tional manner, dismissed a multitude of state officers, and filled their places with his own partisans. By these precipitate and violent measures, he soon lost his long-acquired reputation, in spite of the high-sounding and applauding dispatches of Sir Edmund to the British government. Kolettis wielded the dangerous firebrand of the press; Theodoros Grivas flew to arms, and calling together his wild clansmen, the Klephties spread rebellion and devastation through Ætolia and Acarnania. Having been defeated in several skirmishes against the royal troops, he, with a safe-conduct, returned to Athens. But on his receiving notice from the French embassador at the Piræus, that Mavrokordatos intended to take him prisoner by treachery, he fled on board a French frigate, which carried him to Egypt. A tumult broke out at Athens on the 23d of June, which could only be quelled by the energetic measures of Colonel Kalergis. The greatest obstacles to the ministry of Mavrokordatos were the unfavorable elections for the next assembly. The prime minister moved every stone by bribery and corruption, by threats and open violence, to secure the votes in favor of the English party. Bloodshed was frequent at Kalavrita and other places, in the Morea. Kalergis was put forward as a ministerial candidate for the Chamber of Deputies, in direct violation of the new constitution, which as yet only existed on paper. Yet the most extraordinary scene occurred at Patræ in Achaia. There the minister of justice attempted, by means of the chorophylakes or gendarmes, to force the inhabitants to elect him as their deputy. A letter written by himself, ordering the officers to make use of military violence to secure his election, fell into the hands of the opposition. In triumph it was carried to King Otho, and soon made public by the press. It excited a peal of indignation, which sounded the knell of the Mavrokordatian administration. Otho had never had any confidence in the proud Phanariote; he now became an aversion to the king; but the great difficulty was now to reconcile the parties by a change in the ministry. The "entente cordiale" between the French and British cabinets, at that time, made the obsequious M. de Piscatory

attempt to employ his influence to support Mavrokordatos, and thus to preserve the appearance of a friendly union of the French and English parties. Kolettis was to take part in the government; but that shrewd statesman soon discovered that the English party had already suffered a total shipwreck in the public opinion, and that the hour had arrived for him, at the head of his numerous followers, and of the malcontents who had lost office, to stand forward as the champion of the constitution. The parties came to a pitched battle at Athens on the 17th of August. Kalergis called on the troops in vain; they refused to interfere; the gendarmes advanced, but they were routed by the armed multitude. In the midst of the struggle, King Otho suddenly appeared on horseback, and order and obedience were instantly restored. This tumult in Athens gave the death-blow to the ministry, and to the military sway of Kalergis. The Constantinopolitan Heterochton, Mavrokordatos, now gave way to the Autochton or native Rumeliote, Johannis Kolettis ;-the minister resigned, and the commandant of Athens, the favorite hero of September, was, by one of those sudden reversions of public opinion, scorned and insulted by the Athenian people, like Themistocles and Phocion of old, and forced to seek a refuge in Corfu, and later in England, where he remained for several years in perfect retirement from the political movements of the day.

Kolettis was more successful. Among all the Greek statesmen, he was the only one who combined integrity of character and unceasing activity with the most sincere desire of promoting the happiness of the nation and of strengthening the throne. Johannis Kolettis was a Rumeliote from Mount Agrafa, who had studied medicine at Pisa, in Tuscany; and later, appeared with brilliant success as the leader of the liberal party in Greece, after the death of count Capo d'Istrias, in 1831. It was no doubt a most happy idea of the government of Count Armansperg to send off this able and popular man as Greek embassador in France, whence he did not return until after the revolution of September.

In spite of the hostility of the English and Russian party,

of the intrigues of Sir Edmund Lyons, and the defamatory articles of his Secretary, Mr. Griffith, in the Morning Chronicle,* Kolettis wielded with vigor the mace of office for three years, until his sudden death on the 12th Sept., 1847. He enjoyed the full confidence of the king and the nation. But he had a hard stand against the systematic persecution of Lord Palmerston and the party-spirit in Greece itself, fomented and strengthened by foreign intrigues. The old pallikars, who, after the dissolution of the phalanx, had again become the scourge of Greece, either turned robbers in the mountains, or they raised openly the banner of rebellion against Kolettis. Thus broke out that short but sanguinary contest of the old Griziotis, the lion of Euboea, who, nevertheless, was quickly surrounded by the regular troops of government, commanded by Grivas, and after a smart engagement on the hills of Alliveri, in which he lost an arm, he was defeated and forced to flee to Smyrna, where he died of his wounds.

