uncivilized life, where the passions predominate, could it be otherwise. The prolongation of tones, and the swell and fall of the natural voice in the various moods of passion or excitement, invariably producing the first elements of music, its lengthened notes and varieties of cadence: the music, consequently, presents but a softer and regulated impression of the excitement which the words tended to express; and hence arises that wildness, remarked in every national melody, presumably derived from the earlier ages of existence.

The words and tones, therefore, being but the expression of an actual feeling in the first instance, were necessarily united and indivisible in their origin, though afterwards divorced; and thus we find, as among the Arabs, who of all nations have most carefully cherished their early habits, that the most prominent of their leaders were also their greatest poets, and that every burst of feeling was originally uttered in song. The trace of this practice remains in the literature of the Semitic stock, who have best preserved the patriarchal habits of their ancestors. The Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian works alternate verse with prose in more modern, equally with ancient, times, and have thus retained, as a refinement of taste and an exhibition of fancy, the form which, in a ruder period, was simply the utterance of feeling.

We are justified in referring on this subject to the nations specified above, since, independent of the reasons assigned, it is well known that Turkish literature in general follows the same course; and that the compositions of both Arab and Persian, the latter more especially, have served in a great degree as the models of the Turks. In the irregularity of their latter nomade existence, these last appear to have altogether lost even the traces of that poetry which was originally so boasted in the deserts. Yet, from all we can gather now, they must have made a great progress in the art of poesy at that time, for the celebrated Songs of the Tatars, already referred to, appear to have been something more than the rudest and earliest of Arabic compositions that have reached our times, and in a greater degree connected and historical; probably, therefore, more like the romantic ballads of Spain and Germany; and further, in the days of Sultan Mahmoud of Ghazni, to have furnished a portion of the groundwork for the Persian poetical historian.

To the celebrity of the Shah-nameh, then, and the interest it excited beyond even the bounds of its own proper empire, we may attribute, in a great degree, the loss of the less finished Tatar efforts. Ferdousi's historic poem, embracing necessarily so large a portion of Tatar achievements, and preserving the fame of their Afrasiab from whom Seljouk boasted his descent, would not merely supplant the native romances of those countries

with their most learned and polished writers and courts, but also be the means of more widely extending any existing taste for the works of his great predecessors, contemporaries, and followers, in the Pehlivi and Persian languages. Such we know was actually the case; nor was this the only consequence of Persian fame; since the admiration thus awakened precluded all attempts at originality amongst the Tatar tribes, and the utmost of their subsequent efforts has been confined to imitation of their masters.

The Turkish literature springs originally from a double source, according to the best investigations. The Eastern or most antient was that of the Ouighours, the original and pure representatives of the Turks, and whose traces ascend and are lost in the remotest antiquity. The western branch is far more modern, since it aspires only to the Seljoukian tribes, who, previously to the Ottoman irruption into Europe, inhabited the wastes of Turcomania, indifferently under the names of Kumani, Oghuzi, and Balbi or Valabi, which last may perhaps be traced in the Valabi dynasty of Guzerat.

The Ouighours, properly Scythians, appear to have been the most early cultivated of all the Tatar tribes of the East.* The best account of their origin dates it nearly 3000 years before the Christian era. Slight and doubtful notices of their existence are scattered through subsequent history; but it is not till the ninth century after Christ that we learn with any certainty of their condition and historical relations. It appears that they were then possessed of a literature, and that the commencement of this might be referred to a very remote period; that they used a native alphabet, or character, as well as that of their Chinese neighbours; and that history and poetry were carefully cultivated in their schools; the latter retaining the so-called Book of Oghuz, the earliest name of celebrity in Tatar history, and whose reputed volume was a compendium of the wisdom of their ancestors, compiled in verse.

The letters and language of the Ouighours appear from the agreement of Eastern historians to have been the source of civilization amongst the neighbouring tribes from the earliest ages; and though the oldest existing relics of their literature can scarcely date beyond the 10th century, there seems no reason to doubt the existence of their annals at a period when even the Chinese and Persians were fain to borrow from them the traditions of their origin. The Jama-al-tuarikh, compiled about the commencement of the 14th century by Rasheed-Eddeen, contains all that remained of those annals at that period, but confused with a mass of other and foreign traditions. The Ouigbours,

*We use largely, though with corrections, the admirable dissertation prefixed to David's Grammaire Turque,

however, were clearly the most enlightened of the subjects of Jenghiz Khan, since they were the secretaries of the conqueror, and taught the use of letters by his command to the Manchou Tatars on the north-eastern borders of the Great Wall of China, as we learn from the historians of the latter kingdom. Their creed, if we may rely on Persian writers, was derived from Tangout or Tibet. When Jagatai assumed the empire, he gave his name also to the literature of the Ouighours.

Although containing some words apparently of Chinese origin, these are so few, and so much altered from the original, that it is evident the Ouighour language and race had a widely different source from the Chinese. As still spoken in the vicinity of Cashgar, the strength and simplicity of this dialect bear reasonable evidence of its antiquity; but the relics of their literature that have descended to us go back no farther than the 11th century at the utmost, and the manuscript that preserves the single specimen of that period is itself but a transcript, and of the 15th. A short extract from this can not be unacceptable or misplaced, since it may not be generally known to our readers; and it is singular that the conversational or dramatic turn of the work itself assimilates it rather to Chinese or Indian than Persian and Arabic composition. We would versify it thus:

From Eastern skies the gales of Spring exhale,
And Eden's fairest paths our footsteps hail.
Earth spreads her carpet; through the Fishes' sign,
Before the Ram, the Sun's full glories shine;
Fresh, welcome foliage every trunk indues,
And brightening nature robes in loveliest hues.
See, with the caravan from far Khitai

The verdure comes, the softest zephyrs play;
Flowers crowd the earth; the rose its charm receives;
Camphire and Ayât decked once more with leaves;
The freshened branches bursting buds beset,
The morning brings the breath of violet;

The wild-bird, dove, kalkak, and parrot, spring

For prey; or build; or ply the sportive wing.

