1856.] Treasonable Alliance with Russia. directed to undermine these rights. Art. 1. By our great clemency we consent that the Principality recently subdued by our invincible power be governed by its own laws, and that the Prince of Wallachia have the right of making war and peace, and that of life and death over his subjects. Art. 2. All Christians who, having embraced the religion of Islam, should afterwards pass from the countries under our dominion into Wallachia, and should again become Christians, shall in nowise be demanded or prosecuted. Art. 3. All Wallachians who may go into any part of our possessions shall be exempt from the haratch, and from all other tax. Art. 4. Their Christian Princes shall be elected by the metropolitan and the boyars. Art. 5. But by reason of this high clemency, and because we have inscribed this prince in the list of our other subjects, he also for his part shall be bound to pay yearly into our imperial treasury three thousand red piastres of the country, or five hundred silver piastres of our money. It is to be observed that the right here granted of making peace and war did not confer, as at first sight it appears to do, any sovereign rights, since at that time, and till very much later, even recently, this right was shared by all the frontier walys or governors of the Ottoman empire, such as those of Baghdad, Tripoli, &c. Another Firman was granted to the Wallachians by Mehemed II. in 1460, confirming that of Sultan Bayazid. In 1513 the Sultan granted a similar firman to Boydan, Prince of Moldavia, who, by the advice of his father, Stephen the Great, offered to become a vassal of the Sultan, in order to preserve the religion, laws, and elective Princes of Moldavia. Subsequently some of the MoldoWallachian Princes revolted, and entered into alliances with enemies of the Porte, and the Turkish armies were compelled to enter the country to bring it back to its allegiance, and to leave garrisons at Giurgievo, Ibrail, Galatz, and Ismail, to keep the Hungarians and Poles 249 in check. The Turks only maintained these places as tétes de ponts, and if the garrisons committed any excesses, or went beyond the limits of these fortresses, this was the act of rebellious frontier-governors, and not authorized by the Ottoman Porte. In 1710, Castriot, a Greek from St. Petersburg, and a Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem, induced Demetrius Cantemir, Prince of Moldavia, to enter into a treasonable alliance with Peter the Great, by which Russia recognised the Prince of Moldavia as an independent sovereign and ally of Russia, and binding him to maintain ten thousand soldiers, whose pay was to be provided by Russia, commenced that protectorate over the Principalities which Count Nesselrode has lately denied ever to have been claimed by Russia. On the publication of a new edition of the Organic Statutes in 1837, Russia endeavoured to obtain the insertion of the following words: Toutefois cela ne saurait avoir lieu sans le consentement de la cour Suzeraine et Protectrice [this, however, cannot take place without the consent of the sovereign and protecting court] at the end of the article which provides for the revision of the Organic Statutes by the Assembly with the consent of the Hospodar. The Wallachian Assembly protested decidedly against this encroachment, but Russia induced the Porte to issue a firman requiring the insertion of these words in the Organic Statute. The treason of Cantemir and of the Wallachian Hospodar who followed him in forming an alliance with Peter the Great, brought upon the two provinces the disastrous rule of the Fanariot Hospodars. The Greeks succeeded in deceiving the Turks into the belief, that not only the Princes but also the body of the Moldo-Wallachian people were well affected to Russia, and, as a reward for their services, the Fanariots obtained the Hospodorates of the provinces, which they misgoverned and impoverished during about a century. But the insurrection of Ypsilanti, and the counter-movement of Tudor Vladimiresco in support of the Turks against the Greeks in the Russian interest, opened the eyes of the Ottoman Porte, and in reward for the fidelity of the Wallachian people, their native princes were restored to them by a Hatty-Sherif in 1821. This was against the interest of Russia, and accordingly was opposed by that power. But this act once accomplished, Russia took credit to herself for having gained this advantage for the Wallachians. An unofficial article in the Moniteur recently put forward this view, which is in opposition to historical facts and dates. This misstatement, apparently unimportant, appears to have been supplied to the Moniteur by one of the Fanariots at Paris. Some writers have put forward the notion that the possession of Moldo-Wallachia was of small importance to the Porte, because the tribute is insignificant in amount. But this view, even with reference to the tribute only, is very erroneous. For it must be remembered that, though other provinces of the Ottoman Empire contribute a much larger revenue to the Imperial Treasury, yet a considerable sum has to be deducted for the expenses of government, administration, and justice; in addition to which, in the case of Moldo-Wallachia, the Porte is relieved from the burden of attending to the details of their internal administration. The chief value of these provinces is however strategetical, and lies in the resources which, when once in the hands of the enemy, they are compelled to furnish against the Porte. These resources, of which Russia has largely availed herself, have been summed up as follows: The budget of the Principalities. The hospitals, whose revenues are drawn from other sources than the budget. The provisioning and lodging of an army of two hundred thousand men by the inhabitants. The money deposited in the municipal chests. The provisions