sliced off her provincial kingdom of Galitzia. The power of Mahomet the IVth was to the barbarous anarchy of Ireland in 1649, about what the power of George the IVth is to Turkey in 1822.

ries before, had occupied the Saxon kingdom of England, back into Normandy-How would Mr. Hughes, if writing the history of that period, speak of that Mufti's fetfah? and does he not fear lest some future Colombian Gibbon should say of his pamphlet and proposal, "of the Greeks, foolishness;" or, if Syntax be an author then read,

66

Eloquentiæ satis, sapientiæ parum ?” There is no reasoning so fair as argumentum ad nationem, no rule so infallible as, "Do as you would be done by."

Mr. Hughes says, with a generous ardor, which must not blind us to the fallacy of his logic, "Away, then, with flimsy, Jesuitical pretexts. What Christian nation can, what nation would, plead an alliance offensive or defensive with the Sultan? It is sufficiently disgraceful to have formed any tie or convention with tyrants nurtured in ignorance and hostility to our faith, slaves to eunuchs and other vile ministers of a seraglio, who commit open outrages and insults on the very ambassadors of European states." The "flimsy Jesuitical pretext" which we should really guard against, is that famous sophism, "Fides cum hereticis non est servanda;" a doctrine which will hardly be recognised now; though it might alleviate our financial distress, by settling at once the claims of the Jewish stockholders. Of all the odd charges which are every day brought against ministers, this is the strangest. It seems that they have been guilty of making treaties of commerce with people of a different religion from ourselves; that they have aggravated this first fault by observing them ; and that they can now atone for such multiplied guilt only by breaking them.

With regard to the second charge against the Turks, I cannot see what we have to do with the qualifications or disqualifications which they think necessary in a cabinet minister, any more than they have with our tests and oaths of supremacy; though, when we thus learn, that the virtue of a Turkish Chancellor of the Exchequer is owing to necessity rather than choice, we may recall with augmented pride the memory of an immaculate minister." As for the last charge, the great error of Turkish policy has been prostituting the immunities of an ambassador, and letting every insignificant consular agent, Greek or Frank, not only defy

"The Lord Chancellor" answers, perhaps, more nearly than "the Chancellor of the Exchequer" to the Kislar-Aga, or Chief of the black Eunuchs, who has, with equal propriety, the gift of all the Grand Seignior's Crown Livings, and the uncontrolled superintendence of the endless and enormous religious foundations throughout Turkey. The parallel between our Chancellors and the Kislar-Aga must however end here.

the laws of the whole Ottoman empire, but privilege any number of its subjects.

I cannot think that Mr. Hughes is aware of the unavoidable deduction from what he has written in the enthusiasm of the moment; or that, as an English politician and a Protestant divine, he is prepared to pronounce all treaties with Mahometan potentates void. Would he send off circulars from the Foreign Office to recall our agents in Persia, Africa, and India, and orders from the Admiralty to fit out ships at Portsmouth against all kings" nurtured in ignorance and hostility to our faith?" Would he copy the very words of his prayer-book into the letters of marque, and decree lawful prize against all "Jews, Turks, Heretics, and Infidels," whom he seems more disposed to exterminate than to pray for?

I like the old English proverbs, " Fair play is a jewel,” and “Give the devil his due." I would not withhold it even from a Turk, and therefore I think Mr. Hughes's way of inserting traits of individual ferocity ill calculated to give the English public a fair view of the case. It is a mode of appeal equally available and equally inconclusive on both sides. I object to a sentence of outlawry against the Turks, on account of the destruction of Joannina, as much as I should to one against the Greeks for the scenes of Tripolitza and Navarin. I am more anxious to soften the minds of my countrymen towards the Greeks, than to inflame them against the Turks. Mr. Hughes's pamphlet does him great honor as a writer, but he does not want it, for he has already merited and obtained a high literary reputation: it will do great harm to the Greek cause, which has been sufficiently injured in this country by the misrepresentations of its advocates.

