OF

the overflowing literature to which the Eastern war has given rise, to us, one of the most acceptable products is Mr. Milner's History of the Crimea.

It is a very readable, and we think a trustworthy book. Mr. Milner is a man of research, evidently a careful student, and an agreeable writer. His style is easy and attractive. He takes the reader up lightly, and carries him along pleasantly. Perhaps he lacks nerve as a narrator; and one misses the glow and grace, which only a dramatic imagination can give to the groupings and the details of history. Nor ought we to lose the chance of vindicating our critical sagacity which is offered us by a suspicion that Mr. Milner is more deeply indebted, than the uninitiated would imagine, to a certain venerable quarto entitled L'Histoire de la Chersonèse Tauride, by M. Stanislaus Siestrzesewicz de Bohusz, a gentleman at whose name, indeed, our readers may sneeze, but whose merits as a chronicler we advise no one rashly to dispute.

Leaving Mr. Milner and M. Bohusz, however, to settle their accounts as they may please, we propose to avail ourselves freely of the labors of both and of many other literary workmen besides, in order to sketch the outlines of the romantic history of that far-away peninsula, on which the eyes of the civilized world have been fixed with an interest so intense during the first campaigns of the great war of the Western Alliance.

Three years ago the name of the Crimea was scarcely more familiar to our ears than that of Cambodia. Children learned its boundaries at school; antiquarians squabbled over its sites; but, for the most part of men in this western world, the Chersonesus was a very dim and shadowy fact, floating on the far horizon of fancy-just a trifle nearer to us than Cathay; just a trifle further from us than Cashmere.

And yet the Crimea has an authentic history-most stirring and most strange. Within that small peninsula, great tragedies have been enacted. It has witnessed the rise and fall of mighty

monarchs; the glory and the shame of great races of men.

War and woman-these are the staple of romance; Ulysses

"On the ringing plains of windy Troy, Drinking delight of battle with his peers;"

or:

"In the boyhood of the year

Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere Riding through coverts of the deer, With blissful treble ringing clear," these are the types of those eternal passions which make history romantic.

A woman's smile or a warrior's sword shines on every page of the Crimean history; and we fear not to affirm that. if all possible histories could be fairly written, few would charm with more irresistible magic than this.

How pathetic is the picture with which it first rises upon our sight.

Three thousand years ago, the barks of the confederate princes of Greece lay in the port of Aulis, waiting for the wind to waft them to the shores of the divine Troy. They waited, but no breeze shook their sails. The wrath of the gods was visibly kindled against them; and, from one to another, the princes looked, seeking the offender. That

offender was their royal chief. Agamemnon, king of men, had slain the favorite stag of Diana; and the goddess, said the solemn priest, would never loosen her hold upon the fleets of Greece, till the wrong she had suffered should have been appeased, by the sacrifice of the sinner's beauteous child-the young Iphigenia.

The sacrificial knife hung suspended in the hand of Chalchas above the maiden's devoted head; when Diana appeased at once, and moved with pity, snatched the victim from the altar, and bore her away to be a votary and a priestess in the temple of Cape Parthenium among the Tauri of the Tauric Chersonese.

Hard by the monastery of St. George at Balaklava the remains of that old temple are standing now.

The sentiment and pathos of Euripides gave immortality to the legend; and we doubt not that many an English

man, not all unmindful of Eton and of Oxford, has delighted himself in the lapses of the weary siege of Sebastopol with tracing in the nooks and crannies of the iron-bound coast, and the landlocked inlets of the sea, that still retreat wherein Orestes, the brother

of the priestess, accompanied by his faithful Pylades, sought concealment after their shipwreck, and were discovered by the fishermen, whose trade it was to "fish the murer up" for his fine purple dye.

Homer says nothing of Iphigenia and her touching story; but the shores of the Crimea are not without an echo of his song.

Ulysses, always roaming with a hungry heart, is supposed to have touched at the Tauric Chersonese. Did he sail westward or eastward from the fields of Troy? Dubois de Montperreux carries him into the Euxine; and surely the Times Correspondent, himself, could give no better picture than this of the harbor of Balaklava.

"Within a long recess a bay there lics,

Edged round with cliffs, high pointing to the skies;

The jutting shores that swell on either side,
Contract its mouth and break the rushing tide.
Our eager sailors seized the fair retreat,
And bound within the port their crowded
fleet;

For, here retired, the sinking billows sleep,
And smiling calmness silvered o'er the deep,
I only in the bay refused to moor,
And fixed, without, my hawsers to the

shore."

Odyssey, Book X.