always contained in the magazines as a reserve in case of scarcity. Provisions bought from the inhabitants at a price fixed before the occupation, with bonds which are never paid. Eight hundred thousand carts, drawn by two or four oxen, which are taken for the transport of munitions and forage. The labour of the peasants at field-works and fortifications. Thirty or forty thousand troops, who are compelled to serve in the Russian army. But for the preponderance Russia, and now Austria, have been allowed to obtain in the Principalities, all these resources would be at the service of Turkey and her allies. The thirty or forty thousand troops could easily be increased, and indeed one among the many causes of complaint made by the Wallachians against the Austrian occupation is, that it has prevented them from taking part in the war against Russia, and from sending a contingent to the Ottoman army, to be employed either in the Crimea or on the Pruth. We have already alluded to the naturally good disposition of the Moldo-Wallachian peasantry; brigandage and assassination are unknown among them; yet they are frequently oppressed by the agents of the proprietors, and are subject to very heavy contributions of labour and of produce both to the proprietors and to the State: their condition, as the boyars themselves confess, is very inferior to that of the Bulgarian peasant in Turkey. Not only is the material condition of the Rouman peasant below that of the Bulgarian, but he is also far less protected by the law; and there is at this moment a greater distance, in the eye of the law, between the boyar and the peasant, than between the Turk and the Bulgarian. Whilst the Sublime Porte was extending the Tanzimat to those of its subjects under its direct sway, Russia had been re-establishing serfdom in Moldo-Wallachia, and in drawing up the Organic Statutes, rendered the condition of the peasant more onerous than it was before. The revolution in 1848 brought this great question under consideration, and had enfranchised the gipsies, who up to that time had been sold separately from the soil, in the same way as negroes in the United States, when Russian 1856.] Patriotic Aspirations of the People. This intervention destroyed the hopes of the peasants, and again reduced the gipsies to slavery. They however gained something, for they are no longer an object of commerce, as before 1848. When Russia took possession of Bessarabia in 1812, she proclaimed the emancipation of the peasants, not in their interest, but to ruin the boyars. The peasants then left their habitations, and wandered over the country, seeking more fertile situations and land on better conditions. disorganization of labour ruined the Moldavian boyars, who could neither cultivate their lands nor pay the heavy taxes which the Russian Government imposed upon them. They were consequently compelled to sell their lands, and the greater part of them emigrated from Bessarabia to Yassy. When these lands had changed hands, the Russian Government adopted another tone, compelled the peasants to settle, and re-established serfdom; they at the same time abolished the schools in which Rouman was taught, and allowed Russian only to be taught in future. But the Bessarabian clings tenaciously to his language, and prefers to remain ignorant of reading and writing if it is to be at the expense of his mother tongue, and the Muscovite schools are not crowded with pupils. Notwithstanding the sufferings which the peasantry of the two Principalities have endured in present and in past times, they are strongly attached to their country; they alone preserved their language and the name of Rouman during the century of Fanariot oppression, when the Wallachian boyars basely joined with the Greeks in contemning their name and race, so that at one time the word Rouman came to be synonymous with peasant, and was used as such even by the native boyars. This bad feeling, however, lasted but for a short time, and now that the society of the two provinces has emancipated itself from the trammels of the Fanariots, national sentiments are predominant. To conclude, the wants of the Rouman population may be very shortly summed up: they require and ask only to be reinstated in the rights granted them by 251 Sultan Bayazid and his successors. The Sublime Porte requires nothing more from these provinces than what is contained in these firmans, which, but for the pressure exercised by Russia, supported by a Fanariot party in the Principalities, would never have been infringed. All the treaties between the Porte and Russia which have been injurious to the right and interest of the two Principalities, and of the Sovereign paramount, from that of Kutchuk-Kainarjy down to that of Balta-Liman, have ceased to exist since the declaration of war. Yet the Organic Statutes are still in force, and the population have as little to say with respect to their Government as during the time of the Russian occupation. The occupying army, indeed, has changed its name but not its character; it has become more odious to all the classes of the Moldo-Wallachians than ever the Russian army was. But let the provinces be administered by princes faithful to their obligations and to the real interests of their countrymen; let the National Assembly be convened, and the Organic Statutes revised; let the autonomy of the two provinces be restored to them, unfettered by a Russian proconsul or by any other who may desire to imitate him; and the government of the Hospodar, by attending to works of public utility, and the gradual reform of the statutes regulating the contributions in labour and produce of the peasant, will do more to ameliorate his condition, and along with it the prosperity of the provinces, than can be expected from the plans produced by diplo matists at Vienna, ready prepared from their experience of the wants