Shrieks the shrill crane; the gladdening partridge flies

To the dark brows that shade Khan Ghazi's eyes;

Oh! be his life prolonged to utmost age,

As Locman's days, the favoured and the sage !

Of the Kirghiz, an ancient tribe, neighbours and rivals of the Ouighours in civilization, and who are often confounded with them, two short poetical specimens have been given to the world by the Baron de Meyendorff.

See

yon tents, the rich man's place; One sole daughter boasts his race:

VOL. XIX. NO. XXXVIII.

E E

Still at home each burning noon,
Wandering nightly with the moon.

Look on this snow;- -more fair my bosom's rise:
Yon lamb's blood vies not with my cheek's rich dyes:
The fire-scathed tree stands blackening on the hill,
Yet mark my hair-its hue is blacker still:
Let royal scribes toil ceaseless:-canst thou think
Mine eye-brows' lines not darker than their ink?

The most celebrated period of the Jagataian literature, which includes the commentaries of Timur, occurs however too late for our view of Turkish poetry, as it dates about the period of the taking of Constantinople, and consequently after the separation of the Turks from the Tatars.*

The second source to which we have referred, that of the Seljoukians, appears, as already noticed, considerably later in history; though the preservation of the name of Ghuz or Oghuz as the lineal descendants of that renowned ancestor, and the extreme veneration for the volume that bears his name, would seem to claim for this race (and, joined with other causes, not improbably,) a derivation from the earliest times. We give one specimen from the Baron's volume in our translation.

The steed knows him who guides the rein at will;
The sword knows him who teaches it to kill;
Dominion, him who founded first its throne:
And woman, him who made her first his own.

The language of the Kunen or Kumanen is generally considered derived partially from the Ouighours. The source might be common to both; but by writers in general the Kumani branch are derived, though doubtfully, from the Chinese Tatars, as some extant wrecks of their own narratives also inform us; and some trace of Chinese words in their language would tend to confirm the allegation. We know little beyond this, and their union with the Ghuz about A. D. 1000 and subsequent dispersion, but that they possessed a class of poets or minstrels, from whose works about three or four hundred scattered lines were preserved and collected about the beginning of the fourteenth century, by order of Sultan Walid.

Though the Seljoukian literature influenced the tribes as long as they remained in their native wastes, so soon as they entered upon that tide of war and conquest that brought them with such rapidity to the very heart of the falling Greek empire, the Turks emancipated themselves from the yoke of their earlier poetical teachers, and even in Asia Minor assumed a new tone. But

A volume of Poetry, in the Cashan dialect, now lying before us, deserves favourable mention hereafter.

this was merely an exchange of their models; and the rugged style of their ancestors was supplanted by an imitation of the Persian compositions that had so long excited their admiration. They even carried, as is not unusual, that admiration to the length of not merely imitating, but exceeding the faults of their new masters. As they afterwards carried into the graver style of history an affectation of methodical, sometimes puerile arrangement, and a finical nicety of precision, so in their earliest poetical efforts they adopted a tone of spirituality and mysticism far beyond even the Persians themselves, and which, as the distinguishing characteristic of the Turkish poetry, was preserved, followed, and, if possible, enlarged upon by their successors.

Unfortunately for the Turks, this taste for mysticism, which has so much and so deservedly contributed to keep their works and their authors from the general eye of readers, and to confine them to the obscurity they appear to have sought, was developed in Persia to its fullest extent, as concerns that country, about the middle of the 13th century, and just before the commencement of the Turkish empire. The Persian abstractions, therefore, of Jelaleddin Roumi and his son found minds eager to admire and imi tate the extravagance of their novel aberrations. It was not confined, among the Turks, to a single channel. Ethic and didactic, panegyrical, lyric, romantic, heroic, and religious poetry, all followed the prevailing mysticism, from which translation itself was not kept free. Jasid-ougli, Elwan, Chelebi, Daji, Nesimi, Sheiki, Ahmedi, Aashik-pasha, and Sudr-Eddin, all stamped with mystical allusion the character of their national poetry, and Elwan transferred it even to his Persian originals, in the very first era of the Ottoman empire and literature.

The vulgar opinion that the Mahommedan religion is opposed to enlightenment and intellectual cultivation, and which our author confutes from the Koran itself, can only be excusable in the utter ignorance of historical facts. It could never need a refutation or a notice with those who recollect the life and labours of its founder, or recall the ardent admiration of the Arabs for the style of the Koran, and which they consider as a sufficient proof of its celestial origin. But the imputations that Arabia has so triumphantly answered have been suffered to prevail against the Turks, owing to the existing ignorance of their history, institutions, and literature. To say nothing, however, of the denunciations of the Koran, which are evidently directed against the elegant literature of erring creeds alone, and which are sufficiently counteracted by the Prophet's own example and that of his followers, the Turks, in embracing the Mahommedan religion, assuredly lost nothing of their native fondness for the refinement of science