the grand vizier, Ali Pasha, convoked a divan in the tent of the sultan, and beside his corpse. A disputed succession was feared, less from the rivalry of the brothers or the character of Jacob, than from his popularity in the army. The Koran says, 'an execution is better than a rebellion.' The counsellors issued from the imperial tent, and entered the tent of Jacob with the sentence of death. His corpse, which was left lying outside his tent, informed the army in the morning that they had only one master, the Sultan Bajazet. In this prompt way the army was informed that the race of Othman would not spare even their own blood for the safety and unity of the empire. The law thus savagely inaugurated has never fallen into desuetude. The Bedouin who buried his daughters alive, that they might not share his food, has always had his lineal descendant in the sultan who has strangled his brothers, lest they should seek his throne. Of Murad III. and Mohamet III., both contemporaries of the English Queen Elizabeth, it is recorded, for example, that the one strangled five and the other nineteen of his brothers, on coming to the throne. Mahomet, the founder of the religion, rebuked the Bedouin, who was an infanticide from want, and Othman, the founder of the dynasty, legalized fratricide in favour of family ambition;-a flagrant contradiction between the religious teacher and his imperial disciple. The present Sultan, Abdul Medjid, is praised by his flatterers as the first son of Othman who has not sought the security of his throne from fratricide! What depths of barbarity and sycophancy still disgrace humanity in this year,

A.D. 1855!

A singular fate befel Mustapha, one of the sons of Bajazet. During the reign of this sultan, the Turks having rapidly degenerated under the influence of success, and sunk down into the base vices of the Greeks they had conquered, were attacked by Timor the Tartar, who had issued from Samarcanda at the head of immense hosts, and after a great battle and terrible slaughter of Moslem against, Moslem, routed the Turks upon the plain of Angora. Bajazet entered the battle-field with five sons, named Soliman, Moussa, Isa, Mahomet, and Mustapha. Overtaken in his flight with his son Isa, and brought before Timor, Bajazet seemed less afflicted by the defeat of his army than by the loss of his four sons. Timor generously commanded a search to be made, and news was brought of them all except one, Mustapha, who was not heard of for twenty years, and who was believed to have fallen in the battle. Bajazet died in captivity. The three brothers, Soliman, Moussa, and Mahomet divided the empire, and carried on war against each other until two of them were killed, and the third reunited his father's empire as Mahomet I. His son Murad II., had in his turn ascended the throne, when

news was brought that the lost Mustapha had reappeared, and supported by Hungarian and Greek princes, and by Djouneyd, governor of Nicopolis, who had been brought up with him at his father's court, and who had fought by his side on the field of Angora, was at the head of an army of 40,000 men, asserting his right to the throne as the Sultan Mustapha. His story was highly probable. Having fallen wounded and insensible on the battle-field, when he became conscious he found himself stript naked, without any sign of his former rank about him, incapable of understanding a word of the language of the victors, who in their turn neither heeded nor understood the sounds addressed to them by one of their slaves. He was marched in the gang of slaves in the rear of the army of Timor, as far as Samarcanda. At length, after being sold and resold, and passing twenty years chiefly as a camel-keeper, he was bought by a merchant of Bokhara who took him to Bagdad, where his language was understood and his story believed, and whence he was conveyed to Turkey. The unpopularity of Murad, and the justice of his claims, put Mustapha at the head of an army, which was, however, defeated at Salonica. He owed his safety to the swiftness of his horses, and spent the remainder of his days in the convent of the Virgin Mary on the Island of Lemnos, as an exile under the protection of the Greek emperors.

The rapidity of Turkish degeneracy, when subjected to the temptations which follow successful conquests, must be ascribed in part to the influence of Mahometanism. When Bajazet returned from the conquest of Adrianople, the Servian princess he had wedded had already given him a taste for the wines of Hungary and Cyprus. Monstrous depravity had spread in his army, and those mutilations and perversions of the sexes had commenced which have hung as a moral pestilence, a cloud of infamy, a sign and a cause of doom alike over Greek and Turkish Constantinople for more than a thousand years.