of France and England, but without regard to the condition of society in the provinces; and which, if carried into execution, would disorganize the social system, and im poverish the proprietors without corresponding benefit to the mass of the population. It must also be remembered, that though the boyars are a small class, the proprietors of the soil are a very numerous one, who must be reckoned with, and any measure that alarmed them would throw a serious weight into the scale of that insidious policy which has so often availed itself of the jealousies existing between one class and another. Such are the legitimate aspirations of the Roumans; if they have another hope, it is that they may see their brothers in Bessarabia re-united to them. They hope shortly to see the allied arms carried across the Pruth. They know that the Treaty of Vienna secured the freedom of the mouth of the Danube, and that so long as Ismail remains in the hands of the Russians, the new treaty will probably be no more faithfully observed than the Treaty of Vienna has been. And they cannot forget that in 1812, in order to draw Russia into her alliance, England pressed the Porte to cede Bessarabia to Russia ;-a cession which the fortunes of war had not made necessary. This negotiation was the first in which our present Ambassador at Constantinople took part: that he may have the good fortune to live to see the reversal of a measure he once advocated, is the sincere desire of every Rouman. SONNE T. Ah now, Thou dost wear an alter'd brow, With an angel's mien.-T. W. HOPE! Hope! my heart is dying, art thou dead? But when I call'd her, mocking Memory laught. And when I call'd again at utmost need, Madness through midnight glared with tiger-eye! 'Hope! Hope! yet hear me, if thou art indeed She came, as I lay bleeding yester even; A glory, without shadow, fell around; She look'd . . . then turn'd her large wild eyes to Heaven, I, clinging, saw that fear with rapture blending, And following her gaze, beheld Faith redescending. MARY J. J. REES. FRASER'S MAGAZINE. MARCH, 1856. TRISTRAM SHANDY OR THE CAXTONS? IN N the present article it is our object to enter upon a comparison of the merits displayed by the popular romance of The Caxtons-which it is the fashion to represent as introducing a new element into the principles of novel-writing, and as forming the basis of a new school, distinct from that of the preceding age-with the immortal but eccentric fiction of Lawrence Sterne. We shall discuss the question with the strictest impartiality: we shall bear in mind that a considerable latitude has been allowed, by traditionary practice and presumed consent, to writers commanding high reputations for originality, in borrowing from the thought and invention of a preceding age; andwe readily admit that such a licence forms an inevitable condition of the progressive character of literature. But it will be seen that there is a point from which a line of demarcation must be drawn, in order to separate the world of constructive originality from the nether world of copyism; and we shall endeavour to point out to which of these two spheres of existence The Caxtons, on the one hand, and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy on the other, may be said to belong. To Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton we readily concede-what indeed it would be superfluous to withhold-the first rank on either side of the Channel in point of imaginative power, since the death of Walter Scott, and of François Réné de Chateaubriand. It is no dispraise to any man to say that he may not have equalled the celebrity of Goethe, of Schiller, or of Klopstock; or that he may not have aspired to rival the traditions of the great Scotch novelist. The originality displayed by Sir E. Bulwer Lytton has perhaps been rather of English than of European character. For his plots, for the genius, and the dominant ideas of his mind, we search in vain for any exact prototype among the literary_characters of this country. But if we extend our survey only so far as into France, we find a striking parallel to this seeming idiosyncrasy. Between the historical novels of Sir E. Bulwer Lytton and those of Scott we see indeed a very marked distinction. It was the character of the one to describe the social life of different periods of history; that of the other to portray great historic catastrophes, the fall of empires, of dynasties, and of great cities. When, therefore, we compare Waverley, or Ivanhoe, or Woodstock, with The Last Days of Pompeii, The Last of the Barons, or The Last of the Tribunes, we find the distinction unequivocal and complete; and we are thence apt to acquiesce in the plausible conclusion, that the one class of fictions possesses the same claim to originality with the other. If we look for parallels to the historic romances of Scott, in the literature of modern Europe, we find that our search has been unprofitable and vain. But if we pass over into France, we find the almost exact parallels to the histo rical romances of Sir E. B. Lytton, which have succeeded the historical romances of Scott. We need only mention such works of fiction as the Last of the Abencerrages, by M. de Chateaubriand, who had introduced into prominence, contemporaneously with the rise of Scott, what we may term the tragical order of the historical romance. Nor is it difficult to find the key to much of that melancholy and shadowy cast of thought, if we may so speak, which pervades many other of the fictions of Sir E. B. Lytton, in the dreamy character of Rousseau. That the interfusion of these foreign elements into what in Germany are commonly called the 'Bulwer Novels,' was marked by great talent, and by great mastery in their application to other, though chiefly cognate subjects, no man, probably, would be found so devoid of taste and perception VOL. LIII. NO. CCCXV. R |