and Ethiopia were in a most prosperous condition, from the great profits it poured into those countries. In the year 523 the king of Ethiopia was able to collect a fleet of thirteen hundred ships in the Red Sea, and to obtain abundant supplies for a large army on the coast of Arabia, where a single ship and a company of infantry would find it difficult to procure provisions for a week. After the reign of Justinian this commerce rapidly declined. The increase of piracy on the coast near the entrance of the Persian gulf, and the wars of the Ethiopian kings in Arabia, were simultaneous with the poverty, depopulation, and destruction of capital in Africa and Italy, caused by the Vandal and Gothic wars of Justinian. At this crisis, when Alexandria and Rome were rapidly declining, the security which the extent of the Turkish empire and the policy of the great Khan afforded to merchants, turned a great portion of the Eastern trade towards Constantinople. The Indian traders began to prefer the caravan journey through the deserts of central Asia, to the tedious and dangerous navigation of the Red Sea. By sea they could no longer venture to visit the intermediate ports from fear of pirates, while on the land journey they could carry on a profitable trade in slaves, and in exchanging the precious metals, at many stations on their way. The great importance of the slave trade at this time in central Asia is proved by the circumstance that the emperor Tiberius II., A.D. 578-582, formed a corps of fifteen thousand mamlouks, composed entirely of purchased slaves, imported into the Roman empire by the traders engaged in the Indian or the fur trade. Had the supply continued, and had the successors of Tiberius II. pursued the same policy, the Roman empire would in all probability have been overthrown by Turkish mamlouks, as that of the caliphs of Bagdat was by following a similar military system at a later period.

The first Turkish empire was not of long duration. The Khazar kingdom, whose relations with the Roman and Persian empires in the hour of their decline give it an important place in history, arose in its western

fragments, and inherited a considerable portion of its power and commercial influence. But the Khazars, though called Turks by the Byzantine historians, Nicephorus the patriarch and Theophanes, are supposed by modern scholars to have been a people of mixed race.

There are several points connected with the history of the rise and fall of the first Turkish empire which are interesting, as marking an era in the progress of civilisation. At no previous period in the history of mankind were greater changes made in the commercial, political, and religious ideas of mankind. Religion was then closely connected with political organisation. Christianity was identified with the Roman government; the religion of Zoroaster with Persian domination. The fact that both Christianity and the religion of Zoroaster were declining in the sixth century is unquestionable. Historians have not clearly explained the causes of a revolution so degrading to human nature. In Arabia, in central Asia, and in Spain, an extensive conversion to Judaism heralded the extraordinary rapidity with which the lizard-eaters of Arabia, led by the followers of Mahomet, exterminated the religion of Zoroaster, and converted the majority of the inhabitants of Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Africa to Mohammedanism. It is evident that an internal canker in the social condition of the Christians in the Roman empire, and of the inhabitants of Persia, prepared the way for the desolation of many of the richest provinces of the ancient world.

The second Turkish empire was founded by the Seljouks in the eleventh century. Its power grew up on the political decline of the caliphate of Bagdat and of the Byzantine empire. The dominions of the caliphs had been dismembered, and Bagdat itself had been plundered by Turkish mamlouks, before it was conquered by Togrulbeg with his Seljouks. The Byzantine empire, which, by the creation of a systematic and legal administration, had reinvigorated the expiring energies of the eastern Roman empire, had declined into a pure despotism, and the rulers of Constan