Thus it is that the peninsula, which, under various guises-as Taurida, the Tauric Chersonesus, Crim Tartary, and now as the Crimea-has so often flashed out on the world's history, begins to glimmer faintly, in mist and fable, there, on the shores of the Inhospitable Sca, three thousand years ago.

What was the rude race which first peopled it—a race so rude, that all strangers cast upon their shores became a sacrifice to their inhospitable gods?

Succeeding revolutions have of course all but obliterated the traces of the first Keltic inhabitants. Their remains are but slight-slight, yet significant-remains which, apparently meaningless, are yet eloquent and persuasive to the archeologist and the ethnographer. Keltic, then, the first people was.

When

this people reached the Crimea, it would, of course, be difficult to determine. Any research in that direction would require VOL. VII.-10

to be pursued in the geologic, rather than the historic method-by that paleontologio mode of investigation employed by the geologist or the archeologist. In all probability they roamed the steppes, and dwelt among the hills of the Crimea for centuries before they became known to Greek adventure. There is even a myth which would point to the discovery of the peninsula by the Argonauts, which antedates, by a hundred years, the annals of

"Thebes or Pelop's line,

Or the tale of Troy divine."

Herodotus, too, speaks of an invasion of the Scythians into the country of the primitive Tauri or mountaineers, fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. With these the aborigines would seem to have united: and it was these Tauro-Scythes that became known to the Greeks as Cimmerians-an old vocable (CRM) which we find resounding through a variety of names, as Cimmeria, Crimea, Crim (Tartary), Crimbres, Cymry. Tradition makes these a "savage race, using stones and clubs as weapons, fierce to strangers," and even massacring those who arrived on their shores. The hostility of the inhabitants, joined to the difficulties and dangers of the navigation of the Black Sea, it doubtless was which caused the Greeks to give it the appellation of the Inhospitable-ağevos. This reputation it retained long enough. Ovid, the Roman poet, and Tertullian, the Christian bishop, have both poured out their execrations upon it.

And so through centuries of darkness, of Cimmerian darkness, 'mid which glimmers only the faint light of fable, these Kelts, these Scythians lived. On the extreme verge of ancient civilization dwelt they, "beyond the ocean stream, wholly wrapt in mists and darkness, where Helios never looks down with his illuminating sunbeams." Off to the east lay those wild, mystic Caucasian crags whereon agonized the divine Prometheus, who brought down the celestial fire to mortals; those crags the wandering Io crossed in her journeyings. Hidden in that little peninsula, all unknowing and. unknown, the Kelts remained, till, in the seventh century, they flashed out on the history of the world, in a quite unexpected manner.

In the seventh century, B. C., the

Greeks commenced an extensive colonial system along the shores of the Black Sea. Its coasts were explored-Greek civilization and Greek commerce were planted thereon, and the Pontic itself came to be regarded no longer as the Inhospitable, but as the Hospitable Εύξεινος-Euxine Sea.

Two Greek settlements were made about this time in the Crimea. One from Miletus to the Eastern peninsula of Kertch, the other from Heraclea to the southwestern part of the Crimea— the Heracleatic Chersonesus, as it was afterwards called. The Milesians founded the city of Panticapæum, the present Kertch, and Theodosia, to which the Tartars afterwards gave the appellation of Kaffa. The settlers from Heraclea built the city of Cherson-not the Cherson near the Dneiper-but another city of the same name, close by the harbor of Sebastopol-Sebastopol, in fact, being built on the ruins of one of its suburbs. This little republic flourished some two thousand years. Its history is full of romance: we shall meet with it again.

The extensive settlements made by the Milesians in the eastern part of the Crimea, were, in course of time, consolidated into one power, under the name of the Kingdom of Bosporos, whereof Panticapæum became the capital. It begins to be of importance, say five centuries before Christ, and flourished, altogether, for about eight hundred years. This kingdom would seem to have been, on the whole, not without a certain splendor. For three hundred years Panticapæum and Theodosia carried on a grand and massive system of commerce with the mother-country. Their galleys sailed, freighted with corn, wool, furs, salted provisions, and sturgeons, for Greek gourmands. Their little peninsula became the granary of Greece. The fertility of its soil enabled it to send an annual export of 400,000 medimni of corn to Athens; and even yet it has not altogether lost its ancient character. Oliphant mentions the curious fact that the buck-wheat of Kertch carried off the prize at the World's Fair, in London, 1851. "It was to Athens, in the age of Demosthenes," says Mr. Milner, "what Egypt became to Rome, in the days of the Empire the country on which her citizens depended for the staff of life, a mart for her traders, and a nursery for her ma

rines." Leucon, the fifth sovereign, lives in history as a wise and powerful prince. He gained the eternal gratitude of Attica, by feeding it during a great famine.

