Shakspeare's device for rousing the guilty conscience of the king, is the unexpected representation before him of a play in which the murder scene in the garden had been exactly copied, and into which Hamlet has contrived to introduce "some dozen or sixteen lines," so as to make the application more pointed. Taken by surprise in this way, we can readily conceive that "guilty creatures sitting at a play". would find it no easy matter to preserve their composure. Ducis' plan is to introduce the subject of the murder of the King of England before Claudius and Gertrude; a matter, be it observed, with which they were both perfectly familiar, and which they had doubtless discussed in all its bearings long before the subject was alluded to by Hamlet. And accordingly, as might be expected, though the Queen is a little shaken, Claudius, a "vieux routier" in such matters, keeps his countenance admirably.

But we feel we are devoting more room to Ducis than the occasion justifies, and must hasten at once to the notable use which is made of the

urn.

Ducis had seen an urn figuring on the stage in the Orestes, and could not resist the temptation of so fine and classic an instrument of exciting emotion. In his view it seems to have been totally immaterial, that increma tion and urn-burial were as totally unknown to the ancient Danes as powder or peruques. The urn must be introduced upon the scene: Gertrude is called upon by her son to attest her innocence of the murder, beside the vase which contains the ashes of the King. Why this device for discovering her guilt should be resorted to, is not obvious; since Hamlet had not only the Ghost's word for it, which in such a case might be taken for a thousand pounds, but the symptoms of confusion which the Queen had shown when subjected to the test which Claudius with more firmness had endured. Accordingly, in the celebrated scene in the last act, of which we observe Villemain speaks with much respect (though he admits it not to be altogether in Shakspeare's manner), Hamlet suddenly producing the urn, which he seems to carry about with him like a pouncet-box, addresses his mother

[Elle tombe sans connoissance sur un fatueuil.”

We cannot agree with Hamlet in thinking that the Queen's confusion was any proof of guilt, under the circumstances. If the urn was of lead or cast iron-and surely the ashes of the deceased monarch must, for decency's sake, have been included in some such repository-it could not have weighed less than a hundredweight; and even if they had been put off with a mere covering of terra cotta, the urn, ashes included, could not have weighed less than about fifty pounds avoirdupois. Now, we really think that few ladies, whether guilty of mur. der or not, would succeed in preserving their composure when a heavy article like this was suddenly left upon their hands; and that most people would be disposed to swear any thing, to get quit of such a disagreeable piece of furniture.

Specimens, quite as extraordinary, of the metamorphoses to which Shakspeare has been subjected at the hand of Ducis, might be selected from the Macbeth; but enough has been quoted to show, that with regard to the real character of Shakspeare's Tragic Drama, no more complete mystification could have been played off on the French nation than was performed in these versions of Ducis.

Ducis has endeavoured also to imitate the Greek drama as well as Shakspeare, and has contrived to produce a very successful drama upon a very simple principle. Sophocles had written an Edipus at Colonos; Euripides an Alcestis; Ducis blends the two subjects in one, From such a union no happy result was to be anticipated; but, as a specimen of the vigour of thought and expression

Ou se donne tout de souffrance

Pour peu d'effet!

Une si douce fantaisie

Toujours revient;

En songeant qu'il faut qu'on l'oublie,
On s'en suivient!"

We have now reached the lowest point of decline in the French Literature of the Eighteenth Century; in our next and concluding article on the subject, we shall witness its partial revival. Upon the productive energies of genius, the excitement of opinion which preceded the actual developement of the French Revolution, and even the opening scenes of that tragic drama, pregnant as they were with suspense and deep interest, undoubtedly produced a salutary influence. The sluggish surface of literature, which had begun "to cream and mantle like a standing pool," was healthfully stirred and freshened by the first motions of the breeze which was afterwards to rise into a tempest. As the time drew near when all those theories of political and moral regeneration, which had been brooded over till they had lost their freshness of interest, seemed hurrying to their accomplishment, that enthusiasm which had greeted their original announcement, in a great measure revived. The national mind-buoyed up with hopes of a new era, but agitated also by fear, when reflecting on the hazards with

which the experiment was attended_ pausing like Cæsar on the brink of the Rubicon of revolution-resolved like him to pass it, but like him, also, fully aware of the irrevocable step about to be taken felt itselfroused and elevated by the energetic operation of the passions by which it was alternately swayed. The stamp of greater energy and sincerity again became visible on the literature in which these emotions were reflected; feeling began to speak a warmer language; the love of nature and simplicity, in some degree to reappear; and religion, as if conscious that the hour was at hand when her still but solemn accents would be drowned in the roar of civil commotion, seemed to collect her last breath for an earnest farewell. A principle of faith and spirituality is perceived struggling against the old atheistical and sensual philosophy. The opposition to materialism, which had been faintly indicated by Condillac, is carried out by Bonald and Le Maistre. In romance, a new path is opened by the tenderness of St Pierre's Paul and Virginia, and the enthusiastic feeling of the René of Chateaubriand; fresh spirit is imparted to the drama by Beaumarchais and Chenier; and eloquence awakens from its long slumber, to become at once the predominant power of the time, and to startle as. sembled senates in the terrible accents of Mirabeau.