tinople were rapidly devouring the wealth and diminishing the numbers of their subjects by financial oppression. The exploits of Togrulbeg, Alp Arslan, and Malek Shah, may be read in the pages of Gibbon, which have secured them fame wherever English literature is known. Many traces of their handiwork are visible at the present,-monuments of what is called their glory. When they entered the countries between the Persian Gulf, the Caspian, the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean, they found them filled with cities, which, though declined in splendour and wealth by the loss of their municipal administrations, in consequence of the rapacious centralisation of the Roman, Byzantine, and Mohammedan empires, were nevertheless still well inhabited, and surrounded by a numerous agricultural population. But with the coming of the Seljouks, "the verdure fled the bloody sod." They were a nomade people, and their armies were composed of nomadic tribes, who drew their supplies from the flocks and herds which moved with them. The inhabitants of cities were their enemies unless they became their tributaries; and in order to preserve a garrison in the countries they conquered, it was necessary for them to exterminate the cultivators of the soil in the richest and most central plains of their dominions. An encampment of tents could only be secure from surprise by being surrounded to the extent of a day's journey by untilled pastures. Similar desolation has been effected in agricultural countries for ignobler objects. In England the traveller may still see the effects of an arbitrary act of devastation, perpetrated about the same period, by William the Conquerer, in the New Forest; and in wandering through Asia Minor many of our readers have probably passed over districts as fertile as the plains of Poland and Moldavia, on which wheat never grows, but which the page of history informs us were inhabited by an industrious agricultural population, until the towns were destroyed, and the population exterminated, by Kutulmish the lieutenant of Alp Arslan, and Suleiman his son, the lieutenant of

k Shah. The Seljouk empire

was soon divided into the three secondary kingdoms of Roum or Iconium, of Syria, and of Persia. It was subdued and rent into fragments by the successors of Genghis Khan, and in the fourteenth century the Othoman empire arose amidst its dismembered provinces.

Othman, the eponymous hero of the Othoman empire, entered the Seljouk empire of Roum with his father, who was the chieftain of a small tribe consisting of four hundred families. In the year 1289 he was appointed governor of the town of Karady-hissar by Aladdin III., the last Seljouk Sultan of Iconium. The market held on Friday at Karady-hissar was a trading mart of great local importance. A judge sate in the centre of the people to decide every question that arose without delay, and without appeal. Othman frequently occupied the judicial seat. It happened that, as he was presiding, an important dispute was brought before him for decision, in which a Christian of Belokoma in the Greek empire complained of the injustice of a Seljouk noble of Kermian. Othman decided in favour of the Christian, and the equity of the sentence extended his fame, and gave additional importance to his government. Years rolled on. Many emirs established themselves as independent princes, and have given their names to several provinces in Asia. Sultan Aladdin III. died in the year 1307, and Othman secured to himself a position as independent as any of the Seljouk emirs. Just before his death, he conquered Brusa from the Greeks, and laid the foundation-stone of the Othoman empire.

This new Turkish empire is remarkable for its rapid progress and firm consolidation, but still more so for the singular fact that it never reposed on a national basis. The four hundred families who accompanied Othman's father into the Seljouk empire never became the nucleus even of an Othoman tribe. The Othoman empire threatened Europe with conquest; the Othoman armies were long invincible; the Othoman administration was superior to every contemporary government on the European continent; but, during the period of Othoman greatness and power, there

was no such thing as an Othoman nation. Of the forty-eight grandviziers who conducted the administration from the taking of Constantinople to the death of Sultan Achmet I. in 1617, only three or four were of Othoman or Seljouk families, while more than thirty were either renegades or children of Christian parents brought up in the Mohammedan religion. The other born Mussulmans were not even of Turkish race. Few absolute monarchies have preserved their pristine vigour with the same unimpaired energy as the Othoman, and none have passed triumphantly through greater disasters. Few national governments, indeed, could have survived the fearful ordeal of the defeat at Angora, and the conquest of Asia Minor by Timor. Neither Timor nor any of his contemporaries supposed that it was possible to re-constitute the Othoman government; and, indeed, the ease with which it regained its power over the Greek Christians and the Seljouk emirs, is a singular political phenomenon.

This vitality was due to the institutions implanted in the government as the very breath of its life, by Orkhan the son of Othman, the greatest legislator of modern times. As a lawgiver, Orkhan was something between a Lycurgus and a Loyola. At all events, he puts the modern constitution-makers of Europe to shame. They strive to improve the rotten fabric of their political institutions by patching the old despotic garment of Roman law with the new cloth of representative institutions, forgetting that the rabid appetite of centralisation swallows the old garment and the new patches far more easily than the boa-constrictor can swallow a blanket. The institutions of Orkhan were superior to the Code Napoleon and its progeny, in as far as they were framed on the exigencies of the time, and modelled on the demands of a progressive state of society-not borrowed from an extinct people in a different social aud political condition.

