Where, if an honest cause engage thy sword, May glorious issues wait it. In our realm We shall not need it longer. Crythes. Dost intend To banish the firm troops before whose valour Barbarian millions shrink appalled, and leave Our city naked to the first assault Of reckless foes? Ion. No, Crythes; in ourselves, I would not grieve thee; but thy valiant troop- Infect us. Crythes. My lord Medon. Think of thee, my lord? Long shall we triumph in thy glorious reign. Ion. Prithee, no more.-Argives! I have a boon To crave of you. Whene'er I shall rejoin In death the father from whose heart in life Stern fate divided me, think gently of him! Think that beneath his panoply of pride Were fair affections crushed by bitter wrongs Which fretted him to madness; what he did, Alas! ye know; could you know what he suffered, Ye would not curse his name. Yet never more Let the great interests of the state depend Upon the thousand chances that may sway A piece of human frailty; swear to me That ye will seek hereafter in yourselves The means of sovereignty: our country's space, So happy in its smallness, so compact, Needs not the magic of a single name Which wider regions may require to draw Their interest into one; but, circled thus, Like a blest family, by simple laws May tenderly be governed-all degrees, Not placed in dexterous balance, not combined By bonds of parchment or by iron clasps, But blended into one-a single form Of nymph-like loveliness, which finest chords Of sympathy pervading, shall endow With vital beauty, tint with roseate bloom In times of happy peace, and bid to flash With one brave impulse, if ambitious bands Of foreign power should threaten. Swear to me That ye will do this! In whose mild service my glad youth was spent, As at this solemn time I feel there is, Beyond ye, that hath breathed through all your shapes The spirit of the beautiful that lives In earth and heaven, to ye I offer up This conscious being, full of life and love, For my dear country's welfare. Let this blow Clemanthe [rushing forward]. Hold! I did not hope for-this is sweet indeed. Bend thine eyes on me! Clem. [Stabs himself. And for this it was Thou wouldst have weaned me from thee! Couldst thou Henry Fothergill Chorley (1808-72), born of Quaker stock near Wigan in Lancashire, was educated at Liverpool, and became musical critic on the staff of the Athenæum, which he joined in 1833. He was also a literary critic, a verse-writer, a playwright, and a novelist, producing three dramas and four or five artificial and long-forgotten romances, the earliest of which were Conti (1835) and The Lion (1839), and the latest Roccabella (1859). His best work, and that by which he is remembered, is found in his Music and Manners in France and Germany (1841) and his charming Thirty Years Musical Recollections (1862). He was a keen but rather acrid critic of music and literature, and a strenuous foe of Berlioz and Wagner. His Autobiography was edited by H. G. Hewlett in 1873. Eliot Warburton (1810-52), born at Aughrim, County Galway, was the son of the InspectorGeneral of Constabulary in Ireland. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was called to the Bar, but soon devoted himself to literature, travel, and the improvement of his Irish estates. In 1843 he made the tour in the East of which the record, first printed in the Dublin University Magazine (then edited by Charles Lever) in that year and the next, was issued at the end of 1844 in its finished form as The Crescent and the Cross. Singularly enough it was in 1844 also that Warburton's friend and fellow-pupil, Kinglake, published Eöthen, the book with which it is naturally compared and which it in many ways resembles a book rather of impressions and experiences and opinions than of objective description and detail. From the first it was greeted with acclamation for its glowing descriptions of the East,' was by contemporary criticism voted equal to Beckford at his best, and was soon declared (by Sir Archibald Alison) to be 'indelibly engraven on the national mind.' Modern critics have said that it might well be used as a (glorified) guide-book to Egypt, and have found in it clear suggestions of improvements put into practice under the British occupation. The style is elaborate and eloquent, with too many purple patches and too much fine writing.' By the end of the century it had gone through a score of editions, and was still being from time to time reprinted. Warburton published in 1849 The Memoirs of Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers; in 1850 an unsuccessful novel, Reginald Hastings, dealing with the same period; and in 1851, shortly before starting on his last and fatal voyage, another historical romance, Darien, dealing with Paterson and his Scots