FROM the time when the Russians laid the foundation of their present domin. ion on the shores of the Black Sea, they have shown themselves constantly solicitous to limit the intercourse between these countries and the rest of Europe to the commerce carried on at the seaport towns, and to place such restrictions even on this mode of communication as might render it almost impracticable to acquire any accurate information on the existing state, resources, and population of these provinces, and the condition of the indigenous tribes by which they are principally inhabited. With this view, the acquisition of the Krimean territory was immediately followed by the organization along its shores of a complicated and tedious system of quarantines, with other vexatious sanitary and fiscal regulations, which, though professedly framed to raise a barrier only between Turkey and her late Tartar dependencies, had in reality the further effect of throwing such impediments in the way of all travellers arriving from Constantinople or the Mediterranean at the ports of the Black Sea, that the few details which we till of late possessed, relative to the Cossack territory and the other southern provinces, were derived almost solely from Clarke and Heber, who reached them by the tedious overland route from St Petersburg and Moscow. The former writer observes, that " even in Reymann's map, published in Berlin in 1802, the territory of the Don Cossacks, Kuban Tartary, and the Krimea, appear only as a forlorn blank: as it is a maxim in Russian policy to maintain the ignorance which prevails in Europe concerning those parts of her dominions. The courses of the Dniester, the Bog, and the Dniepr, as well as the latitude and soundings of the coast near their embouchures, have never been accurately surveyed: the only tolerable charts are preserved by the Russian government, but sedulously secreted from the eyes of Europe."

The topography of the coasts was in some degree elucidated by the valuable plans which Clarke himself, at the imminent hazard of his own safety, procured at Odessa, and deposited in the British Admiralty; but the interior remained unvisited and almost unknown; for so effective had the system of repulsion apparently been rendered, that few, if any, of the crowds of travellers who flocked to Constantinople ventured to extend their researches to the northern shores of the Euxine. The treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi, by which the islands at the mouth of the Danube, and the control of the Dardanelles, were surrendered to the Czar, converted the Black Sea into a Russian lake: and the success of the exclusive system would have been complete, had not the circumstances attending the blockade of the Circassian coast, and the piratical seizure of the Vixen, given the European world a full insight into the motives which had so long actuated Russia in drawing a preventional cordon around her Black Sea provinces, and shown at the same time how frail a hold she has yet acquired over the numerous warlike tribes, which, during a long course of years, she has subjected either by force or fraud to her sceptre.

The interest excited by these transactions has, during the few last years, drawn the attention of Europe powerfully towards the present position of these regions, and has partially raised the veil with which the jealous caution of Russia had covered them; and the result of this newly roused spirit of enquiry has been, to demonstrate that it is not among the Circassians and Lesghis only that the yoke is detested, though these only have as yet risen in arms to repel it; but that by the Cossack and Tartar races, who constitute the great numerical majority of the population in the southern districts of European Russia, the Muscovites have never ceased to be regarded as strangers and aliens, differing in religion and manners, and even in language, from the native inhabitants, among whom the Russian civil and military functionaries are treated as foreigners, and the very term Moscofski* used as a byword of contempt and reproach. The introduction of the abominable system of slavery (though in a mitigated form) among the remaining Tartar peasantry of the Krim, soon followed the seizure of that ill-fated country in 1783: and though the numbers, martial habits, and ancient spirit of independence of the Cossacks, have preserved them from the attempt to impose this last and most hateful badge of Russian domination, their old privileges and immunities have been, especially since the commencement of the present century, repeatedly encroached upon and invaded. The ukase of 1837, by which the Cossacks of the Don were, for the first time, made liable to the punishments of perpetual military service and exile to Siberia, filled up the measure of their discontent: disaffection manifested itself so openly in the campaign of last year against the Circassians, by repeated desertions and acts of insubordination, as to render the withdrawal of most of the Cossack regiments from the army of the Caucasus matter of imperative necessity; and at the present moment, as far as can be gathered from the accounts which have escaped the vigilance of the Russian authorities (who are ever on the alert to prevent the dissemination of unfavourable intelligence), the whole of the Cossack country is in a state bordering on open revolt.

Though the achievements of the Cossacks in the late wars made their name familiar throughout Europe, as designating a peculiar and formidable description of irregular cavalry, the fact of their existence from the earliest period as a separate people among the Russians, has been either disregarded or imperfectly understood; and their singular history and institutions are even now almost unknown, although the latter present the only remaining vestige of the popular forms and municipal system which once per

vaded Russia, and the annihilation of which (as is correctly remarked by Mr Parisht) has been, from the day of the destruction of the republic of Novogorod to the present moment, the aim of the system of centralized despotism by which the country is now governed. But though thus presenting a link between the ancient and modern history of Poland and Russia, and abounding in wild and martial passages which might vie with the chronicles of western border warfare, the annals of the Cossacks have remained unknown to the English reader, except by the scanty notices scattered through the histories of Russia (the projected work of Heber having, unfortunately, remained a mere fragment); and the notoriety into which the Cossacks of the Don have risen during the last half century, has only increased the confusion, by leading the mass of readers to attribute to them the exploits of their western brethren, the Cossacks of the Dniepr and Ukraine, whose name stood conspicuous in the past annals of those regions, ere the Don- Cossacks were heard of beyond their native steppes. A sketch of the past history and present position of these military communities will not be without use and interest at the present moment, not only as elucidating the points above referred to, and showing at how early a period the system of making the protection extended to independent tribes a pretext for depriving them of their liberties, found a place in the wily policy of Russia ; but also and most especially, as pointing out the real weakness of that power, and the quarter in which she is most assailable, by proving how ill cemented is her union with a people, who have hitherto been considered one of the most formidable weapons in her hands.

The origin of the Cossacks has been traced, by Tooke and other writers, as high as the tenth century of the Christian era, on the supposed authority of the Greek Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who mentions a country called Kasachia, between the Euxine

*