and the left, and with all our might stretching forward to the objects before us.

"It was the hope of Greece that, in these seasons of emergency, she would not fail of help and earnest resort of friends from the Christian nations throughout Europe. For it was agreeable neither to humanity nor to piety, that the rights of nations, liable to no grudges of malice or scruples of jealousy, should be surreptitiously and wickedly filched away, or mocked with outrage and insult; but that they should be settled firmly on those foundations which Nature herself has furnished in abundance to the condition of man in society. However, so it was, that Greece, cherishing these most reasonable expectations, met with most unmerited disappointments.

"But you, noble and generous Englishman, no sooner heard the trumpet of popular rights echoing melodiously from the summits of Taygetus, of Ida, of Pindus, and of Olympus, than, turning with listening ears to the sound, and immediately renouncing the delights of country, of family ties, and (what is above all) of domestic luxury and ease, and the happiness of your own fire-side, you hurried to our assistance. But suddenly, and in contradiction to the universal hope of Greece, by leaving us, you have thrown us all into great perplexity and amazement, and that at a crisis when some were applying their minds to military pursuits, some to the establishment of a civil administration, others to other objects, but all alike were hurrying and exerting themselves wherever circumstances seemed to invite them.

us, that he should mean to insult the wretched-least of all, to insult the unhappy and much-suffering people of Greece. Under these circumstances, both the Deliberative and the Executive Bodies of the Grecian Government assembling separately, have come to a resolution, without one dissentient voice, to invite you back to Greece, in order that you may again take a share in the Grecian contest-a contest in itself glorious, and not alien from your character and pursuits. For the liberty of any one nation cannot be a matter altogether indifferent to the rest, but naturally it is a common and diffusive interest; and nothing can be more reasonable than that the Englishman and the Grecian, in such a cause, should make themselves yoke-fellows, and should participate as brothers in so holy a struggle. Therefore, the Grecian Government hastens, by this present distinguished expression of its regard, to invite you to the soil of Greece, a soil united by such tender memorials with yourself; confident that you, preferring glorious poverty and the hard living of Greece, to the luxury and indolence of an obscure seclusion, will hasten your return to Greece, agreeably to your native character, restoring to us our valued English connexion. Farewell!

"The Vice-President of the
Executive,

"ATHANASIUS Kanakares.
"The Chief-Secretary, Mi-
nister of Foreign Relations,
"NEGENZZ."

Since then, having in 1817 connected himself in marriage with a beautiful young lady of Armenian Greek extraction, and having purchased land and built a house in Ar

gos, Mr Gordon may be considered in some sense as a Grecian citizen. Services in the field having now for some years been no longer called for, he has exchanged his patriotic sword for a patriotic pen-judging rightly, that in no way so effectually can Greece be served at this time with Western Europe, as by recording faithfully the course of her revolu tion, tracing the difficulties which lay, or which arose in her path-the heroism with which she surmounted them, and the multiplied errors by

which she raised up others to herself. Mr Gordon, of forty authors who have partially treated this theme, is the first who can be considered either impartial or comprehensive; and upon his authority, not seldom using his words, we shall now present to our readers the first continuous abstract of this most interesting and romantic war :

GREECE, in the largest extent of that term, having once belonged to the Byzantine empire, is included, by the misconception of hasty readers, in the great wreck of 1453. They take it for granted, that concurrently with Constantinople, and the districts adjacent, these provinces passed at that disastrous era into the hands of the Turkish conqueror; but this is an error. Parts of Greece, previously to that era, had been dismembered from the Eastern Empire ;-other parts did not, until long after it, share a common fate with the metropolis. Venice had a deep interest in the Morea; in that, and for that, she fought with various success for generations; and it was not until the year 1717, nearly three centuries from the establishment of the Crescent in Europe, that "the banner of St Mark, driven finally from the Morea and the Archipelago," was henceforth exiled (as respected Greece) to the Ionian Islands.

name, that from the year 1717, the fears and the enmity of the Greeks were to be henceforward pointed exclusively towards Mahometan tyrants.

