antagonists of civilisation. Commerce is forcing its irresistible way into Greece and the Turkish dependencies; European literature, science, and intelligent curiosity float on its stream, like those seeds which the currents of the ocean carry to islands from which the navigator has been hitherto repelled by their barriers of rock, or startled by the sight of their inhospitable sterility. The eyes of Europe are rapidly turning on the progress of man in the East, and whether war or peace, the fiery sweep of armies or the gentle illumination of arts, are to be the ordained instruments in scattering the clouds which for a thousand years have hung upon Asia-whether the darkness is to be broken up by the lightnings or the dawn, it will be broken, and that, too, in our

time.

The Doctor. Mr. Urquhart begins his narrative with an animation which, in all the details of his personal adventures, never deserts him to the close. Commencing with a lively sketch of the bustle produced in Greece by the famous protocol which settled the northern boundary, he tells us that in the early part of 1830 he was in Argos, on his return from Constantinople. Just as he was on the point of leaving Greece, a king's ship touched its shores and landed-a protocol! which with a power to be compared only to magic, set, instanter, everybody by the ears. "To tell how the people went and came, and harangued and gesticulated, how the fustanels (the Albanian kilt) flounced about, how the mustachios were turned up, would be a task indeed." The news spread and the tumult along with it. How the mere drawing of a boundary-line, a few miles more or less to the north, and the whole outside the Morea, could put these Moreotes into so prodigious a confusion, may be a question. Yet it will be a question with none who know the eagerness of a population of idlers to have something to stimulate them, something to talk of, and something to be angry about. An English village awakened from its hebdomadal slumbers by the discovery that its rights have been insulted, and its liberties endangered, by the enlargement of a ditch or the removal of a parish pond, often exhibits a similar heroic and rebellious paroxysm. The busy idlers of Greece, not one-fiftieth of whom could probably read the protocol in any language of man, and not one-five-hundredth of whom would be a piastre the better or the worse for it to the end of their existence, instantly adopted the airs of offended potentates, talked of national vengeance, scoffed at crowns and cabinets, and having displayed their wrath in street debates from corner to corner of the peninsula, adjourned the discussion to the coffee-houses; where, over the ashes of their pipes, they developed the wrath of inveterate smokers, and inextinguishable patriots roused by the wrongs of their injured country.

The Rector. Travelling in Greece is attractive for reasons old and new; for its rich harvest of classic associations, for its recent bandit and Pasha romances; and, for what is alike old and new, the singular beauty of its mountain scenery, and the unexampled loveliness of its summer climate. Mr. Urquhart feels the spirit of the landscape in all its living beauty, and all its brilliant recollections.

"About an hour from Livadia, we came successively in sight of the serrated shores of the Ambracian Gulf, the Leucadian promontory, and the

coast of Epirus. Before us rose the land of Pyrrhus, Scanderbeg, and Ali Pasha; and, to the right, the mountain altars of ancient mythology, the ridges of the Pindus sublimed with snow."

The hour and the season were genial. It was near mid-day when he reached the base of the hills. The heat was tempered by ample shade, and by the sea-breeze that had just set in.

"The country seemed to smile round us in reckless richness. We found ourselves on a bright, green sward, half encircled by a bend of the rocky stream, and shadowed by a deep border of that constant ornament of running waters, the friendly chenar (the plane-tree). The living portion of the landscape was striking and appropriate. A troop of Palicars (mountain soldiers), had chosen this spot for their encampment, and fixed their habitations among the trees. They were allured only by the amenity of the place, the abundance of water and shade, and their innate taste. Each Palicar had woven for himself a pallet of green boughs, covered with fern, which, according to his fancy, he supported by stakes driven into the bed of the stream on its bank, or nestled in the forks of the massive trunks and branches of the trees; or, to catch the cool current of the air, suspended from the boughs crossing each other from the opposite sides of the stream."

The pen here almost pictures like the pencil.

The Colonel. The work deepens in interest as it proceeds; and nothing that modern travels have supplied is superior to the description of the short journey through the passes of the Pindus with Veli Pasha's troops; the tempest among the hills; and the meeting with the rebel cavalry under Arslan Bey. It is to be hoped that a writer with such opportunities, and such powers to avail himself of them, will not suffer his recollections to sleep. England, and here we fully agree with him, requires to know much more of the East than her travellers have told her, or than she is likely to learn from diplomacy. It is in the East that her next great war will be made, that her shores must be defended, and that she will be summoned once more to stay the gigantic tyranny that threatens once again the liberties of the world.