We have no space to enumerate Orkhan's institutions. It is sufficient for our purpose to notice the keystone of the fabric which raised a small band of emigrants from Mesopotamia,

before three generations had elapsed, into the founders of one of the great empires of the earth. A tribute of Christian children, imposed by Orkhan on the people he conquered, was the basis, the cement, and the keystone of the Othoman empire. Never before were the laws of humanity and the principles of justice so systematically violated for so long a period with such success. The Othoman empire really dates from the year 1329, for it was in that year that Orkhan assumed the power of coining money, placed his name in the public prayers, and promulgated his laws. From that time he was regarded as the founder and the legislator of a new state, and not as the ruler of a Seljouk emirat. Orkhan made his household the nucleus of his empire. The strength of his dominions was, by his legislation and policy, concentrated within his palace walls. Under his roof was united a college, conducted with all the order and talent of a college of Jesuits, and a range of barrack-rooms, in which a discipline prevailed as severe as that of Lycurgus.

The history of the institution of the tribute children, and the formation of the corps of janissaries, is this: The Mohammedan law authorises-and, indeed, commands-every Mussulman to educate unbelieving children who have fallen into his power as orphans, in the Mohammedan faith. As the military usages of the Seljouk empire gave the Sultan a fifth of all the spoil taken in war, Orkhan soon became possessed of a numerous household of Christian slaves, whom he might have sold like the other Seljouk emirs, and hired mercenary troops with the produce, or filled his palace with concubines and poets, and devoted himself to the pursuit of pleasure and fame. Orkhan sought instruments to gratify his ambition, and to extend the dominion of the Koran. His wars as the ally of the rebel emperor and hypocritical historian Cantacuzenus, furnished him with a large supply of slaves from the Greek empire. The base ambition and rapacity of the rival emperors of Constantinople, induced them to allow Orkhan to insert a clause in his treaties, authorising him to transport Christian captives

in the improvement of the soil, and, strange to say, this peculiar feature of its social condition is common to the new-created monarchy of Greece, and to no other European state. Trade often flourishes, cities increase in population and wealth, gardens, vineyards, and orchards grow up round the towns from the overflow of commercial profits, but the canker is in the heart of the agricultural population; a yoke of land receives the same quantity of seed it did a hundred years ago, and the same number of families cnltivate the same fields. This is the most favourable view of the case; but the fact is, that many of the richest plains of Thrace, Macedonia, and Asia Minor, are uncultivated, and have only the wolf and the jackal for their tenants. In Greece, too, under the scientific administration of King Otho, and with a representative government à la Française, we see the plains of Thebes, Messenia, and Tripolitza, present the same agricultural system which they did under the Othoman government, and agriculture in general quite as much neglected and more despised. Now the line of demarcation between civilisation and barbarism really consists in the profitable investment of capital in the soil. The agricultural population is the basis of a national existence, and unless the soil produce two bushels of wheat from the same surface where one formerly grew, and fatten two sheep where one merely gathered a subsistence, a nation gains little in strength and wellbeing though its cities double their population. The political and social problem, with regard to the governments of Constantinople and Athens, which now requires a solution, is, to determine the causes that prevent the cultivation of wheat on the European and Asiatic coasts of the Archipelago, and in the fertile island of Cyprus. The provinces between the Danube and the Don were in a similar condition when Akerman, Okzakoff,

and Azof, were Turkish pashaliks; under the Russian government, they supply France and England with grain. Now, the grain-growers of Turkey could furnish half the grain exported at present from the Black Sea, and they could obtain much higher prices for their produce in consequence of the great saving of freight to consumers. Even the fertile districts of Bithynia and Thrace, bordering on the Sea of Marmora, than which there are no finer corn-districts in the world, cannot furnish Constantinople with a regular supply of wheat; and the Osmanlees would often suffer famine in the capital of their empire, unless they were provisioned from the provinces taken from them by the Moshof gaiour.

