again see the light. Persons are count ed by hundreds who die every year for want of nourishment or care, of the blows which they have received, or merely of regret, dejection, and despair. Wo to them if they dare to murmur, or to utter the slightest lamentation. For the smallest negligence they receive two hundred strokes on the sole of the foot, for the slightest resistance they are punished with death.

"There is in slavery a certain character of disgrace, of meanness, of bitterness, which chills the soul, disgusts the view, and revolts the thought. Men despise and reject this degraded being, as in India they despise and reject the proscribed and accursed classes of the Parias and the Pulkis. The slaves, accustomed themselves to be oppressed and despised, think themselves as contemptible as miserahe. These iron chains, which are with us a sign of crime and dishonour, degrade the soul of him by whom they are worn. Servitude extends even to the soul. The son of civilized Europe learns to think himself of a nature inferior to these savages of the African Syrtes; and man, born free, who had learned to turn his eyes to Heaven, thinks himself born to serve, and views himself as sunk to the vile condition of a beast of burden. The soul is often purified in the furnace of adversity; but in the condition of the slave there is something dismal and abject, which makes courage lose its temper, extinguishes the fire of every generous passion, and deprives man of his intelligence and dignity. The greatest of all misfortunes is, that virtue, which triumphs over all afflictions, which sometimes renders them precious to us, virtue itself is often weakened or extinguished in hearts oppressed by the cruelty of men, or overwhelmed by the feeling of a degraded nature. Gloom renders the heart bad, while it sinks the courage; the virtues are all derived from a noble and exalted soul, while meanness engenders only vice. Religion itself, that pillar of Heaven, on which the Christian rests, when all is shaken around him, religion affords no longer consolation to a wounded heart. The unhappy. no longer turn towards Heaven, when they feel themselves abandoned on earth. It were well if, in suffering, they mingled

their tears together, if these unhappy persons supported each other in their affliction; but friendship, the sweet consoler of afflicted hearts, becomes mute for beings who never meet with pity. Instead of loving and supporting, they hate and envy each other. He who has suffered too much from the cruelty of men, and from an iron destiny, feels the source of compassionate tears dried up within him, and the flame of amiable sentiments extinguished in his heart; that heart itself becomes hard as stone. The Italian language gives the name of intristito, saddened, to a tree or a field which, never seeing the sun, produces no fruit, and is clothed with no flowers; the same name may be applied to a man whose mind is coldly and deeply perverted."

Nothing appears to us more striking than this observation of an eyewitness on the moral effects of slavery; that sinking of character, that conta gious contempt which is felt even by him who is the object of it; that confession of inferiority, which force alone extorts from weakness; that drying up of the heart which shuts it against pity, when our own misfortunes exhaust in ourselves all our power of suffering. Many other observations confirm this sad truth. We know that in great national calamities, in plagues, in famines, in great military reverses, the heart, amid suffering and danger, closes itself against compassion; and selfishness, called forth in all its force for the preservation of our existence, stifles every other affection. We know that a race is seldom viewed with universal contempt, without becoming really contemptible; that the government which secures liberty, renders men more virtuous, by rendering them respectable in their own eyes; that despotism renders them degraded still more than it renders them miserable. The experience dates from the time of Homer, and has never been falsified. Yet it is not without grief we are forced to acknowledge, that even this inheritance, the noblest and most precious which remains to us, that virtue itself, as well as riches and liberty, may be taken away by fortune.

We cordially join, then, in the noble wish of M. Pananti, for the abolition of slavery in Africa, and the destruction of a government which,

to the shame of European nations, is maintained only by a robbery exercised against them. May there be established over all the coast of Barbary, a liberal government, which may restore to happiness this beautiful portion of the world, which may call a numerous people to civilization and opulence, which may make new openings to European industry in the market which is richest and nearest to us, and which will receive our manufactures in return for new sources of enjoyment, and for the means of subsistence, of which Barbary will long be the granary.

M. Pananti leaves no room to doubt for a moment, that the bombardment of Algiers, executed by an English fleet, far from ameliorating the condition of those who navigate the Mediterranean, or trade to Barbary, has augmented their dangers. The Dey, it is true, has been constrained to set at liberty the captives who were found at Algiers; but his hatred against Christians, his resentment, and his desire of vengeance, thenceforth no longer knew any bounds. He has received from Europeans the most sanguinary affront, while his power has not been at all diminished. For we must not imagine that the death of eight or ten thousand men, women, or children, who perished in the bombardment of Algiers, or the burning of a great number of the houses of the peaceable inhabitants, is a national calamity in the eyes of an African tyrant. It is to him only an insult; and the sentiment is the more bitter, from having been inflicted by that race which he calls infidel, and which he despises. Accordingly, from that moment, he has not ceased to prepare for vengeance. The African governments, formerly always divided, have been united by a close alliance. The superiority of the Sublime Porte, after being long disowned, has been invoked anew, that it may afford them protection. The most marked and incessant activity has been employed, in adding to the fortifications, in making new levies of troops, and in building new vessels. The time cannot be distant, when the consuls of Europe will be massacred at Algiers, the merchants settled there thrown into chains, and when new swarms of Corsairs will infest the seas, and renew their system of piracy.