fellow-adventurers, and, ominously, describing a fire at sea. He edited the Memoirs of Horace Walpole and his Contemporaries, by N. F. Williams; and Hochelaga, or England in the New World, a brightly written description of Canada by his brother, Major George Warburton, who was also the author of The Conquest of Canada and of a Memoir of the famous Earl of Peterborough. In 1851 Eliot Warburton (whose full name was Bartholomew Elliott George Warburton, though he used the abridged form as nom de guerre) had been deputed by the Atlantic and Pacific Junction Company to visit the Indians of the Isthmus of Darien, establish a friendly understanding with them, and make himself thoroughly acquainted with their country. He sailed in the Amazon steamer, and was among the passengers who perished by fire on board that ill-fated ship. Woman in the Hareem. The Eastern woman seems as happy in her lot as her European sister, notwithstanding the plurality of In wives that her lord indulges in or ventures upon. her 'public opinion's law' there is no more disparagement in occupying the second place as a wife than there is in Europe as a daughter. The manners of patriarchal ages remain in Egypt as unchanged as its monuments; and the people of Cairo think as little of objecting to a man's marrying a second wife as those of Memphis of questioning the legitimacy of Joseph. The Koran, following the example of the Jewish doctors, allows only four wives to each Mussulman, and even of this limited allowance they seldom avail themselves to its fullest extent. Some hareems contain two hundred females, including wives, mothers-in-law, concubines, and the various slaves belonging to each; but these feminine barracks seem very different from what such establishments would be in Europe; in the hareem there is as much order and decorum as in an English Quaker's home: it is guarded as the tiger guards his young; but its inmates consider this as a compliment, and fancy themselves neglected if not closely watched. This cause for complaint seldom occurs, for the Egyptian has no blind confidence in the strength of woman's character or woman's love. He holds to the aphorism of Mahomet in this matter, 'If you set butter in the sun, it will surely melt,' and considers it safer, if not more glorious, to keep her out of the reach of temptation than to run the chance of her overcoming it when exposed to its encounter. Born and brought up in the hareem, women never seem to pine at its imprisonment: like cage-born birds, they sing among their bars, and discover in their aviaries a thousand little pleasures invisible to eyes that have a wider range. To them in their calm seclusion the strifes of the battling world come softened and almost hushed; they only hear the far-off murmur of life's stormy sea; and if their human lot dooms them to their cares, they are as transient as those of childhood. Let them laugh on in their happy ignorance of a better lot, while round them is gathered all that their lord can command of luxury and pleasantness: his Iwealth is hoarded for them alone; and the time is weary that he passes away from his home and his hareem. The sternest tyrants are gentle there; Mehemet Ali never refused a woman's prayer; and even Ali Pasha was partly humanised by his love for Emineh. In the time of the Mamelukes criminals were led to execution blindfolded, because if they had met a woman and could touch her garment they were saved, as by a sanctuary, whatever was their crime. Thus idolised, watched, and guarded, the Egyptian woman's life is nevertheless entirely in the power of her lord, and her death is the inevitable penalty of his dishonour. No piquant case of crim. con. ever amuses the Egyptian public; the injured husband is his own judge and jury; his only 'gentlemen of the long robe' are his eunuchs, and the knife or the Nile the only damages. The law never interferes in these little domestic arrangements. Poor Fatima! shrined as she was in the palace of a tyrant, the fame of her beauty stole abroad through Cairo. She was one amongst a hundred in the hareem of Abbas Pasha, a man stained with every foul and loathsome vice; and who can wonder, though many may condemn, if she listened to a daring young Albanian who risked his life to obtain but a sight of her? Whether she did listen or not, none can ever know; but the eunuchs saw the glitter of the Arnaut's arms as he leaped from the terrace into the Nile and vanished in the darkness. The following night a merry English party dined together on board Lord Exmouth's boat as it lay moored off the Isle of Rhoda; conversation had sunk into silence as the calm night came on; a faint breeze floated perfumes from the gardens over the starlit Nile, and scarcely moved the clouds that rose from the chibouque; a dreamy languor