dens, furnished orientally, and lodging a dependant multitude.

The commencement of the Russian intercourse was in 1710. The Czar Peter was then risen, founding that extraordinary power which has since grown with such gigantic rapidity into the empire of the North of Europe and Asia. The Porte, which had, so late as 1695, shaken the supremacy of Austria, scarcely rested on its arms after the treaty of Carlowitz, when Peter formed the bold conception of attacking the Ottoman dominions. A territory of the Greek faith, bitterly oppressed by its Turkish masters, and lying directly in his road to Constantinople, naturally became the first object of the campaign. Besarabba, the Voivade of Wallachia, had been already in secret alliance with Austria. He was easily won by Peter, and a negotiation was opened, in which he agreed to furnish the Russians with a force of 30,000 troops, and with provisions for the invading army.

The negotiation was soon known by the Porte, and the death of the Voivade was determined on, but it was delayed till the secure moment. The Turks were still the great military power of the south, and on the first sound of Russian war, the Sultan put himself at the head of 220,000 men, and marched direct upon the Principalities. Peter, in 1711, had arrived in Moldavia, and halted in its capital, in expectation of the Wallachian army. But the Ottomans were already on the frontier. Besarabba, terrified, shrunk from his promises, and this campaign suddenly became the most perilous in the annals of the great Czar. He was surrounded in an exhausted country, and after exhibiting all the dexterous and daring qualities of his nature in succession, was reduced to the necessity of negotiation for his escape. The generosity or weakness of the Sultan on that day, threw away the golden opportunity of extinguishing the rising glories of Russia.

The history of the fickle Voivade is characteristic of Ottoman diplomacy. In his eagerness to conciliate the Porte, he remitted vast sums of money to Constantinople, the natural mode of securing impunity. But in his terror he remitted too much. The Porte, conceiving that he had, by some means or other, became master of measureless wealth, issued an order for the seizure

of the prince and his treasures. In Passion week of the year 1714, a Capigee-bashi (chamberlain) arrived at Bucharest with an escort; he sent word to the prince that he was on his way to one of the fortresses, and should have time only to pay him a visit on the next morning before his departure. The visit was one of death. As he entered the audience chamber, and the prince stood up to receive the messenger of the Sultan, the Capigee-bashi advanced, and laid a black shawl on his shoulder, the signal, at that period, of deposition to the high officers of state. The Voivode, astonished, burst out into furious invective against the treachery and ingratitude of the Sultan. But he was in the power of hands that never relaxed their grasp. He was made prisoner; his public treasure and private property were seized, he was deposed by a firman read in the Divan, and was ordered instantly to Constantinople with all his family.

The people of Bucharest, thunderstruck, made no resistance, and the unfortunate prince was hurried across the Danube. On his arrival at Constantinople, the catastrophe of his miserable and restless life of ambition was rapidly brought to a close. He was flung into the prison of the Seven Towers, that tremendous dungeon, which, if the stones could find a tongue, might have the most disastrous and desperate tales of fallen grandeur to tell, of any spot in the world. His wealth was found unequal to the extravagant conceptions of the Divan. To discover his secret stores, his four sons were put to the torture for three successive days, in the sight of their wretched father!

At the close of this unavailing scene of horror, the Sultan ordered that they should be all beheaded. They were led out into a square of the Seraglio, from the windows of which looked the Sultan and his principal officers. Then came the full declaration of the long-reserved vengeance of the Porte. An officer read to the prisoners the charges of the Voivode's old intercourse with Austria, his later negotiations with the Czar, and the whole list of suspicions that he had looked on as wiped away by years, but which no time ever extinguishes in the fierce recollections of the Turk. His four sons were then put to death, their father undergoing the bitterness

of all, and finally being beheaded. Their heads were then put on pikes, and carried through the streets; the bodies were thrown into the sea, but, after floating a while, were taken up by some Greek boatmen, piously buried in the Greek monastery of the little island of Halcky, in the Propontis. The wife of the Voivode, her three daughters, and her grandson, were spared. They were first sent into exile to Cuttaya, in Asia Minor, but in three years they were suffered to return to Wallachia. A descendant of this grandson still survives, in possession of the estates of his ancestor, and presumed to be the richest and first Boyar of Wallachia, his income amounting to 200,000 piastres, (L.7500.)

The subsequent weakness of the Turkish power invited the attacks, in 1775, of Russia; the treaty of Rainorgic, in 1775, established their right of interference in the Hospodariate, virtually equivalent to a perpetual right of going to war with Turkey, whenever the convenient time of Russia should arrive. It is memorable that the Greek insurrection should have originated in this feeble and delapidated govern

ment.

The political state of the Principalities has now become an object of the highest European interest. They are the present pretext for that war, which, once begun, may spread over Europe, and on their fields will be fought the first battle of the Turk and Russian, for the supremacy of the one, and the existence of the other.

The treaty of Kainorgik was the result of the preponderance of Russia. It was dictated by the Empress Catherine, of whom it might be said, that if any name was ever written on her heart, it was "Constantinople." The right of interfering in the administration of the principalities, conferring the double advantage of conciliating the people in peace, as their defender from the severities of the Divan, and giving a perpetual ground for war, was never relaxed by that most masculine and ambitious sovereign of her time.

But to make this interference more systematic, Catherine soon demanded that Imperial agents, whom she entitled consuls, should be received, with authority to protect the Russian traders and dependants. This the Porte was unable to refuse, and the

concession, however reluctantly, was made.

Austria now demanded that she too should have consuls, though for purposes more exclusively commercial. Republican France next made a similar demand, and her consuls were, like all her foreign functionaries, spies, and the conductors of political intrigue. In 1802, a British Consul General was appointed to reside at Bucharest, chiefly for the purpose of assisting the correspondence between England and Turkey. The peace of Tilsit put an end to his mission, but in 1813 he was re-appointed, with enlarged powers, for commercial purposes.