During the reigns of Bajazet and Mahomet I., a singular development took place among the Turkish people, of the ideas which have since been known in Europe under the names of communism, or red-democracy. Luxury had spread among the chiefs, and dreams and schemes of enjoyment inflamed the imaginations of their followers. Mahomet himself seems to have struck the first key-note of this fanaticism on the day in which he returned to Mecca, and smashed three hundred and sixty idols in the temple, beginning with the image of a dove. The truth is come,' he cried; 'let the lies vanish. There is no other god but God. No more idolatry! No more inequality! No more differences on earth founded upon old genealogies and ancestors. All men are children of Adam, and Adam was the child of the

dust. The end of society is a brotherhood. The most prized by God is he who fears and serves him best upon the earth.'

Mahometans, Christians, Jews, Greeks, and Turks became all wild together during the reign of Mahomet I., with visions of happiness to be obtained by association, brotherhood, and the partition of property. A monk named Bedredien was the chief of these Oriental communists. The ideas had first manifested themselves in Arabia and Persia, and spread naturally enough from the common pasturages in the Balkan Mountains. Bedredien soon found himself at the head of 10,000 armed men, but Mahomet sent his son Murad against him with a powerful army, which defeated his forces, and made him prisoner. Bedredien was exhibited publicly at Ephesus, chained. mutilated, and crucified upon a camel. His followers were offered their lives on condition of renouncing their master, but they answered 'No!' and stretching out their necks to the sabres, cast a last look upon their chief, saying- Father, receive our souls into thy kingdom.' Many of the sect believed that their prophet came to life again, and lived concealed in the pine forests of the Island of Samos. The sects of Oriental communists were not finally suppressed in Turkey until 3000 Derviches who taught their doctrines were caught and hung on the trees in the valley of Magnesia. From the East communism passed into Germany, where it reappeared among what were called the Anabaptists. In England it was displayed by Jack Cade and his followers, who sung

'When Adam delved and Eve span,

Where was then the gentleman ?'

and again by the Levellers, who were put down by Oliver Cromwell. Babœuf represented it in the first French Revolution, when he sought by an armed conspiracy to establish a state of society the motto of which should be, 'Liberty, equality, and common happiness.' Insignificant in Italy and England, in 1848, communism played a considerable part in France and Germany. The communists are organized in India into a secret society called the Assassins or Ishmaelites, whose chief, Hassan Sabba, gave them for symbol a dagger, and for motto the words,Do all and dare all.'

Popular delusions pass away leaving their lessons behind them, and a Turkish proverb says- Fish corrupt first at the head.' When reflecting on the history of the imperial and despotic houses of Palæologus, Othman, and Romanoff, we are struck with the identity of the crimes, treasons, conspiracies, and revolutions which have been their common lot. Emperors, czars, and sultans have all been stained with kindred blood. If a Paul I. was strangled in his bed in 1801, on the banks of the Neva, the lifeless body of Selim III. was in 1807 thrown over the walls of

the Seraglio on the banks of the Bosphorus; and both were slain for being under the influence of Buonaparte. The very crimes which brought merited retribution down upon the Greek emperors have been practised alike by czars and sultans. A Peter called Great puts to death his son Alexis, just as a Bajazet strangles his brother Jacob, for reasons of state. The guards, whether called Prætorians, Preobrachenski, or Janissaries, have played the same parts of lawless violence and ruthless assassination in the Greek, the Ottoman, and the Russian palaces. In the north, the murdered monarchs might have been called the third Peter or Ivan, and in the east the sultan (more frequently dethroned than assassinated) might have borne the name of Mustapha or Achmed, but there is an absolute identity in the phenomena of anarchy and crime.