seemed to pervade all nature, and even the city lay hushed in deep reposewhen suddenly a boat, crowded with dark figures among which arms gleamed, shot out from one of the arches of the palace; it paused under the opposite bank, where the water rushed deep and gloomily along, and for a moment a white figure glimmered amongst that boat's dark crew; there was a slight movement and a faint splash, and then-the river flowed on as merrily as if poor Fatima still sang her Georgian song to the murmur of its waters. I was riding one evening along the banks of the Mareotis; the low land, half swamp, half desert, was level as the lake: there was no sound, except the ripple of the waves along the far extended shore, and the heavy flapping of the pelican's wings as she rose from the water's edge. Not a palm-tree raised its plumy head, not a shrub crept along the ground; the sun was low, but there was nothing to cast a shadow over the monotonous waste, except a few Moslem tombs with their sculptured turbans: these stood apart from every sign of life, and even of their kindred dead, like those upon the Lido at Venice. As I paused to contemplate this scene of desolation, an Egyptian hurried past me with a bloody knife in his hand; his dress was mean and ragged, but his countenance was one that the father of Don Carlos might have worn; he never raised his eyes as he rushed by. My groom, who just then came up, told me he had slain his wife, and was going to her father's village to denounce her. My boat was moored in the little harbour of Assouan, the old Syene, the boundary between Egypt and Ethiopia; opposite lies Elephantina, the 'Isle of Flowers,' strewed with ruins and shaded by magnificent palm-trees; the last eddies of the cataract of the Nile foam round dark red granite cliffs, which rise precipitously from the river, and are piled into a mountain crowned by a ruined Saracenic castle. A forest of palmtrees divides the village from the quiet shore on whose silvery sands my tent was pitched. A man in an Egyptian dress saluted me in Italian, and in a few moments was smoking my chibouque, by invitation, and sipping coffee by my side: he was very handsome; but his faded cheek and sunken eye showed hardship and suffering, and he spoke in a low and humble voice. In reply to my question as to how a person of his appearance came into this remote region, he told me that he had been lately practising as a surgeon in Alexandria; he had married a Levantine girl, whose beauty was to him as 'la faccia del cielo :' he had been absent from his home, and she had betrayed him. On his return he met her with a smiling countenance; in the evening he accompanied her to a deep well, whither she went to draw water, and as she leant over it he threw her in. As he said this he paused and placed his hands upon his ears, as if he still heard her dying shriek. He then continued: I have fled from Alexandria till the affair is blown over. I was robbed near Siout, and have supported myself miserably ever since by giving medical advice to the poor country people. I shall soon return, and all will be forgotten. If I had not avenged myself, her own family, you know, must have done so.' And so this woman-murderer smoked on, and continued talking in a low and gentle voice till the moon was high; then he went his way, and I saw him no more. The Egyptian has no home—at least, in the English sense of that sacred word; his sons are only half brothers, and generally at enmity with each other; his daughters are transplanted while yet children into some other hareem; and his wives, when their beauty is gone by, are frequently divorced without a cause, to make room for some younger rival. The result is, that the Egyptian-a sensualist and slave-is only fit to be a subject in what prophecy foretold his country should become the basest of all kingdoms.' The women have all the insipidity of children without their innocence or sparkling freshness. Their beauty, voluptuous and soulless, appeals only to the senses; it has none of that pure and ennobling influence 'That made us what we are-the great, the free- The Moslem purchases his wife as he does his horse : he laughs at the idea of honour and of love: the armed eunuch and the close-barred window are the only safeguards of virtue that he relies on. Every luxury lavished on the Odalisque is linked with some precaution, like the iron fruit and flowers in the madhouse at Naples, that seem to smile round those whom they imprison. Nor is it for her own sake, but that of her master, that woman is supplied with every luxury that wealth can procure. As we gild our aviaries and fill them with exotics native to our foreign birds in order that their song may be sweet and their plumage bright, so the King of Babylon built the Hanging