spoken. He suggested that all the Slavonic literati should become acquainted with the sister dialects, so that a Bohemian or other work might be read on the shores of the Adriatic as well as on the banks of the Volga, or any other place where the Slavonic language was spoken; by which means an extensive literature might be created, tending to advance knowledge in all Slavonic countries; and he supported his arguments by observing, that the dialects of ancient Greece differed from each other, like those of his own language, and yet that they formed only one Hellenic literature." This idea of an intellectual union led to that of a political one, and the Slavonians, seeing that their numbers amounted to about a third part of the whole population of Europe, and occupied more than half its territory, began to be sensible that they might claim to themselves a higher position than they have hitherto occupied. This opinion, it seems, is gaining ground; and the question agitated at present is, whether the Slavonians can form a nation independent of Russia, or whether they should be satisfied in forming part of one great race, under the protection of the most powerful member as their chief. It appears that the latter opinion is gaining ground, and some Poles are disposed to attribute their sufferings rather to the individual will of the Czar than to the general feelings of the Russian people. They therefore begin to think that, if they cannot exist as Poles, the best thing to be done is to rest satisfied with a position in the Slavonic empire; and they hope that, when once they give up the idea of restoring their country, Russia will grant concessions to their separate nationality. Great efforts are making among other Slavonian people to induce them to look on Russia as their future head, and she has already gained considerable influence over the Slavonic population of Turkey. This feeling, it is said, has not extended to Dalmatia, or to other states, which are animated by a greater love of independence. Some think that Austria, who has among her various population above sixteen millions of Slavonic subjects, might put herself at the head of a movement in their favour; and others think that a Slavonic empire might be established on the ruins of Turkey.† "It will be interesting," says the auauthor, to watch the turn taken by this movement, or by the policy of Russia. The Russians are enacting much the same part as the Macedonians of old; and the means then used to excite the Greeks against the enemy of their race may find a counterpart in those now beginning to be employed to rouse the prejudices of Slavonians. Like the Regale Numisma' of Philip, the gold of Russia performs its part; and the fear for Europe is not, as Napoleon suggested, when a bearded Czar' shall wield the sceptre, but when Russia shall possess wealth enough to further her projects, and shall command the co-operation of the Slavonic populations. On the other hand, there is reason to believe, that the liberty of Europe will not be endangered by the increasing power of Russia: she has an encroaching, rather than an invading, tendency; she is unassailable herself, but her system of government, her social condition, and the difficulty she has in keeping up a large army at a distance from home, prevent her being formidable to any but her immediate neighbours; many of the Slavo * The author observes, that a large blank in the history of Europe, during the dark ages, may be supplied by tracing the inroads of the Slavonic race upon the provinces of the Byzantine empire. "Whether the Turks will ever become really civilized, before their rule ceases in Europe, may be doubted; and the rapid decline of their power is everywhere perceptible. Nor are they ignorant of it; and the conviction that they are losing their consequence in the world, though not openly allowed by them, already influences their conduct; as success and power formerly inflated their pride, and rendered them overbearing and oppressive; and no people will more quietly sink from conquerors to passive, indolent, inoffensive subjects than the Turks, when they see themselves reduced to that condition by a power they cannot resist." P. 67, and see p. 85. There are many curious and many important portions of these volumes which we have been unable even to allude to, from the variety and copiousness of the materials which they afford, and the attractive novelty of the subjects. The author has given, towards the close of the second volume, a history of Dalmatia under the Roman empire, and also a continuation of that under the Byzantine Emperors and the Dukes of Dalmatia, from the arrival of the Slavonians to the peace of 1814; to which we must add a history of the Uscocs, a kind of fugitives turned pirates and buccaneers, who fled from their rulers and princes, and about 1500 began to acquire renown, having their stronghold in the citadel of Clissa, and afterwards at Segna. They seem to have been the origin of the Greek pirates of later days, with even more than their savage and relentless cruelty. SONNET ON THE DESTRUCTION OF MY BOOKS BY FIRE. [See our last Magazine, p. 517.