The volumes before us do not supply a want which indeed has never as yet been satisfied by writers of travels on Turkey, we mean, full and correct information respecting the Greek population. According to all accounts Mahometanism and Christianity are there mere names and forms. Turks, Russians, and Grecians, alike have only enough of their religions to fight for them, but they do not embody them in their lives. Processions and ceremonies are observed; and once when the Greeks received permission to spend a certain number of days in repairing one of their churches, thousands of them worked day and night voluntarily and gratuitously, and instead of repairing it they rebuilt it. In the Moscovite, however, as in the ancient Turk, the extension and exaltation of his religion is the generous mask of his ambition. The Greek church resembles the Church of England more than any other body, in doctrine and dependence on the State. The royal supremacy of the czars, in regard to which Peter the Great played a similar part to Henry VIII., is more strictly carried out than ever it has been in England. Delinquent clergymen are not more leniently dealt with by Nicolas than fraudulent generals. The czar Peter himself chanted in the public ceremonies as the first of the bishops.

"The Russian synod,' says the author of 'Turkey, its History and Progress,'receives an annual report as to the conduct of the clergy of the Greek church in the Russian empire. In 1853, 260 clergymen were stripped of their functions for dishonouring crimes, and 4,986 punished for lesser offences. In the year 1839, there was one criminal to every twenty clergymen, and from 1836 to 1839 no less than 15,443 were found guilty. Of the church itself we will quote a passage from the Marquis de Custine's 'Russie en 1839.'-“I would wish to send Christians to Russia, to show them what can become of Christianity when taught by a state church, and when carried out under the inspection of a clergy selected by such a church. The sight of the humiliation into which the clergy fall, when merely dependent upon the state, would make every consistent Protestant shudder."'

The history of journalism in Turkey throws light on the French influence, which is called reformation. Verninhac, envoy-extraordinary of the French Republic, printed for some time a gazette at the palace in Pera. In 1811, and during the Russian campaign, the French embassy printed and distributed extracts from the bulletins of the grand army. In 1825, M. Alexandre Blacque established the 'Spectateur de l'Orient.' Under the title of the 'Courrier de Smyrne,' this journal exercised a marked influence upon the events which distinguished the close of the Greek insurrection from 1825 to 1828. The author of 'Turkey, its History and its Progress,' pays an odd compliment to the influence of this journal when he says, 'It alone defended, against the whole European press, the rights and interests of the Porte, and contributed largely to the overthrow, and perhaps to the assassination, of Capo d'Istrias.' The Sultan Mahmoud summoned M. Blacque to Constantinople, in 1831, to set up the 'Moniteur Ottoman' in French. Next year appeared the Table of Events, or 'Takvimi Vakaï,' which was a reprint in Turkish of the official part of the Moniteur Ottoman.' M. Blacque died suddenly at Malta, in 1836, while on a voyage to France, and his two successors on the journal died with equal suddenness within two years and a half. Public opinion suspected a political reason.' After a few years, the place of the journal was taken by the 'Djerideï Havadiss,' and the 'Takvimi Vakaï' remained the sole official paper. When M. Blacque gave up the 'Courrier de Smyrne to M. Bousquet Deschamps, it changed its title from Courrier to Journal; and the City of Smyrna, which was the first to possess a journal, soon boasted of five. M. Bargigli, Consul-General of Tuscany, founded, in 1838, the Echo de l'Orient.' M. Edwards, some time afterwards, published the 'Impartiel,' first in English, and afterwards in French; and it is the only one of the three journals published in French which has held its ground in Smyrna, where two journals are published in Greek, one in Armenian, and one in Hebrew. Thirteen journals are published in Constantinople, most of which, especially those discussing politics, receive an annual subvention of thirty thousand piastres a piece. Four of these journals appear in French, four in Italian, two in Turkish, one in Greek, one in Armenian, and one in Bulgarian. Thirty-two or thirty-three journals appear in all in the Turkish empire; some of them at Belgrade, Beyrout, Alexandria; and a few of them in Turkish, but most of them in French. No one can fail to find matter for reflection in this history of the brief existence of the Turkish press. There are two journals published in Turkish and four in French in Constantinople, and no journal appears in English. A journal contributing to an assassination; three editors suspected of dying