the new reign by a victory. Cobourg took the field with a hundred battalions and sixty squadrons. He moved to the field famous for its name, half Greek half Slavonic; but more famous still, for its demolishing the virgin laurels of the Emperor. At Tyrkagukuli he pitched his huge camp, gave a banquet in honour of the new hero of the House of Hapsburg, and, after it, rode out to fix upon the spot in which he was to annihilate the Infidels. eye to look upon, except under its web of Shiraz silk twist-all remained in his tent, and were all that remained of the famous Hassan Caramata Vizier. A crowd of reports attempted to account for his sudden disappearance. By some he was thought to have fallen in a skirmish, into the midst of which he was seen plunging, with his usual desperate intrepidity, a few days before. But this, the Delhis, to a man, swore by their beards, was an utter impossibility; for what swordsman in the Austrian cavalry could stand for a moment before the fiery blade of Hassan ? Others thought that he had been sent for privately by the Sultan, as usual, to converse on matters of state, and have his head cut off. But this was disputed too-for fond as Sultans may naturally be of cutting off heads, Has san's was one that kept the Sultan's on the shoulders of the Father of the Faithful. The Rumeliotes, however, began to discover, according to the custom of their country, that there In half an hour he came flying back into his lines, with Hassan and fifteen thousand of the finest cavalry in the world thundering after him. Never had Prince of the Holy Roman Empire a narrower escape of being sent to his illustrious forefathers. The sixty squadrons were booted and mounted just in time to be charged, rode over, and broke into fragments. The aide-de-camp who carried the news of the battle to Vienna, announced that the Prince had gained an unequalled victory, but that he required reinforcements to follow was witchcraft in the business, from up the blow." Hassan sent no aide- beginning to end. They rememberde-camp to Constantinople, but he ed Hassan's countenance-the wient a waggon containing as many thered lip, never smiling except Crosses and Eagles, St Andrew's and with some sarcasm that cut to the St Peter's, as would have paved the soul-the solemn, foreboding, meaudience-hall of the Seraglio, or made lancholy brow-the look of magnifibuckles and bracelets for the whole cent beauty, but tarnished by bitter haram, Nubians, Kislar Aga and all. memory, or fearful sufferings. For The Austrians were thunderstruck, all those, what manufacturer could but they sung Te Deum. The Turks be found but the old enemy of man? followed the flying Prince, and strip- Zatanai himself had shaped the face ped him of his standards, guns, and foragers, as they had done the Rus- fortunes too? This accounted for an armistice, in pity, as they decla- his gaining the Sultan's favour, none red, for the waste of Moslem blood. knew how-and his going, it puzThe Allies proposed his coming, none knew whenceThe Turks galloped on, and, without zled all the philosophers in the army of philosophy, cut up the hundred any similar compliments to the spirit to say where. sians before. of Hassan; and why not shape his The witchcraft solution settled all son of darkness, let loose from his battalions as they had cut up the difficulties. Hassan was a ghoul; a sixty squadrons. The days of Ruperti seemed to be come again, and bed, five thousand miles deep, to Leopold thevictorious began to think spend a few uneasy years on the of clearing out the fosse, and rebuild- upper surface of the world; or a ing the ramparts of Vienna. But the city of the Danube was magician, bargaining for a short period of power and honours, and no longer to be besieged by a Turk, suddenly carried off, to complete his nor saved by a Pole. Hassan Cara- bargain. The Delhis, however, pled mata disappeared. His scimitar, ged themselves to cut off the musta worth a province in jewels; his state ches, and the head along with them, turban, embroidered by the supreme of any son of clay who dared to his horse furniture, the present of their friend, favourite, and captain, fingers of the Sultana Valide herself; think, much more to assert, that the Sultan, and too brilliant for the was not a true man, a first-rate Del hi, and worth all the Viziers that ever kissed the dust off the slippers of the Padishah, since the days of Abubeker. It The news reached the allies. was worth all their feux-de-joie. Every soldier in Vienna was instantly sent to fill up the ranks of the victorious general, who was always beaten. Good news came still. Yussuf Pacha was re-appointed Vizier; and in a fortnight reached the camp, with his pillows, his pipe, and his asthma. In another fortnight he had made up his mind to fight; and he moved to find out Cobourg and the Russians. The Moslemin shook their heads, wished old Yussuf at his pillau in Constantinople again, shouted“ Allah il allah," and marched to the memorable plain of Rymnik, making up their minds to drink the sweet sherbet of immortality. Old Yussuf was as brave as a lion, with the brains of an ass. He carried one hundred and fifteen thousand true believers into the teeth of the Austrian and Russian batteries-fought like a hero and