But the most romantic figure in the history of the Bosporanic Kingdom is that of Mithridates, the mighty sovereign of Pontus, that prince whom Cicero held to be the greatest monarch that ever filled a throne.

The Crimea fell into his hands when the Greek colonists found themselves impotent against the harassing attacks of the interior tribes. Crimean cohorts were ranged beneath his banners, while for thirty years he bade defiance to the eagles of Rome. Defeated at length in that famous battle fought by moonlight on the banks of the sacred Euphrates, the Pontic sovereign fled, before the victorious Pompey, into the heart of the Crimea. There in that very Panticapæum, now called Kertch, he lived out the few last and miserable years of his magnificent career. "Though old and afflicted with an incurable ulcer, he bated not 'one jot of heart or hope;' but conceived the daring project of marching westward round the shores of the Euxine, gathering the wild tribes of the Sarmatians and the Getai to his standard, and throwing these masses upon the frontiers of the Roman state !"

Well might the republic decree twelve days of thanksgiving for the overthrow of so indomitable a foeman.

But the valor, and the wisdom, and the will of Mithridates, his skill in policy, and in arms, his cunning in medicine, all availed him not against an enemy mightier than Pompey. Treason and ingratitude smote him down, and he lies buried in Crimean soil. They point you now to his tomb. His ungrateful son Pharnaces did not long enjoy the throne he had basely purchased. He quarreled with his Roman masters; and on the field of Zela, Cæsar "came, saw, and conquered" him.

The Crimea passed under the sway of Rome, and it was one of the first provinces detached from the colossal empire in the great northern convulsion. The Goths overwhelmed it, and the Bosporanic province disappeared from history, about the fourth century.

The modern town of Kertch still preserves many traces of the Bosporanic days.

Vestiges of towers and mighty walls,

thousands of barriers or tumuli attest the grandeur of the ancient Panticapæum-the "city all of gardens." Vases, statues, ornaments of all kinds have been exhumed from time to time. Many of them adorn the hermitage at St. Petersburgh; many more did

adorn the museum at Kertch, till the vandalism of the Turks and the Zouaves destroyed that curious and beautiful collection.

It is a striking illustration of the profound ignorance in respect to the Crimea, which prevailed before the eastern war broke out, that it should have been left for an American traveler, Mr. George Sumner, of Boston, to inform the British government of the existence of this collection at Kertch, and to suggest to them the propriety of looking after its safety.

Bosporus fell; Cherson, meanwhile, however, continued to flourish. And flourish she did till the thirteenth century of our era-escaping, for ages, the weakness and decay into which the Hellenic race was plunged-preserving for a thousand years, while Greece was sunk in abject slavery and degradation, her glory and her freedom-with

"A Homer's language murmuring in her streets,

And in her haven many a mast from Tyre." Cherson, with her own free institutions, governed by her own elective Archon, cherishing the customs and imitating the policy of Greece, long maintained her commercial prosperity and her political liberties. It was not until about the middle of the ninth century that the Emperor Theophilus destroyed, in a measure, the independence of Cherson, by bringing it under the dominion of the Eastern Empire. Thus brought into contact with the corrupt spirit of the Byzantine power, the integrity of the little republic soon vanished; and it was thus prepared to fall an easy prey to the Tartar hordes which, four centuries later, swept across Europe. Meanwhile, however, let us glance at its history.

During these early centuries we notice the intimate relationship which Cherson held to Rome and the Emperors. Dioclesian, for some signal services which she rendered the State, granted her citizens extensive commercial privileges throughout the Roman Empire; and the Empire itself, during

the old age of Constantine the Great, was indebted to the valor of the Chersonites for a defense against an invasion of the Gothic and Sarmatian tribes, who had crossed the Danube and were preparing to fall upon the Western World. Constantine, in gratitude, sent to Cherson a golden statue of himself; and, better still, granted her a charter ratifying every commercial immunity bestowed upon the city by preceding Emperors. Cherson would also seem to have served as a place of banishment during the reigns of the Roman Cæsars. Large numbers of the early Christians, in particular, appear to have been sent thither. In a quarry near by Inkermann, St. Clement, first Bishop of Rome, by order of the Emperor Trajan, for many years labored. The rocks in this vicinity are positively "honeycombed with cells and chapels,"-the work of exiles, refugees, recluses, and monks of the early Christian epoch.