-EDIT.] FAREWELL companions of each passing year To you I look'd in sad affliction's hour- 'Tis solace to me, that in earlier time, And the blow struck when I was past my prime. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 27th April, 1849. JOHN ADAMSON. *At the close of his Preface Sir Gardner Wilkinson refers those who are interested in Panslavism and the Slavonians to the recent publication of Count Valerian Krasinski, which was reviewed in our Magazine for April, p. 388. In the course of his book, Sir Gardner has frequently quoted the former works of that author. LINES SUGGESTED BY THE MONUMENT TO BE ERECTED ON THE TERRACE OF RICHMOND HILL TO THE MEMORY OF THOMSON. Ipsæ te, Tityre, Pinus, Ipsi te fontes, ipsa hæc arbusta, vocabant. Or no heroic enterprise of war, Or laurels gather'd 'mid ensanguined fields, The Nymphs, her loved companions, in their groves First Spring upon the sleeping flow'rets breathed So 'mid these studious scenes, his blameless harp And Truth and Virtue by the Muse bestow'd. Then waft his name ye winds that murmuring pass Bear to each distant vale the Poet's song. Benhall, May 1, 1849. J. MITFORD. SOME HISTORIC DOUBTS RESPECTING THE MASSACRE AT FORT DEL ORE, ON SMERWICK HARBOUR, CO. KERRY, A.D. 1580. BY THE REV. ARTHUR B. ROWAN, M.R.I.A. IN presenting an original, and, as I believe, hitherto unpublished document for publication, I beg to introduce it by a few remarks upon the double aspect in which history may be regarded, in each of which it has its own attractions and uses. First, and in the more exact and appropriated sense of the term, we may view history as the grand chronicle of the events which have marked the succession of ages, and determined the course of the world up to that state of things in which we live at the present hour. In this point of view history employs itself with public transactions and their bearing upon the general interests of mankind; and the qualifications of a writer for this department may be briefly stated as the power of condensing a subject from a variety of materials, and presenting it in a style at once concise and clear, which shall alike avoid diffuseness, and allow nothing of essential import to escape notice. With this power is required the faculty for abstracting from trivial occurrences the philosophic principles involved in them. On the laborious and extended research necessary for him who aspires to rank as a writer of "Philosophy thus teaching by example " I shall not dwell, but merely observe that as culinary artists sometimes astonish us by stating the enormous quantity of animal food expended in concocting some exquisite morceau for an epicure's table, so it is only from his own private memoirs that we can form any adequate conception of the vast amount of literary toil of which we enjoy the result while revelling in the flowing generalities of the History of Gibbon. But there is another description of literature which may claim to rank under the title History, and which, if less aspiring, may not be less useful to the student of the past. I mean that class of writings of which the French have expressed the use in their name "Mémoires pour servir l'Histoire," and which are daily becoming more numerous among us as lapse of time removes those restrictions which pruGENT. MAG. VOL. XXXI. dence or reserve had for a while imposed upon the archives of departed statesmen or other public characters. The avidity with which diaries, journals, or familiar correspondence are received and read, is the best test of their utility in elucidating general history, and it is not easy to express the satisfaction with which the student places the stately generalities of the authorised historian on one side, and the minute details and familiar gossip of the day on the other, for the purpose of mutual illustration. How often a public transaction, mysterious as it stands upon the page of general history, becomes intelligible when we connect it with its motives, as we collect them from the confidential communications of the actors. How interesting to find in some secret diary the connecting link which joins to its cause an event which the formal historian, devoid of what is called "behind-the-scene knowledge," has set down in his pages as "inexplicable." Nor, as I conceive, is the satisfaction slight with which a rightlyconstituted mind discovers in any private record of the day the means of removing some groundless aspersion under which an illustrious name has stood forth in the records of public history as "damned to everlasting fame," or, in the words of some of the authorities I propose to correct, "branded with infamy over Europe." The document I am about to submit to the public belongs to the last class, and I shall now briefly relate the cause and object of presenting it to notice. A splendid edition of the Annals of the Four Masters has been lately given to the public under the editorship of Mr. O'Donovan, M.R.I.A.