a blockhead-and before sunset lost fifty thousand of his troops, his two camps, the battle, and the little understanding that seventy years had left him, and all the fruits of all the triumphs of Hassan Caramata. Evil days now fell upon the Father of the Faithful. The Delhis rode back to the capital, and vowed vengeance on the murderer of their great leader. The Sultan declared himself innocent, but offered them any head of his ministers in exchange. They demanded his own. He admitted, like all Sultans, their right to the demand, but offered them, in the mean time, the head of the Vizier. Yussuf was sent for, acquainted with the necessities of the state, and, in half an hour after, his head was thrown over the seraglio wall. The war was at an end. The Russians and Austrians had forced a peace. The Sultan gave all they asked; and Turkey was stripped of all that she had conquered during half a century. Still no tidings had been heard of Hassan. Towards the close of the year 1830, immediately after the new lesson which the Turks received from the yellow beards, and the new evidence that Viziers from the cobblers' stalls, and admirals from the stables, were not the natural props of a falling empire, a party of Italian draughtsmen, who had been sent out by the Genoese Jews, the established speculators in all articles of vertu, to make drawings, make bargains, and, according to custom, steal what they could among the fine ruins lately discovered by the English consul at Salonichi, were, by some absurdity of their own, enveloped in a column of the Ottomans, on their way home from Shumla. The unlucky artists were of course stripped to their trowsers, and ordered to march. The natural consequence would have been, that after a day or two of starving, hurrying through rugged roads without shoes, and sleeping under the canopy of the skies, they would have either made their last bed in the marshes of Thessaly, or left their bones for the foxes and ravens of Pindus; but this is still no unclassic land, though trampled by the hoof of the swinish Ottoman, or harried by the lance of the mountaineer Albanian. The unfortunate Italians were under the wing of the Muses, and, like the Athenians in Syracuse, found the advantage of having received a civilized education. On the second evening of their capture, as the column halted in a miserable village at the foot of the mountains, the lucky accident of finding some date brandy in the corner of their hut for the night, put the captain of the escort into such a state of drunken good-humour, that he ordered his captives to share it, by dancing the Romaika along with him. Half dead as they were, they complied. He then ordered a song, to set him asleep. The Italians were in no forte for melody; but the captain's commands were peremptory, and the song was sung. While it was going on, an old merchant, attracted by the sound, came to the door of the hut, and speaking Italian, of a better quality than the lingua franca of the half savages round him, offered his services. He finally found them some food, by his influence with the peasantry; and, by a still more useful influence, some piastres duly administered, obtained the Turk's leave for them to remain under his prescriptions for a few days, until their feet were healed, and 龚 their fatigues sufficiently got rid of to follow him. The Marabout took them up the mountain, provided, if not a cottage for them, at least a cavern, and for a month also furnished them with the means of subsistence until they could communicate with their friends. As the season advanced, and the Italians began to make preparations for returning home-for the compact with the captain was probably not expected by either party to have been very conscientiously kept, and the captain himself was as probably, by that time, either shot or sabredthe Marabout's uneasiness grew obvious. He at length acknowledged himself an Italian, and even a Genoese, but omitted to account for his Mahometan habit, his life, and his profession. He was not urged upon the subject. The time of their departure came. The old man's cares were unremitting to the last; and with provisions, some piastres, and a shower of benedictions, he sent them forward to the sunny land of mimes, monks, and guitars. Before the week was over, they found the Marabout among them again. But, a merchant no longer, he was now an Italian pilgrim, such as one sees every Easter by the hundred, before the hundred shrines of the little dingy Madonnas in Rome. He told them that, after their departure, he had found solitude doubly irksome; that old recollections had come again upon him; and, in short, that as he was born an Italian, an Italian he would die. They brought him with them to Genoa, installed him, by his own desire, in a convent there; the easy superior of which forgot to ask questions touching the previous faith of a brother who went through his aves and misericordes with such perfection. There he remained for some months, going through the duties with a rigour and punctuality that prodigiously edified the brotherhood. He was the admiration of the women too, for his stature and countenance had scarcely felt the effect of years, further than in a slight bend in the one, and paleness and thinness in