Gardens for the mountain girl who pined and lost her beauty among the level plains of the Euphrates. The Egyptian is quite satisfied if his Nourmahal be in good condition: mindless himself, what has he to do with mind? The Egyptian woman, obliged to share her husband's affection with a hundred others in this world, is yet further supplanted in the next by the Houris, a sort of she-angel, of as doubtful a character as even a Moslem paradise could well tolerate; nay, more, it is a very moot point among Mussulman D.D.s whether women have any soul at all, or not. I believe their chance of immortality rests chiefly on the tradition of a conversation of Mahomet with an old woman who importuned him for a good place in paradise. 'Trouble me not,' said the vexed husband of Cadijah; 'there can be no old women in paradise.' Whereupon the aged applicant made such troublous lamentation that he diplomatically added, 'because the old will then all be made young again.' I can find no allusion to woman's immortality in all the Koran, except incidentally, as where all men and women are to be tried at the last day,' and this is but poor comfort for those whom 'angels are painted fair to look like.' Women are not enjoined to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca, but they are permitted to do so. They are not enjoined to pray; but the Prophet seemed to think that it could do them no harm, provided they prayed in their own houses and not in the mosques, where they might interfere with or share the devotion of those who had real business there. In fine, women receive no religious education; they seldom, if ever, pray; and their heaven, if they have one, is some second-hand sort of paradise, very different from that of their husbands-unless, as I have observed, ‘by particular desire.' Nothing can be more hideous than the Arab woman of the street; nothing more picturesque than her of the hareem. The former presents a mass of white, shroudlike drapery, waddling along on a pair of enormous yellow boots, with one brilliant eye gleaming above the veil which is drawn across the face. The lower classes wear only a very loose, long blue frock, and appear anxious to conceal nothing except their faces, in which they consider that identity alone consists. As these women cannot spare the hands to the exclusive use of their veils, they wear a sort of snout, or long, black, tapering veil, bound over the cheek-bones, and supported from the forehead by a string of beads. Take one of these, an ugly, old, sun-scorched hag, with a skin like a hippopotamus and a veil-snout like an elephant's trunk; her scanty robe scarcely serving the purposes of a girdle; her hands, feet, and forehead tattooed of a smoke-colour; and there is scarcely a more hideous spectacle on earth. But the Lady of the Hareem, on the other hand-couched gracefully on a rich Persian carpet strewn with soft pillowy cushions— is as rich a picture as admiration ever gazed on. Her eyes, if not as dangerous to the heart as those of our country, where the sunshine of intellect gleams through a heaven of blue, are nevertheless perfect in their kind, and at least as dangerous to the senses. Languid, yet full-brimful of life; dark, yet very lustrous; liquid, yet clear as stars, they are compared by their poets to the shape of the almond and the bright timidness of the gazelle's. The face is delicately oval, and its shape is set off by the gold-fringed turban, the most becoming head-dress in the world; the long, black, silken tresses are braided from the forehead, and hang wavily on each side of the face, falling behind in a glossy cataract, that sparkles with such golden drops as might have glittered upon Danaë after the Olympian shower. A light tunic of pink or pale blue crape is covered with a long silk robe, open at the bosom, and buttoned thence downward to the delicately slippered little feet, that peep daintily from beneath the full silken trousers. Round the loins, rather than the waist, a cachemire shawl is loosely wrapt as a girdle; and an embroidered jacket or a large silk robe with loose open sleeves completes the costume. Nor is the fragrant water-pipe, with its long variegated serpent and its jewelled mouthpiece, any detraction from the portrait. Picture to yourself one of Eve's brightest daughters in Eve's own loving land. The woman-dealer has found among the mountains that perfection in a living form which Praxiteles scarcely realised when inspired fancy wrought out its ideal in marble. Silken scarfs, as richly coloured and as airy as the rainbow, wreathe her round, from the snowy brow to the finely rounded limbs, half buried in billowy cushions: the attitude is the very poetry of repose-languid it may be; but glowing life thrills beneath that flower-soft exterior, from