For our part, we must say that it is not unreasonable to entertain some doubts of the improvement which has manifested itself in the Othoman administration proving permanent, until we see some increase of the agricultural population. When the citizens of Stamboul and Athens begin to colonise the country, it will be time enough to talk of the regeneration of the Othoman power. And unless the population of the kingdom of Otho of Bavaria, which possess all the advantages to be derived from universal suffrage, joined to the inestimable liberty of walking about the streets with pistols and Turkish knives stuck in the belt, begin to abandon its passion for coffee-houses, and find pleasure and profit in the cultivation of the fields, the improvement of the Greek nation will not be generally admitted, even though Athens become a clean, elegant, and flourishing city. There must be an evident increase in the amount of the produce of the soil from a given number of acres, before those who study the political history of nations can be persuaded of the feasibility of the project of restoring a Greek empire.

As we never had the good fortune of moving in that circle of society to which the power of retailing anecdote, with minute circumstantiality, was considered as the proper passport-as we never were invited to listen to the small scandals of the group collected at Holland House, or the smaller delivery of the contents of commonplace books, which, in less renowned Whig coteries, is considered the perfection of sprightly converse-we are not ashamed to acknowledge our momentary oblivion of the party, who, in the sonorous verse and rounded periods of a brother dramatist, recognised his own thunder. We cannot at this moment accurately remember whether it was the figurative Puff or Plagiary, or the real Cumberland, who preferred that accusation; and, therefore, we frankly admit, that we lie at the mercy of those gentlemen who consider a slip in an anecdote, or an erroneous name and date in a fragment of gossip, as the evidence of deficient education, and the token of unpolished intercourse. We allude to the story in question merely because the preface to Mr Macaulay's collected speeches exhibits a curious specimen of the wrath which may be excited by another method of conveyance. It is not the appropriation of his thunder, but the non-appropriation of it, which seems to have roused Mr Macaulay to a point of very vehement indignation. It appears that a London publisher, Mr Vizetelly, availing himself of a licence which the law permits -namely, that of reprinting speeches which have been publicly deliveredconceived that the issue of a collection of Mr Macaulay's speeches might possibly prove a paying speculation. He reprinted, as we are given to understand, from "Hansard's Parliamentary Debates," a number of these orations; but, in his preliminary advertisement he appears to have announced that he did so "by special permission." That phrase ought not to have been used; or if used, it

should have been accompanied by a distinct reference to the party who granted the permission. Nine out of ten of the reading public would certainly conclude, from the terms employed, that Mr Macaulay, not the proprietor of Hansard, had authorised the publication; and, so far, there is just ground for complaint. It was not only natural, but proper, and due to himself, that Mr Macaulay should have taken steps to disavow any connection with, or any countenance given to the enterprise of the enigmatical publication. But he has not contented himself with a broad disclaimer. Stung to the quick by some absurd blunders which the self-constituted editor has committed, and which are specially referred to in the preface, in terms of vehement indignation, he has thought it necessary for his own fame to suspend "a work which is the business and the pleasure of my life, in order to prepare these speeches for publication." It is no compliment to Mr Macaulay to say that the public will not thank him for having done So. The desire and eagerness, on the part of the public, to receive a new instalment of his History, is only equalled by their repugnance to peruse speeches upon subjects the interest of which has long gone by—a repugnance not lessened by the impression that, even when new, the speeches were not of a superlative degree of merit. We are sorry that because Vizetelly- whom Mr Macaulay supposes to be actuated by a desire of attaining the same distinction which was formerly enjoyed by Curllshould have mistaken Pundits for Pandects, and magnified the city of Benares into an oriental nation-because he has made the gifted orator "give an utterly false history of Lord Nottingham's Occasional Conformity Bill"-or because he has represented him as saying "that Whitfield held and taught that the connection between Church and State was sinful," whereas Whitfield never said any

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