the other. But his eye was the eagle's still, and his step had the loftiness and stride of the mountaineer. As he passed through the streets with his bare head, venerable by a few silver locks at the side, and his fine bold physiognomy, he inevitably caught the eye of strangers, and, under those circumstances, I myself remember to have remarked him, among the mob of mean or fierce faces that crowd every corner of the city of the Dorias. It happened also that my cicerone was one of the captured draughtsmen, and from him I heard the particulars of Fra Paulo, or Giovanni's life, I forget which-particulars which my Italian friend would probably not have intrusted to a less heretical ear. So far, my story has nothing uncommon in it, and the misfortune is, that the sequel is only too much in the common form to be worth the modern taste for romance. The old man, some time after my departure, was found dead in his bed, without any mystery of assassination being called in to account for it; nor was there much wonder in the case, when we learned that he was eighty-three, a disease that defies medicine, and has no want of the spadaccino to settle its account with the world. There is nothing more out of the routine, in the fact that the old merchant left a confession behind him; for every monk confesses to some one or other, and the old merchant had matters on his mind which he could not have, without utter expulsion and ruin, suffered to drop into the most prudent ear within the walls of Genoa, or, perhaps, the shores of Italy. He thus at once saved his religious honour, and disburdened his science, by committing his memory to paper, and making my cicerone friend the residuary legatee of his sins. But even the record of such matters is a delicate possession in bella Italia, and my friend expressed his gratitude in all the hyperbole of native eloquence, on my desiring him to collect all the membra disjecta of the old man's pen, transfer them to me under the Ambassador's cover, and keep his soul in peace for the rest of his life, relative to the MSS. of his mountain fellow-traveller,Moslem, Marabout, klept, and monk as he was. con The papers were blotted and mutilated in all kinds of ways, but a species of abrupt narrative struggles through them. I give them, such as they were: "Whether, like all my country men, who are constantly enamoured of some Donna or other, I could have spent life in wandering from ball to ball, and between the serenade, the supper, and the gamingtable, been satisfied to make my way to the end of the day, and of all days, is more than I ever had it in my power to tell. I fell in love-fell in love but once, and, with the extinction of that heavenly flame, became a fiend. "There is, no use now in telling the name of my family. It was noble, and of the highest order of nobility. But is it not enough for the belief that it was proud, profligate, and splendid; that its head was a magnificent idler, and its younger branches were showy, subtle, passionate, and with nothing to do on the face of the earth; that it was Italian? If I went farther, and said that the head of that family was half maniac in good and evil, a madly prodigal benefactor, a madly trusting friend, a madly adoring lover, and an avenger mad to the wildest depths of vengeance, need I write under the picture that he was a Genoese ? "I was that magnificent idler. I was that splendid fool, that son of fortune, who cast away all the gifts of earth and heaven-who trampled out in blood loves and feelings that might have made the happiness of angels, who ran a frantic career of destruction through all that had twined itself round my heart of heartsthen denied, defied, and cast from me the only hope which can console man for the loss of this world, and then sat down in solitude, helpless remorse, and despair-unutterable! * * * "It was during my residence at Vienna, that I first saw the woman who was afterwards to kindle all the fury and all the agonies of my nature. It is useless now to repeat Septimia's title. She was a woman of the highest rank, the daughter of one of our sovereign princes, and though of a Spanish mother, most beautiful. At the Austrian Court, she was the topic of universal admiration, and when all admired, who shall wonder if I, her countryman, young, ardent in all that spoke to the passions, proud of the honours paid to Italian beauty, proud too, perhaps, "We were married. Until the hour when I led her from the altar, I had never dreamed that I was not the first object in her heart. But as she turned away from that altar, the single look which she gave to the image of the Saint above, undeceived me at once, and for ever. It was not reproach, nor sorrow, nor religion, but it was a compound of them all. That look never left my mind. It has haunted me in my dreams, it has followed me in solitude. I have seen it starting up before me in the midst of balls and banquets, and investing the meaningless faces there with sudden sorrow and majesty. It has risen before me in the camp, in the cell; in the calm, in the storm: I see it before me, pale, sorrowful, and lovely as ever, at this hour-the look of a heart broken, but holily submissive; bowed to the earth, but contented with its grave. Septimia! Septimia! "I