This resistance on the part of the mountaineers, the intrigues in the Chamber, the arrogant demands of the Great Powers, pressing poor Greece to pay the enormous dividends of a loan, the third series of which had never been paid, made the unhappy premier adopt several violent measures little calculated to pacify the parties, or to economize the resources of the state. Yet, on the other hand, has his administration, by impartial Greeks, been considered as the most just and active since the day of independence. Kolettis was the liberal protector of the University of Athens, of the colleges and schools in the provinces, which would have gone entirely to ruins, without the necessary support of the minister; the same care was extended to the monuments of the Acropolis and the lower city, where interesting excavations were undertaken.

Kolettis was suffering from a cancer; the disgusts which the

The Morning Chronicle says, Oct., 1847-" Colettis was the willing tool of the corruptive influence of bad men!! The word Colettis' is but a symbolic representation of the pernicious system followed by the ministry over which he presided: it is a hieroglyphic engraven on the broken pillar of the Greek Constitution," &c. It is a melancholy fact, that the continual, most unjust, and most absurd attacks on Greece in the British papers, have found many uncritical believers in this country of free and independent research.

opposition party caused him, by thwarting his best intentions, augmented the evil; it suddenly became mortal. Kolettis called for King Otho. The interview was touching. The court and the citizens of Athens followed the hearse of their brave and regretted statesman to his sepulchre on the banks of the Ilissus, where he reposes side by side with Theodoros Kolokotronis, who with his sabre in the derveni of Corinth, had gained that independence for Hellas, to the development of which Kolettis devoted his entire life.

The virtuous Ipsariote, Admiral Konstantinos Kanaris, now formed a new cabinet. But neither the ignorant Tzravellas, nor the active Dr. Glarakis, nor the blustering Khristidis, (of unhappy memory from 1843!) was able to steer the bark of the state clear of the rocks. From one difficulty Greece got into another. Though she was prudent enough to take no part in the juvenile pranks of her western neighbors in 1848-9, and enjoyed both tranquility, and a steady, though creeping progress, in industry, cultivation, and commerce, in spite of intriguing embassadors and calumniating newspapers-yet the old blunders of the Bavarian rule, and the spirited resistance of Kolettis against British encroachments, soon made poor Hellas smart under the long-nourished wrath and thundering hostility of Lord Palmerston in 1850. The narrow space allowed to us, does not permit us to give the details of his unjust and arrogant attack on Greece; the facts are before the public. The small islands of Cabrera and Sapienza, lying under the coast of Peloponnesus, were demanded by England, quite contrary to former treaties and the law of nations. The claim of Col. Finlay, of an exorbitant indemnification for his grounds on the Ilissus, was as unjust, because the Greek Government had, before the removal of the Capital from Nauplion to Athens, in 1834, already beforehand stipulated the sums it intended to pay for lots which might be required for the use of the state; and, last of all, the pretensions of the Portuguese banker, Mr. Pacifico, were in the highest degree absurd and ridiculous, as it has been sufficiently proved by the papers lately published by the Portuguese government.

We shall, therefore, only add that King Otho's government, with the weighty interference of France and Russia, showed a prudent moderation and integrity of conduct, highly honorable to that small and depressed nation. It would be in vain to deny that the sanguine hopes of Europe and America, during the heroical resistance of the Greeks in the war of independence, have not been fulfilled. Yet the main cause of the slow progress of that country lies in the maimed and crippled condition in which the decimated nation at last escaped from the fangs of the Turks. The tender solicitude of the Great Powers deprived the Greek people of all those fertile provinces of their heroical brethren, who, by a union under the banner of liberty, might have given strength and resources to the new state. The Ionian Islands, Crete, Rhodes, Samos, Chios, Thessaly, Macedonia, and Epirus (Albania,) the richest and most populous parts of Greece, were again riveted to the horns of the cresent; and by transforming the desolated Livadia and Morea, with its 500,000 inhabitants, its barren mountains, desolated plains, and destroyed cities and villages, into a European kingdom, with king, court, expensive administration, army and navy, the real cause was laid to that feverish, yet lingering existence between life and death, which no doubt may still continue for some years, and may not give way to a new pulsation, before the thunders of the Russian myriads are heard peeling from the distant banks of the Danube. That day will certainly come. Greeks, Albanians, Bosnians, Servians and Bulgarians-all are awaiting that day of decision which may prepare a new page for the history of the Orient.*

Letters, which arrived from Zante and Athens, corroborate to a remarkable degree the above views taken in our article, and prove that the Greek Constitution of 30th March, 1844, does not work, in the midst of contending parties, and selfish, ambitious individuals, who neutralize the honest but circumscribed activity of King Otho's government. A new conspiracy has been plotted in Athens-not like that of September, 1843, in order to overthrow the absolute rule of Otho; no, quite on the contrary-to do away with the Constitution, and once more to put the reins of the government in the hands of the sovereign.

The dissatisfaction with the chambers and the different Greek cabinets which have followed since the death of Kolettis in 1847, has long ago spread through the country. The conspirators had chosen the first day of Lent for