The Barrister." Speeches of Henry Lord Brougham."-In these volumes Lord Brougham has done what every public man ought to do for himself, for none can safely intrust the task to another. He here has given his sentiments to the world, as he would desire them to be given; he has furnished them with the explanations important to their standing in their fairest point of view; and, having thus secured them from casual error and wilful misconstruction, he has stated his case for posterity. This is, at least, a manly and straightforward proceeding. The writer disdains the equivocation of a "false report," demands to be judged by his own words, and claims to have a fair trial for his character and fame.

The Doctor. Lord Brougham's career has been so mingled with the chief parliamentary transactions of his time, that his speeches form a running comment on the last quarter of a century of English politics. But the peculiar feature of this edition is its giving us short preliminary views of the principal circumstances which gave rise to the speeches, and of some of the more prominent persons who figured at the time. We

thus have brief characters of Wilberforce, Canning, Huskisson, Sir James Mackintosh, &c. &c.; valuable, undoubtedly, as the impression. produced on the mind of a distinguished contemporary; though, as undoubtedly, open to the very different conclusions to which other principles may have led other observers.

The Colonel. The introduction to the speech on the trial of Messrs. Hunt for libel gives a brief notice of the late William Cobbett, a man whom the Opposition courted and feared, flattered and hated, and whose unsparing tongue and pen unhesitatingly repaid the compliment. His wrath against the "Edinburgh Review" was remorseless, and the haughty contempt with which that clever work always treated the man of "The Register," was retorted with all the vindictiveness of one to whom every term of scorn was familiar. Lord Brougham thus alludes to his appearance before the Court of King's Bench, on the charge for exciting a bad spirit in the army in 1810.

"Mr. Cobbett was brought to trial. He defended himself; and, appearing then for the first time before a public audience, exhibited a new but by no means a rare example of the difference between writing and speaking. For nothing could be more dull and unimpressive than his speech, nothing less clear and distinct than his reasoning, more feeble than its style, or more embarrassed and inefficient than his delivery."

On this occasion he was sentenced to pay 1000l. fine, and to suffer two years' imprisonment. But, on his next appearance, ten years' after, he exhibited to more advantage, though, on this occasion, too, he was found guilty and fined.

The Rector. It is amusing to see how unhesitatingly writers who lay down the law with the spirit of a dictator, contradict their own dicta. Lord Brougham constantly proclaims the folly of adopting metaphors as explanations, insists on plainness of speech, short sentences, and clear conceptions; and pronounces the perfection of public speaking and writing to be the most direct expression of the simplest ideas. Yet this devotion to the rude, brief, and naked forms of speech is actually so unnatural, that the clever dictator himself supplies perpetual instances of its violation, and those instances forming the most striking portions of his volumes, and those volumes abounding in the most complicated involvments of phrase, deliberate metaphors, and problematical solutions of political phenomena. A curious example of this reasoning, in which metaphor is the logic, and imagination the history, stands forth in the "Introduction" to the speeches on agricultural and manufacturing distress in 1816. Premising, that the return of peace did not bring back prosperity to any portion of the country; his Lordship says:—

"Whether it was that a war of twenty-three years' duration had carried all the functions of the body politic to an unnatural state, only to be maintained by the stimulants which war supplies in place of more wholesome support; or that the drains of the heavy expenditure created by hostilities carried on all over the globe had exhausted our resources; or that the mere transition from one state to another, operated on the political system, giving it the sudden shock that a sudden relief from pain or want would communicate to the natural frame-certain it is, that never during the whole contest had there been more embarrassment felt than was suffered,

first by the agricultural interest in 1816, and then by the manufacturing classes, the year after.

Now in those formidable sentences all is metaphor-the stimulants applied to the body politic, and the transition state of the nation-are metaphors of the very boldest order; while the sudden shock of a relief from want or disease, is a shock which no man living has ever experienced, and no man will experience to the end of time.