left Vienna. I had grown weary of it, of myself, of the world. Plea sure satiates, but mine was not satiety; it was a fierce undefined feeling; a heavy consciousness that I had been wronged in heart-that I had thrown away my capabilities of loving without the only return that can reconcile man to the cares that beset even the smoothest path of existence. Even the external shew of happiness that made every lip teem with envy, flattery, or congratulation, but increased my hidden anguish. I have heard the compliments of princes, and they were only like taunts to my bitter consciousness. I have sat in the midst of crowds that filled my palace, to congratulate me on birth-days, wedding-days, the various accessions of my rank, and the marks of honour conferred on me by kings, and sat, like Satan in paradise, hating the splendour and beauty by which I was surrounded and tortured! finding, in the brilliancy of courts and court honours, nothing but fuel for the flame that was eat ing its way through my soul. I was alive to but one sensation-the certainty that I was not loved by the only being whose love I could have now valued. I saw it in the hollowness of the cheek, in the feebleness of the form; I saw it even more keenly in the forced smile with which my presence, my tenderness, those attractions with which, half in hope and half in despair, I from time to time made an attempt to restore my wife to me. But her heart was frozen, or gone; and pride, pain, and thwarted affection returned on me like a legion of the spirits of evil. "One day, in a hunting party in Hungary, I was caught in one of those sudden storms that come from the Carpathians, and cover the country with winter in a moment. I took shelter in a farm-house in the forest. The fireside was already filled with the wood-cutters, who had made their way in from the tempest. As I had none of the gewgaws of my rank about me, I passed for no more than what I was, a man, and was welcomed merely as a hunter. They were drinking, and the wine, sour as it was, brought out their confidences. One of them, who discovered that I belonged to the court, probably from some absurd effeminacy that had grown upon me, made enquiries about the mode of conveying a let ter with which he was entrusted, and of which he conceived that I might be a more adroit conveyer than himself. The address was to my wife. I bit my lip till the blood burst out, but I contrived to check the rage that was ready to have torn the carrier and the letter into a thousand pieces. I instantly mounted my horse. The fellow discovered by my muttered curses that he had put his commission into perilous hands, but it was too late: he followed me, and even struck me with his wood-knife; but I had got that which I would not have resigned to all the powers of earth. I felt neither wound nor tempest; I rushed along till I fainted from loss of blood, and when I opened my eyes once more, found myself in my chamber, with half the archduke's physicians beside my bed; languid, and almost lifeless, but with the letter still grasped in my hand. "I had been discovered in the fo rest by some of my hunters, and brought home as dead. I had lain for a fortnight in my chamber, wandering from one delirium to another, but in all I still grasped the fatal letter -no force could take it from me. Such are the poisons which man prepares for himself-I would not have parted with that letter of ruin, to be made monarch of Golconda. "I read the letter. What was it to the breach of confidence? The secret was mine, and of all secrets the most essential and overwhelming. Its pages gave the fullest satisfaction that could be desired by a mind longing to have grounds for self-torment. They were a long-detailed, but gentle accusation of broken vows, sustained by references to times and places, and charges of duplicity and cruelty on the part of friends and parents, which told me that my wife (for the woman was mentioned, it was she in every line) had long been loved, and had loved in turn. That she had been the reluctant sacrifice to the prejudices of her rank; and that my offer had been grasped at by her family, alike for its own advantages, and its rescue of the daughter of so proud a line from an alliance beneath her. "I saw Septimia on that evening. She had come on the first announcement of my returning mind, and, kneeling by my bedside, offered thanksgiving to Heaven for my recovery. I could have stabbed her on the spot. But she wept at my averted face, and besought me, in such language of soft submission, to think kindly of her and her interest in me, that I felt the tears streaming down my cheeks. In that moment I could have turned to her, confessed all that burdened my mind, and solicited to have at least all that was left to her of her early heart. But I was born to be a victim! Pride forbade the humiliation. I sent her from my bedside; and tossing there till midnight, then started up, fevered and feeble as I was, to tread the corridors with shuddering feet, and break open with frantic jealousy the cabinet in which I conceived the remainder of this correspondence to be concealed. "With a sensation, of self-reproach that need not be envied by a wretch on the wheel, I broke open the cabinet, found a packet of letters, |