This wild scheme, of at once driving the Turks from Europe, had been before inculcated with equal vehemence by the author of " War in Greece," a work of whose technical merits I am not qualified to speak, but whose spirited and vigorous language is no less calculated to mislead, than Mr. Hughes's beautiful and finished periods; for, it is no small aggravation of the mischievous tendency of these two addresses, that they are both in their several ways remarkably well written. This author is more decisive than Mr. Hughes in his sentiments. He says: "The European cabinets have a simple and just course to steer, it is with conjoint and equal forces, to drive the Turks out of Europe; giving to Greece a sovereign and a constitution, and then evacuating the country." Simple enough! though I apprehend that the country will have been sufficiently evacuated by the effects of the first part of this remedy. Without saying a word about the paramount duty of sovereigns towards their own subjects, and considering only

the practicability of the proposed measure, I am surprised that such disinterested destruction of the Turks should be contemplated by an author, whose opinion of the necessary selfishness of all governments is so strong, that he says, only a few pages before: "Had not the loss of three hundred thousand of the best French troops taught England that she could not play the same game, the crowns of Spain and Portugal would probably have been added to that of Great Britain, under as plausible pretexts as are used in the appropriation of the territories of Indian legitimate sovereigns. I do not find fault with the practice, I only mean to say that such are the principles on which nations generally act." I am sorry that any Englishman should think his go vernment so wicked, his countrymen so foolish, or his sovereign so unlimited, as to give a moment's plausibility to such a wild notion; but I am glad that he has administered this previous corrective to his new medicine of a constitution which Foreigners are to prescribe. How efficacious soever this fashionable specific for all nationał disorders may be, the best ingredients in a constitution will be inoperative, unless it is the choice of the people on whom it must act. While constitutions, like plants, thrive or wither according to the site and soil into which they are transplanted, such experimental gardening must be both unsafe and uncertain; and earls of Sparta and Thebes, with county members for Messenia and Argolis, might be grafted on Greece, without producing the English fruitage of liberty.

I fear, nothing resembling a crusade will succeed in this age, when ridicule ensures failure, and when Peter the Hermit would be classed with our radical and methodistical mountebanks, or be possibly set in the stocks. Adventure, once clothed in danger, and linked with Enterprise, and courted by gallant spirits, counts among her knights errant only the couriers of Rothschild or Baring; and now that Commerce boasts no more the romance and gallantry of war, and war, fed with loans, is conducted by all the rules of arithmetic, the most glorious successes of the Greeks would make consols fluctuate more than our sympathies. Nay, though the crusades of old, by banishing and impoverishing both kings and nobles, raised the people, and sowed the seeds of freedom throughout Europe, promoted trade, augmented knowlege, contributed to make one family of many nations, and, like the study of alchymy, produced a host of unsought and unexpected advantages, yet this calculating generation can scarce pardon their wild romance. I do not presume to blame the nineteenth century; for, though virtue must in general be confined to domestic life, and the existence of nations be checkered with wars and massacres,

there is, perhaps, just now rather less national folly and guilt in the world than usual.

I regret that the author of "War in Greece" should have suggested young Napoleon as a sovereign for the Greeks. The mere idea is calculated to damp the benevolence of the English public towards them; and the realization of it would probably excite the jealousy of Europe, and involve them in future wars.

The only reason for young Napoleon's being so frequently recommended to insurgent nations, who are supposed to be looking out for a sovereign, is the assumed probability of his resembling his father; but it is a strange infatuation to desire again the inflic tion of a conqueror; a second edition of one, who sinned more in leaving undone so much practicable good, than even in effecting so much positive evil. Europe has had quite enough of the Buonaparte breed, whether considered as a dynasty of usurpers, a gang of plunderers, or a club of upstarts; and I hope the cant about sparing the fallen, and " de mortuis nil nisi bonum,” will never level the immoveable boundaries of right and wrong, shield a character which is historical property as a warning rather than a model, or make us more indulgent to a tyrant on account of his extraordinary talents, than to a tiger in favor of his enormous teeth. The choice of young Napoleon, as the sovereign of Greece, is as little contemplated by the Greeks, and altogether as improbable as it is undesirable. France will continue to waste her diplomatic address in vain endeavors to procure him the ecclesiastical tonsure, and the Emperor of Austria will keep him, through justifiable fear of so powerful a neighbor, as a hand-grenade which he may throw at will among her restless and divided population.

When these ravings, about turning the Turks out of Europe, furnished a silly newspaper with a great part of the nonsense it kneads up for the daily consumption of the public, and while the Greek cause' was only made a scoop for spattering printer's ink

I cannot suffer a second Edition to be published without expressing my regret that this sentence should have given offence to these kneaders of nonsense. So fully was the misfortune of mingled fury and feebleness balanced by the merit of early zeal in the Grecian cause, and by martyrdom from the well-served battery of the Courier, that I cancelled my first expression, "the silliest newspaper of the day," because I felt that it was the same thing as saying "the Morning Chronicle," and was an unfeeling personality on a paper whose vigorous youth ought to procure it respect in its decrepitude, and whose daily offspring should be privileged to drivel by such a brilliant ancestry. Nay, I was so anxious that there should be no needless dissension even between us, between the most insignificant and the most ridiculous of Grecian advocates, that I should have expunged the