the varying cheek and flashing eye to the henna-dyed, taper fingers that capriciously play with her rosary of beads. blaze of sunshine is round her kiosk, but she sits in the softened shadow so dear to the painter's eye. And so she dreams away the warm hours in such a calm of The thought within, and sight or sound without, that she starts when the gold-fish gleams in the fountain or the breeze-ruffled roses shed a leaf upon her bosom. The mystery, the seclusion, and the danger that surround the Odalisque may be perilously interesting to the romantic; but to matter-of-fact people like myself an English fireside, a Scottish mountain, or an Irish glen has more attractions in this respect than any Zenana in Arabia; and the women who inhabit them, with purity in the heart and intellect on the brow, and a cottage-bonnet on the head, are better worth risking life (nay, liberty) for than all the turbaned voluptuous beauty of the East. (From The Crescent and the Cross.) Frances Trollope (1780-1863) was born at Stapleton, Bristol (the birthplace also of Hannah More), but brought up at Heckfield vicarage, North Hampshire. In 1809 she married Thomas Anthony Trollope, barrister and Fellow of New College, Oxford; in 1827, on his falling into the direst embarrassment, she went out to Cincinnati with her second boy and her two little girls. There was a scheme for starting a European fancy bazaar there, which swallowed up £2000, but ended in absolute ruin; her three years' residence and travels in the States bore fruit, however, in her Domestic Manners of the Americans. It appeared in 1832, when its author was over fifty, and at once excited attention. She drew so uncomplimentary a picture of American ways and American faults and foibles that the whole republic was-not without reason, for her representations, even when based on fact, were grossly overcharged-incensed at their English satirist. A novel, The Refugee in America, published in the same year, had much in common with the earlier work, and showed little art in the construction of the fable. Mrs Trollope now tried new ground. In 1833 she published The Abbess, a novel; and in 1834 a book on Belgium and Western Germany, countries where she travelled in better humour, the most serious grievance she had against Germany being the tobacco-smoke, which she vituperates with unwearied perseverIn 1836 she renewed her war with the Americans in The Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, in which she gives touching pictures of the miseries of the coloured population of the Southern States. Paris and the Parisians belongs to the same year. The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837), The Widow Barnaby (1839), and its sequel The Widow Married (1840) are among her best novels, and contain amusing sketches of manners and eccentricities. Vienna and the Austrians (1838) was of the same cast as Belgium and Germany, but unhappily showed much more unreasonable prejudice. Between 1838 and 1843 Mrs Trollope threw off seven or eight novels and an account of a Visit to Italy. Her smart caustic style was not so well suited for sketching classic scenes and the antiquities of Italy as for satirising the eccentricities of national life and character, and this work was hardly so successful as her previous publications. Her later books are decidedly ance. inferior the old characters are reproduced, and coarseness is too often substituted for strength. Her husband having died near Bruges in 1835, she settled in Florence in 1843, and here she died in the eighty-fourth year of her age. She published in all a hundred and fifteen volumes, of which twelve were travels and the remainder novels. 6 Mrs Trollope was an acute and observant writer, but was overweeningly and self-complacently English, cherishing a profound belief in the inestimable blessings of the British constitution, of the English Church, and English culture generally, with an equally frank abhorrence of the manifest and inevitable consequences of democracy. She constantly returns to her maxim that commonsense revolts at the mischievous sophistry of the false and futile axiom, due, she believes, to her bête noire Jefferson, that all men are born free and equal.' She admits that many of her remarks apply to the Wild West rather than to the long-settled States; but the eccentricities of the pioneers in the Mississippi valley coloured her judgments of Washington and New York. She does not approve of slavery : 'I conceive it to be essentially wrong; but so far as my observation has extended, I think its influence is far less injurious to the manners and morals of the people than the fallacious ideas of equality which are so fondly cherished by the workingclasses of the white population of America.' And nothing