The Barrister. The three reasons, even divested of their metaphors, are three reasons of the Scottish school, not of the state of things. The true causes of the public embarrassment, were palpably-first, the cessation of the government expenditure at home, for the supply of our fleets and armies, and the great public establishments connected with the war. The second, was the opening of the general commerce of the world to those nations who had been shut out from it by the war, during which England, by her naval strength, possessed the monopoly. And the progress of the embarrassment proved this to be the true solution. The cessation of the government contracts was felt immediately in all that related to provisions, and the effect depressed all the agricultural markets. The entrance of foreign ships and manufactures into competition, was naturally slower; and thus the pressure was not seriously felt by the manufacturing district, for another twelvemonth. But Lord Brougham's vigorous and inquiring mind was in the fetters of the Scotch economists; who to a man had pledged themselves that the war was utterly ruinous, and that nothing could save the country but a peace with France, however hasty, hazardous, and temporary. To their astonishment they found that England throve during the war. To their still greater astonishment, they found that an universal complaint from all the great public interests of the country instantly followed the establishment of peace; and that too a peace come in its due time, safe, honourable and which has since lasted a quarter of a century. Conviction was a matter of necessity, but contrition was out of the question; and confession was not a northern virtue. The pamphleteers continued therefore to talk their old philosophy with their old perseverance-to theorize in the teeth of facts-to ramble in full contempt of realityand in their higher instances, such as in that of Lord Brougham, to give us the important moral-that, the more eloquence and the more activity are harnessed to the chariot of political error, the more certain it is to run off the road, until it is either dashed to fragments, or runs out of sight and is forgotten by mankind.

The Doctor. Some of his characters of public men have an additional value from the general recollection of the individuals. Thus Roscoe is brought once more upon the stage, in the "Introduction " to the speech on the Liverpool election. Lord Brougham's exertions on commercial subjects had recommended him to the Whig party in Liverpool, as a parliamentary candidate; Roscoe presided at a public dinner in 1812, to which he was invited. At the next election, Creevey and Brougham, stood against Canning and Gascoigne ; Tarleton, the fifth candidate, struggling, as he might, among the neutrals. After an active contest, Canning and Gascoigne were returned, and Brougham's exclusion conti

nued for three years, when he was at last returned for the close borough of Winchelsea, by Lord Darlington.

The Rector. Lord Brougham's tribute to the memory of Roscoe is a graceful act of remembrance to a remarkable man, remarkable for his literature, his prosperity, and the misfortunes which clouded his decline of life. In his progress to fortune as a Liverpool solicitor, he had occupied himself with reading modern Italian poetry, a singularly worthless study, except for the evidence which it supplies of the coincidence of intellectual decay with moral corruption. Italy now produces nothing but epigrams and maccaroni. With Roscoe, however, this trifling study produced a curiosity to examine into the higher ages of Italian authorship; and from this examination arose his fortunate attempt to illustrate the age of Lorenzo de Medici. The excitement produced by the appearance of "Lorenzo's History " was universal and extraordinary. "The sensation," says Lord Brougham," caused by the life of the great prince. merchant of Tuscany suddenly appearing to enlighten the literary hemisphere, is still remembered by many. Criticism was dumb, men had only time to be gratified. And at a period when the dignity of the senate, even of its lower chamber, never allowed any allusion to the contemporary productions of the press, a peer (the late Marquis of Lansdowne) who had twice been minister, and was still a great party chief, begged their lordships to devote as much time as they might be able to spare from Lorenzo de Medici to the study of an important state affair." The Colonel. This was true as a statement of the general enthusiasm of the hour for Roscoe's graceful book. But the enthusiasm unhappily subsided as expeditiously as it rose. There is something feeble connected with all the literature of Italy since the day of Dante. The playful brilliancy of Ariosto, and the elaborate richness of Tasso partially sustained her fame. But Dante alone has given the world` the evidence that Italy was ever capable of the true energies of poetic genius. Petrarch's renown is founded on his sonnets, and what is the most vigorous sonnet but an abortion more or less illshaped and untimely ? The sickliness of Italian literature had lent its hue to Roscoe's volume. Its beauty was soon found to be languid, its graces at once premature and perishing. No work of its celebrity ever sank more suddenly out of the hands of public taste.

The Doctor. Roscoe's fortunes went down still more rapidly than his literary honours. This was to be much lamented, for Roscoe was an able and an amiable man. Lord Brougham's volumes will add to, and secure, his literary distinction; they are various, animated, and eloquent.

The Rector. "The Glanville Family."-This novel adopts once more the original style of the English romance of real life. It neither solicits the pungency of the Smollett school, nor the rapid and picturesque brilliancy of Scott's. It leaves the bitterness and the boldness of the novel of low life to other tastes; turns from the melo-dramatic changes, and high-wrought catastrophes of the Waverley novels; and gives us the simple, but characteristic picture of life as it is in England, and life as it is among the general classes of opulent society.

The Doctor. Life in all climates is shaped by the presence or absence