* Of the elegance of the execution, fidelity of the translation, and vast research exhibited in the notes I do not pretend to speak as a competent judge, though I willingly concur in the general approval they have elicited. I hope, * Reviewed in our Magazine for October last.-Edit. 4 F however, that I may reckon upon the indulgence both of the learned editor and of the public while I attempt to correct an error which he has adopted from others, embalmed in the beauty of his typography, attested and aggravated by his own authority, and which deeply affects the memory of two illustrious men. The error to which I refer, is that of charging upon Arthur Lord Grey de Wilton, Deputy of Ireland in 1580, and Sir Walter Raleigh, then serving under him, the direction and execution of an wholesale massacre of the Italians and Spaniards who garrisoned Fort Del Ore, on the west coast of Ireland, when it had surrendered to the English forces under Lord Grey's command. The authorities upon which this charge is made to rest are,-first, the brief notice in the Annals themselves; next, Muratori, the Italian annalist; again, "the testimony of all Catholic Irish writers," upon which, as Mr. O'Donovan states, "Lord Grey's character was branded with infamy over Europe;" and lastly, that of Doctor Leland, who, affecting more accuracy as he is removed further from the origin of the story, asserts, upon what authority he does not state, nor can I ascertain, that "the detestable service of butchering the prisoners in cold blood was committed to Sir Walter Raleigh." In opposition to these authorities, accredited as they are by Mr. O'Donovan's own remarks, I propose to place an original document, written on the spot by an eye-witness, and at the very date of the transactions themselves; and from which I design to argue that, though the reality of the lamentable massacre is unquestionable, yet that it was done neither under Lord Grey's direction nor by Sir Walter Raleigh's agency; but that it was one of those fierce casualties of war which in all ages have been the inevitable result of military licence, and was the lawless act of a soldiery provoked by resistance, and in the first flush of victory and plunder setting all subordination at defiance. Before we proceed further, let us reduce the subject-matter of inquiry within as small a compass as is consistent with free and full examination. The Annals themselves, though perhaps nearest in point of date, were compiled more than fifty years after the transaction, and they are very brief and general in their mention of the whole affair. Muratori, who writes more than a century after, mentions nothing but a charge of cowardice and treachery against his countryman San Joseph, who commanded the fort. For all the Irish Catholic historians" referred to by Mr. O'Donovan, after examining with some attention those within my reach, namely, “O'Daly's History of the Geraldines" and the “Abbe Geohogan's General History of Ireland," I find in their accounts of this affair such minute and literal agreement with the text of an earlier authority, that I feel warranted in dismissing both, as mere transcripts of one and the same original. A comparison of both these writers with Philip O'Sullivan's (Bear)“ Historiæ Catholicæ Iberniæ Compendium," published at Lisbon, A.D. 1621, will, by their complete identity, at once satisfy any one, that the two later writers have merely copied from the pages of their predecessor, and that their seemingly cumulative testimony, like Falstaff's "men in buckram," dwindles into the evidence of "one," whom the learned Archbishop Usher* (to pass by a still stronger term elsewhere f†) does not scruple to designate as "nugatorum nostri temporis facile princeps," -the greatest trifler of the day. "Curry's History of the Irish Civil Wars comes too close to our own time to have any authority beyond what he can derive from the writers from whom he quotes, and these all must stand or fall with the credit of their original. We have then upon the one side "The Annals of the Four Masters,” “O'Sullivan's Compendium," and "Leland's Modern History ;" and on the other, "Spencer," the secretary of Lord Grey, who accompanied him in the expedition, and the document I am about to present to you, written from Smerwick Harbour the very day after the capture of the fort itself; and of which I cannot but think it strange that Mr. O'Donovan has made no use * Usher, de Primordiis Eccles. p. 739. + In his "Religion of the Ancient Irish," p. 69, he says, "As egregious a liar! as any (I verily think) that this day breatheth in Christendom." |