On the general view of European politics, it is a supremely difficult question to decide in whose hands the possession of this territory would be more fortunate for the general balance of power. To Russia it would lay open the whole of the northern frontier of Turkey. The Danube once passed, a few marches would bring a Russian army to the gates of Constantinople. The ambition of conquest is the very spirit and essence of the Russian empire; and of all conquest, that of Turkey is, from its nearness, its apparent ease, and the national prejudices, the most tempting. But the possession of Wallachia and Moldavia would also lay open the northeastern frontier of Austria, and cut off her intercourse with Turkey. Jealousy must arise, and from jealousy between the powerful, war is not remote. With Austria, Russia, and Turkey, engaged in war, and it would be a wild and bloody one, what nation of Europe could feel itself distant enough to be unsucked into that huge and boiling eddy of fierce passions and remorseless carnage.

Those topics have now degenerated into the common talk, but they are not the less full of terrible apprehensions. The resistance of the Turks has been always bold, and increasing in intrepidity as the pressure of the enemy drove them nearer home. Nothing can be more worthy of observation than the actual slightness of the impression that all the power of Austria and Russia, even combined, has been able to make on the actual Turkish territory during the last hundred years; years, as they were, of acknowledged decline. The naked Greeks have struck a deeper blow on the Ottoman crest than all

neque milites alio duce plus confdere aut audere. Plurimum audaciae ad pericula capessenda, plurimum consilii inter ipsa pericula erat. nullo labore aut corpus fatigari, aut animus vinci poterat. Caloris ac frigoris patientia par: cibi potionisque desiderio naturali, non voluptate, modus finitus: vigiliarum somnique nec die, nec nocte, discriminata tempora. Id, quod gerendis rebus superesset, quieti da tum: ea neque molli strato, neque silentio, arcessita. Multi saepe, militari sagulo opertum, humi jacentem inter custodias stationesque militum conspexerunt. Vestitus nihil inter aequales excellens : arma atque equi conspiciebantur. Equitum peditumque idem longe primus erat. princeps in proelium ibat: ultimus conserto proelio excedebat. Has tantas viri virtutes ingentia vitia aequabant; inhumana crudelitas, perfdia plus quam Punica, nihil veri, nihil sancti, nullus deum metus, nullum jusjurandum, nulla religio. Cum hac indole virtutum atque vitiorum triennio sub Hasbrubale imperatore meruit, nulla re, quae agenda videndaque magno futuro duci esset, praetermissâ.”

δρέιως καὶ ἔρωμένως πραχθῆναι, οὔτε οἱ στρατιώται ἑτέρῳ μᾶλλον ἡγεμονι οὐδ ̓ ἐπιθαῤῥῆσαι οὐδὲ τολμήσαι Ην δ' αὐτῷ πλείστη μὲν πρὸς τοὺς κινδύνους τέλμα, πλείστη δὲ φρόνησις ἐν τοῖς κινδύνως αὐτοῖς· Οὔτε τὸ σῶμα, οὔτε ἡ ψυχή οὐδένι πόνῳ οὐδ ̓ ἀποκάμνειν οὐδε ήττα σθαι ἠδύνατα ψύχους και θάλπους ὁμοιῶς καρτερικὸς τὸ τοῦ σίτου καὶ πότου μέρος κατὰ τὴν τῆς ψυχῆς ἐπι θυμίαν, οὐ καθ ̓ ἡδόνην διωρίζεται Οι τῆς Φρουρᾶς καὶ τοῦ ὕπνου καίροι ούδε ἡμέρας οὔδε νυκτὸς διεκρίνοντος. Ο δε χρόνος, ὁ, τῶν ἅ ἔδει πεπραγμένων, περίων, οὗτος ἡσυχία παρεδόθη, καὶ αὐτῇ ούτε μαλάκῳ στρώματι ούτε σιγή χρε μενος ἐφαίνετο· Πολλοι δ' αὐτὸν πολλάκις χλαμύδι περικεκαλυμμενον τε καὶ χαμαὶ κατακέιμενον ἐν ταῖς τῶν στρατιώτων φυλακαῖς καὶ φρουρᾶις ἑώρων Εσθητα μὲν οὐδὲν τῶν ἡλικιωτῶν διέφερεν. τὰ δ ̓ ὄπλα καὶ τοὺς ἵππους περίβλεπτος τῶν δ ̓ ἱππέων καὶ τῶν πεζῶν πολὺ κράτιστος ἐγένετο. Πρῶτος μὲν εἰς τὴν μάχην ὡρμᾶτο· ἔστατος δε, τῆς μάχης γενομένης, απεχώρει. Ταύταις ταῖς τοιαύταις ἀν δρος αρέταις αἱ μεγίσται κακίαι ἀντιῤ ῥοποι ἦσαν. Ωμίτης υπερβαλλούσα, ἀπιστία πλέον η Καρχηδονίκη, οὐδεν ἀληθὲς, οὐδέν ὅσιον, οὐδέις τῶν θεών φόβος, οὐδ ̓ εὔορκος οὔποτ ̓ ἦν οὔδε εὐσεβῆς ταύ της τῆς τῶν καλῶν καὶ τῶν κακῶν αὐτῷ φύσεως ὑπαρχούσης, ἔτη τρία ὑπ ̓ Ασ δρούβα ἡγεμονος ἐστρατεύετο, οὐδένος ἀμέλησας, ἃ τῷ μέλλοντι στρατήγω ἐπισήμῳ γενήσεσθαι ποιητέα τε καὶ ἐπι σκεπτέα.