excited her 'horror and disgust' so much as what she saw of revivals and camp meetings. The dialect she makes her Americans speak, though it abounds with admitted Americanisms, seems even to an English eye impossible; and while her observations are, to say the least, highly coloured, many of the stories she reports as having reached her about the enormities of representative Americans are quite incredible. No doubt she did note a vast number of things deserving amendment; but the most convinced Tory cannot believe she saw so little worth commendation, and would disapprove the sneering and censorious tone in which many of her tales are told. The Fourth of July. To me the dreary coldness and want of enthusiasm in American manner is one of their greatest defects, and I therefore hailed the demonstrations of general feeling which this day elicits with real pleasure. On the 4th of July the hearts of the people seem to awaken from a three hundred and sixty-four days' sleep; they appear high-spirited, gay, animated, social, generous, or at least liberal in expense; and would they but refrain from spitting on that hallowed day, I should say that, on the 4th of July at least, they appeared to be an amiable people. It is true that the women have but little to do with the pageantry, the splendour, or the gaiety of the day; but, setting this defect aside, it was indeed a glorious sight to behold a jubilee so heartfelt as this; and had they not the bad taste and bad feeling to utter an annual oration with unvarying abuse of the mothercountry, to say nothing of the warlike manifesto called the Declaration of Independence, our gracious king himself might look upon the scene and say that it was good; nay, even rejoice that twelve millions of bustling bodies, at four thousand miles distance from his throne and his altars, should, make their own laws and drink their own tea after the fashion that pleased them best. American Freedom. Cuyp's clearest landscapes have an atmosphere that approaches nearer to that of America than any I remember on canvas; but even Cuyp's air cannot reach the lungs, and therefore can only give an idea of half the enjoyment; for it makes itself felt as well as seen, and is indeed a constant source of pleasure. Our walks were, however, curtailed in several directions by my old Cincinnati enemies, the pigs; immense droves of them were continually arriving from the country by the road that led to most of our favourite walks; they were often fed and lodged in the prettiest valleys, and worse still, were slaughtered beside the prettiest streams. Another evil threatened us from the same quarter that was yet heavier. Our cottage had an ample piazza (a luxury almost universal in the country houses of America), which, shaded by a group of acacias, made a delightful sitting-room; from this favourite spot we one day perceived symptoms of building in a field close to it; with much anxiety we hastened to the spot, and asked what building was to be erected there. "Tis to be a slaughter-house for hogs,' was the dreadful reply. As there were several gentlemen's houses in the neighbourhood, I asked if such an erection might not be indicted as a nuisance. 'A what?' 'A nuisance,' I repeated, and explained what I meant. 'No, no,' was the reply; 'that may do very well for your tyrannical country, where a rich man's nose is more thought of than a poor man's mouth; but hogs be profitable produce here, and we be too free for such a law as that, I guess.' During my residence in America little circumstances like the foregoing often recalled to my mind a conversation I once held in France with an old gentleman on the subject of their active police and its omnipresent gens-d'armerie; 'Croyez moi, Madame, il n'y a que ceux à qui ils ont à faire qui les trouvent de trop.' And the old gentleman was right, not only in speaking of France, but of the whole human family, as philosophers call us. The well disposed, those whose own feeling of justice would prevent their annoying others, will never complain of the restraints of the law. All the freedom enjoyed in America, beyond what is enjoyed in England, is enjoyed solely by the disorderly at the expense of the orderly; and were I a stout knight, either of the sword or of the pen, I would fearlessly throw down my gauntlet, and challenge the whole republic to prove the contrary; but, being as I am, a feeble looker-on, with a needle for my spear and 'I talk' for my device, I must be contented with the power of stating the fact, perfectly certain that I shall be contradicted by one loud shout from Maine to Georgia. On a Mississippi Steamer. The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table; the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured; the strange uncouth phrases and |