The history of Cherson, during these imperial ages, is preserved to us only in a general way; but we catch glimpses of romance throughout. Here, for instance, is a story related by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the imperial author of the De Ceremoniis. Like a snatch of an old Homeric epic, it is borne across these fifteen centuries. About the middle of the fourth century, Lamachos was president of Cherson, and Osandros, King of Bosporos. The Chersonites and Bosporians had, for a number of years,, been at war with each other, and it was now proposed, in order to unite the two States in amity, to marry the son of Osandros to the only daughter of Lamachos. To this the Chersonites consented, on condition that the young Asander should never return to Bosporos, under pain of death. The marriage was celebrated, and Asander dwelt with the young Gycia in the palace of Lamachos, which was a building of regal splendor, covering four of the quadrangles marked out by the intersection of the streets in the quarter of Cherson called Souza, and having its own private gate in the city walls. Two years afterwards, Lamachos died, and Gycia became heir to his princely fortune. At the end of a year, Gycia went out to decorate her father's tombhaving obtained permission from the Senate to entertain the whole body of the citizens of Cherson at a funeral banquet on the anniversary of her father's

death, as long as she lived. Meanwhile her husband, Asander, conceived the design of making himself master of Cherson, and overthrowing its liberty. Accordingly, for two years, he caused men and warlike stores to be secretly transported from Bosporos, and concealed in the immense ware-houses inclosed within the walls of his wife's palace. Two hundred armed Bosporians were thus collected, and Asander was waiting for the approaching anniversary of the death of Lamachos to carry out his perfidious design.

In

But it chanced that, precisely at this time, a favorite maid of Gycia was, for some offense, banished to a room lying directly over where the Bosporians were concealed. Here, while the girl was sitting solitary, one day, her spindle dropped, and, rolling along the floor, it fell into a hole near the wall. order to recover it, she raised one of the tiles of the pavement; when, stooping down, she descried the soldiers hidden in the vaults beneath. This fact the maid immediately communicated to her mistress, and Gycia herself became a witness of the strange spectacle. She saw that her own husband was meditating the ruin of her native city, and she resolved to prevent him!

Communicating the plot to a chosen committee of the Senate, it was resolved to destroy the conspiracy by burning the enemy in their place of concealment-Gycia willingly giving her ancestral palace to the flames to save her country. Meanwhile, however, the expected day arrived, and she ordered the preparations for the annual feast to be made with more than ordinary liberality. In the evening, Gycia, to the delight of her husband, proposed that all should retire to rest at an early hour. Asander waited till midnight to commence his treachery.

In the interim, however, Gycia packed up all her jewels, locked every door of the palace as she passed and hastened out, accompanied by her slaves. Forthwith she commanded the building to be fired on every side, and her husband perished in the flames of her ancestral palace. So did the patriotism of Gycia preserve the liberty of Cher

son.

Gycia, in her revelation of the plot, had made it a condition that, when she died, she should be buried within the walls of Cherson. This was contrary

to the Hellenic custom-nevertheless it was granted. After the lapse of a number of years, however, Gycia, suspecting that the ardor of her countrymen's gratitude had cooled, determined to try if they would keep their promise. She pretended to be dead. The event proved as she had feared: the funeral procession passed the gates of the city, when, rising up from her bier, she exclaimed: "Is it in this way the people of Cherson keep their promise to the preserver of their liberty?" To prove that they would not again violate their promise, the Chersonites caused a tomb to be erected during her lifetime, with a statue of bronze placed over it. Here, when she really died, she was buried. The tomb stood uninjured in the tenth century, when the Byzantine Emperor recorded the story of her patriotism.

A century before this little tragedy at Cherson, on the stormy coast of Scandinavia lived a certain Rurik-a rude, self-helping Norse chieftain. The heart of the man swelled beyond the narrow boundaries of his northern home. So, taking with him a band of his bold fellow countrymen-Varangians, as they were called-he traversed the Baltic, entered the Gulf of Finland, and landed at the spot where now St. Petersburgh stands. The Slavic power was, at this period, concentrated round Lake Ilmen, in the flourishing republic of Novgorod. Flourishing the republic was; yet the citizens seem to have been at strife with each other. Rurik, regarding this as a favorable opportunity, took possession of the government of Novgorod this was in the year 864. The Scandinavians-the Strangers, the Ruotsi, as they were called-soon amalgamated with the primitive Slavi; Rurik transmitted the throne to his posterity; and so, all unnoticed, in the middle of the ninth century, this mighty Russian empire, which now o'ershadows the world, entered the system of European States.

Towards the end of the tenth century, Vladimir, the great-grandson of Rurik, and the Charlemagne of Russia, desiring to embrace the Christian faith, and, at the same time, to strike a blow at the Eastern Empire, marched southward into the Crimea, and besieged Cherson. Theophilus, as we saw, in the middle of the ninth century, had forced Cherson to receive an archon from Constantinople: to attack Cherson was, therefore,