To be hated, however, sufficiently for resistance, a yoke must have been long and continuously felt. Fifty years might be necessary to season the Greeks with a knowledge of Turkish oppression; and less than two generations could hardly be supposed to have manured the whole territory with an adequate sense of the wrongs they were enduring, and the withering effects of such wrongs on the sources of public prosperity. Hatred, besides, without hope, is no root out of which an effectual resistance can be expected to grow; and fifty years almost had elapsed before a great power had arisen in Europe, having in any capital circumstance a joint interest with Greece, or specially authorized by visible right and power, to interfere as her protector. The semi-Asiatic power of Russia, from the era of the Czar Peter the Great, had arisen above the horizon with the sudden sweep and splendour of a meteor. The arch described by her ascent was as vast in compass as it was rapid; and in all history, no political growth, not that of our own Indian Empire, had travelled by accelerations of speed so terrifically marked. Not that even Russia could have really grown in strength according to the apparent scale of her progress. The strength was doubtless there, or much of it, before Peter and Catherine; but it was latent: There had been no such sudden growth as people fancied; but there had been a sudden evolution. Infinite resources had been silently accumulating from century to century; but before the Czar Peter, no mind had come across them of power sufficient to reveal their situation, or to organize them for practical effects. In some nations, the manifestations of power are coincident with its growth in others, from vitious institutions, a vast crys tallization goes on for ages blindly and in silence, which the lamp of some meteoric mind is required to light up into brilliant display. Thus it had been in Russia; and hence to the abused judgment of all Christendom, she had seemed to leap like Pallas from the briain of Jupiter—

In these contests, though Greece was the prize at issue, the children of Greece had no natural interest, whether the cross prevailed or the crescent: the same for all substantial results was the fate which awaited themselves. The Moslem might be the more intolerant by his maxims, and he might be harsher in his professions; but a slave is not the less a slave, though his master should happen to hold the same creed with himself; and towards a member of the Greek Church, one who looked westwards to Rome for his religion, was likely to be little less of a bigot than one who looked to Mecca. So that we are not surprised to find a Venetian rule of policy recommending, for the daily allowance of these Grecian slaves, "a little bread, and a liberal application of the cudgel!" Whichever yoke were established, was sure to be hated; and therefore, it was fortunate for the honour of the Christian

to throw the preponderance into the Christian scale. In the reign of his son, Selim the Second, this crisis was already passed; and the battle of Lepanto, in 1571, which crippled the Turkish navy in a degree never wholly recovered, gave the first overt signal to Europe of a turn in the course of their prosperity. Still, as this blow did not equally affect the principal arm of their military service, and as the strength of the German Empire was too much distract ed by Christian rivalship, the prestige of the Turkish name continued almost unbroken until their bloody overthrow in 1664, at St Gothard, by the Imperial General Montecuculi. In 1673, they received another memorable defeat from Sobieski, on which occasion they lost 25,000 men. In what degree, however, the Turk. ish Sampson had been shorn of his original strength, was not yet made known to Europe by any adequate expression, before the great catastrophe of 1683. In that year, at the instigation of the haughty Vizier, Kara Mustafa, the Turks had undertaken the siege of Vienna; and great was the alarm of the Christian world. But on the 12th of September, their army of 150,000 men was totally dispersed by 70,000 Poles and Germans, under John Sobieski-" He conquering through God, and God by him."* Then followed the treaty of Carlovitz, which stripped the Porte of Hungary, the Ukraine, and other places; and "henceforth," says Mr Gordon," Europe ceased to dread the Turks; and began even to look upon their existence as a necessary element of the balance of power among its States." Spite of their losses, however, during the first half of the eighteenth century, the Turks still maintained a respectable attitude against Christendom. But the wars of the Empress Catherine II., and the French Invasion of Egypt, demonstrated that either their native vigour was exhausted and superannuated, or, at least that the institutions were superannuated by which their resources had been so

line; but in the first collision with the prejudices of his people, and the interest of the Janissaries, he pe rished by sedition. Mustafa, who succeeded to the throne, in a few months met the same fate. But

long administered. Accordingly, at the commencement of the present century, the Sultan Selim II. endeavoured to reform the military discip