It is not by bombardment, a measure cruel, because useless, that the Barbary States must be punished; it is by an armed establishment fixed among them. The piratical governments must be deprived of a country which they are unworthy to govern; the Moors must be rendered happy, instead of being punished for crimes which are not theirs, and which attach only to their masters. The whole tenor of history seems to prove that there is no region in the world, the conquest of which would be easier than that of Mauritania, since it has scarcely ever been attempted without succeeding. The Romans attacked Africa in the centre, and, after conquering Carthage, extended themselves along the two shores, and reduced Numidia and Mauritania into Roman provinces. The Vandals entered by the strait of Cadiz, and placed it entirely under their yoke, extending from west to east. Belisarius, with the Greeks, who called themselves Romans, attacked it anew in the centre, setting out from the ports of Sicily; he destroyed the power of the Vandals, and restored to Justinian those vast provinces, which it seemed ought no longer to belong to an empire so much weakened. Three times, in short, Africa was conquered from east to west by the Arabs; in 647, by Abdallah and Zobeir; in 667, by Akbah, lieutenant of the Caliph Moaviah; and in 692, by Hassan, the governor of Egypt, for the Caliph Abdalmalek. It appears to me, that none of these armies of conquerors ever exceeded forty thousand men.

The French and Spaniards had not, it is true, equal success in their attempts upon Africa. But the religious fanaticism which adds to the bravery of the soldier, almost always misleads the prudence of the captain. Nothing less than a miracle would have been necessary to render successful the expedition of St Louis against Tunis in 1270; accordingly, it was a miracle which that pious king expected. The conquests of the Portuguese and Spaniards, at the end of the fifteenth and the commencement of the sixteenth centuries, were the work of a handful of men, whose success greatly exceeded the means by which it was attained, till the period when Charles V. wholly occupied by another train of ambition, renounced

ly; from whence the name of Gorgons.

Dalmeny. Write Du-mena, a black heath, as it must formerly have been. Dundas. Hill of Fallow Deer. The family has got their name from their property.

Barnbougle is certainly a Gaelic word, but so corrupted with coming through the Anglo-Saxon dialect, that it is not easy to find what was the original. The nearest I can find is Barna-buai-gall, the point (of land) of the victory of strangers.

Liston. Write Lios-t-on, an enclosure upon the side of a river.

Carlowrie is probably Car-labrach. Lark's town. However the spelling differs, the pronunciation is the same. In our Scottish dialect, we would call it Laverock hall.

Alcathy, or Auldcathy. The bad pronunciation and spelling sometimes make explanations difficult, yet may be discovered and explained by attention. When from the name of a place I can describe it, I look on myself as certainly right. You possibly knew Aulcamus, on the English road, the English write it Old Cambus. When I saw the place, I knew it was Altcamus, the rivulet of the bay, from a rivulet that there falls into a bay of the sea. Cumbernauld is written in different manners. I suspected what was the true name, and asked of Lord Elphinston, the proprietor, whether there was not a remarkable meeting of streams near his house there, which he told me there was. Then I was sure that my conjecture was right, and the true name must be Cumar-analt, i. e. a meeting of streams. In the same way, I conjecture that Alcathy is Alt-cathach, battle-burn, from some engagement, great or small, that has happened on the burn there.

Binns. A hill, or hilly.

Nid or Nith is the name of several rivers in Britain, and on the Continent, and probably must have been an old word to express a river.

memnon is conducted in triumph into his palace, and is followed by the treacherous queen. The Chorus are left behind with the captive Cassandra; but the queen immediately returns, and orders Cassandra to enter. Upon this there follows the scene already alluded to, by far the finest in the play, in which a new character is presented to us, that for a time absorbs all our thoughts and feelings: the character of the prophetess, displaying with a power which seems almost unrivalled, the most violent and varied emotions, arising partly from the visions and prophetic horrors which successively crowd upon her soul, partly from the recollections of her misfortunes, partly from the indignation of a great mind, in finding itself undervalued and despised; and yet all these vehement feelings chastised and regulated by the dignity of conscious virtue. The scene long, and cannot well be abridged; it must be given, too, under great disadvantages in the feebleness of a translation,-yet under every disadvantage, (for the power of the original may be partly guessed at, even amidst the defects of a version,) it may fairly be pronounced, in point of conception and execution, to be one of the most wonderful scenes in the whole compass of dramatic poetry. The opening of it, it may be remarked, in the first place, presents us with a beauty, of a kind which has been much and very justly admired in several instances in Shakespeare. Sir Joshua Reynolds, in particular, takes notice of that little gem of a scene in Macbeth, in which the king is introduced conversing quietly with his attendants upon the beauty of the scenery as they are advancing to the gate of that palace from which he was destined never to return. A few sentences of repose thus thrown in between the horrible purposes which we had just seen plotted by Macbeth and his wife-and their still more horrible execution, give a momentary relief to our minds, which, however, only serves to make us more awfully impressed with the scenes of blood that are immediately to follow. In like manner, in this drama, after the Chorus had given vent to their unaccountable apprehensions, and before we are immersed in the real horrors of the tragedy a little picture of a domestic and familiar