then (1808) succeeded a prince, formed by nature for such struggles-cool, vigorous, cruel, and intrepid. This was Mahmoud the Second. He perfectly understood the crisis, and determined to pursue the plans of his uncle Selim, even at the hazard of the same fate. Why was it that Turkish soldiers had been made ridiculous in arms, as often as they had met with French troopswho yet were so far from being the best in Christendom, that Egypt herself, and the beaten Turks, had seen them in turn uniformly routed by the British? Physically, the Turks were equal at the very least to the French! In what lay their inferiority? Simply in discipline, and in their artillery.. And so long as their constitution and discipline continued what they had been, suited (that is) to centuries long past and gone, and to a condition of Christendom obsolete for ages, so long it seemed inevitable that the same disasters should follow the Turkish banners. And to this point, accordingly, the Sultan determined to address his earliest reforms. But caution was necessary; he waited and watched. He seized all opportunities of profiting by the calamities or the embarrassments of his potent neighbours. He put down all open revolt. He sapped the authority of all the great families in Asia Minor, whose hereditary influence could be a counterpoise to his own. Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of his religion, he brought again within the pale of his dominions. He augmented and fostered, as a counterbalancing force to the Janissaries, the corps of the Topjees or artillery-men. He amassed preparatory treasures. And up to the year 1820, "his government," says Mr Gordon, "was highly unpopular; but it was strong, stern, and uniform; and he had certainly removed many impediments to the execution of his ulterior projects."

Such was the situation of Turkey

at the moment when her Grecian vassal prepared to trample on her yoke. In her European territories she reckoned at the utmost eight millions of subjects. But these, besides being more or less in a semibarbarous condition, and scattered over a very wide surface of country, were so much divided by origin, by language, and religion, that without the support of her Asiatic arm, she could not, according to the general opinion, have stood at all. The rapidity of her descent, it is true, had been arrested by the energy of her Sultans during the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. But for the last thirty of the eighteenth, she had made a headlong progress down wards. So utterly also were the tables turned, that whereas in the fifteenth century, her chief superiority over Christendom had been in the three points of artillery, discipline, and fixed revenue, precisely in these three she had sunk into utter insignificance, whilst all Christendom had been continually improving. Selim and Mahmoud indeed had måde effectual reforms in the corps of gunners, as we have said, and had raised it to the amount of 60,000 men; so that at present they have respectable field artillery, whereas previously they had only heavy battering trains. But the defects in discipline cannot be remedied, so long as the want of a settled revenue obliges the Sultan to rely upon hurried levies from the provincial militias of police. Turkey, however, might be looked upon as still formidable for internal purposes in the haughty and fanatical character of her Moslem subjects. And we may add, as a concluding circumstance of some interest, in this sketch of her modern condition, that pretty nearly the same European territories as were assigned to the eastern Roman empire at the time of its separation from the western, were included within the frontier line of Turkey on the 1st of January 1821.

Precisely in this year commenced the Grecian Revolution. Concurrently with the decay of her oppres

sor the Sultan, had been the prodigious growth of her patron, the Czar. In what degree she looked up to that throne, and the intrigues which had been pursued with a view to that connexion, may be seen (as we have already noticed) in Eton's Turkeya book which attracted a great deal of notice about 30 years ago. Meantime, besides this secret reliance on Russian countenance or aid, Greece had since that era received great encouragement to revolt, from the successful experiment in that direction made by the Turkish province of Servia. In 1800 Czerni George came forward as the assertor of Servian independence, and drove the Ottomans out of that province. Personally he was not finally successful. But his example outlived him; and after 15 years' struggle, Servia (says Mr Gordon) offered "the unwonted spectacle of a brave and armed Christian nation, living under its own laws in the heart of Turkey," and retaining no memorial of its former servitude, but the payment of a slender and precarious tribute to the Sultan, with a verbal profession of allegiance to his sceptre. Appearances were thus saved to the pride of the haughty Moslem by barren concessions which cost no real sacrifice to the substantially victorious Servian.

Examples, however, are thrown away upon a people utterly degraded by long oppression. And the Greeks were pretty nearly in that condition. "It would, no doubt," says Mr Gordon, "be possible to cite a more cruel oppression than that of the Turks towards their Christian subjects, but none so fitted to break men's spirit." The Greeks, in fact, (under which name are to be understood, not only those who speak Greek, but the Christian Albanians of Roumelia and the Morea, speaking a different language, but united with the Greeks in spiritual obedience to the same church,) were, in the emphatic phrase of Mr Gordon, "the slaves of slaves:" that is to say, not only were they liable to the universal tyranny of the despotic