any pay for eight months; while the solemn Turk of rank perambulated the area, involved, like pious Eneas at Carthage, in a veil of clouds exhaling from a long amber headed pipe. All around you, you might hear much hard swearing in favour of the most palpable lies; the seller in favour of his goods, and the buyer in favour of his Egyptian piastres. In one place a crowd collects around somebody or other lying on the ground without his head on, on account of some misdemeanour; a little farther on, thirty or forty soldiers are engaged in driving, with repeated strokes of heavy mallets, sharp pointed pieces of timber, six or eight inches square, up the posteriors of some luckless insurgents, who had had the audacity to endeavour to defend their country and their liberty; the women of the country meantime standing at a distance, and exclaiming, "that it was scandalous to make men die in so indecent a manner, and protesting that such a death was only fit for a Christian," (a character they hold in great abhorrence, probably from never having seen one.) Such was the singular scene presented to the view by the market-place of Sennaar.'-pp. 167,.168.

par

The sultan of Sennaar is a young man about twenty-six years of age; he is black, his mother being a negress; he had been confined in prison eighteen years, and was released when his tizans massacred his predecessor. His name is stated to be Bâdy; but this is rather his title, which, according to Bruce, signifies countryman or peasant, and is common to the whole race of kings. He submitted himself as a subject and feudatory of the Grand Seignor, and surrendered his dominions to the supremacy of Mahomed Ali. This gave great umbrage to the neighbouring chiefs, who soon manifested a disposition to revolt, especially in the eastern parts of Sennaar. The divan effendi, in a few days, brought in three of the refractory chiefs, with about three hundred and fifty prisoners. The pasha ordered two of the former to be impaled in the market-place. One of them said nothing but 'there is no God but God, and Mahomet is his apostle;' but the other defied, and cursed his executioners, calling them robbers and murderers,' till, too much exhausted to speak, he expressed his feelings by spitting at them. This act of barbarity is the only stain on the pasha's conduct; and this was committed on the usual plea of expediency, to make a terrible example, and thus spare the effusion of blood.

No time was lost in notifying the submission of the sultan of Sennaar to all the chiefs of the districts of the kingdom, summoning them to come in and perform homage. The chief of the mountaineers to the south and south-west of the capital not only refused to acknowledge him but even to receive his letter; on this the pasha sent Cogia Achmet, one of the sternest of his officers, with thirteen hundred cavalry, to bring him and his followers to reason. Within a month he returned with about two

thousand

thousand prisoners, consisting almost entirely of women and children. The first ten days of Achmet's rapid march were southwest of Sennaar, through a well peopled country between the Azrek and the Abiad, when he reached the mountains of Bokki, inhabited by pagans, whose chief had rejected the pasha's letter. Here he found vast multitudes assembled with spears and swords, who fought bravely, but being hemmed in by the Turkish cavalry, about fifteen hundred of them were put to the sword. The rest effected their escape up the steep and rugged mountains, and Cogia returned with what prisoners he had taken, after stripping the villages of their women and children.

The people of Bokki are represented as a hardy race of mountaineers, tall, stout and handsome, though nearly black; resembling in their dress the Indians of South America, being covered almost with beads, bracelets, and trinkets made of pebbles, bones, and ivory. The men wore handsome helmets of iron, coats of mail made of leather and overlaid with plates of iron, carried long and well-fashioned lances, and a hand weapon resembling the ancient bills used by the yeomanry of England. They called a musquet, which they had never seen before, a coward's weapon, that killed by an invisible stroke. The female prisoners were in possession of many gold rings and bracelets, of which the soldiers quickly disencumbered them.

Mr. English's ophthalmia continuing, and finding himself not likely to be of any use, he obtained permission to return; and passed the desert without meeting with any of the dangers, the difficulties, and the extraordinary phenomena that occurred to Bruce, in a journey made pretty nearly over the same ground. We take leave of him with extracting his concluding remarks on the characteristic features of the people among whom he was thrown, and which may enable our readers to form a pretty general estimate of the people of Nubia and Ethiopia.

'There is a considerable resemblance, in domestic customs, among all the peoples who inhabit the borders of the Nile, from Assuan to Sennaar. They differ, however, somewhat in complexion and character. The people of the province of Succoot are generally not so black as the Nubian or the Dongolese. They are also frank and prepossessing in their deportment. The Dongolese is dirty, idle, and ferocious. The character of the Shageian is the same, except that he is not idle, being either an industrious peasant or a daring freebooter. The people on the Third Cataract are not very industrious, but have the character of being honest and obliging. The people of Berber are by far the most civilized of all the people of the Upper Nile. The inhahitants of the provinces of Shendi and Halfya are a sullen, scowling, crafty, and ferocious people; while the peasants of Sennaar, inhabiting the villages we found on our route, are a respectable people in comparison with those of

the

the capital. Throughout the whole of these countries there is one general characteristic in which they resemble the Indians of America, namely, courage and self-respect. The chiefs, after coming to salute the Pasha, would make no scruple of sitting down facing him, and converse with him without embarrassment, in the same manner as they are accustomed to do with their own Maleks, with whom they are very familiar. With the greatest apparent simplicity they would frequently propose troublesome questions to him, such as, “O great Sheck, what have we done to you that you should come so far to make war upon us? Is it for want of food in your country that you come to get it in ours?”’— p. 198.

66

ART. IV.-Sylla. Tragédie en Cinq Actes. Par E. Jouy.

IT

Edition. Paris. 1822. pp. 80.

4me

T is a trite observation that the literature of the day, as cause or effect, has a close connection with the state of the national character-perhaps one, who travels only by his fire-side, can take no better measure to guide his judgment by on this point. The drama too is that department of literature wherein this connection is ordinarily the closest-it undoubtedly is so in France: a light-hearted Parisian naturally flies to that branch of literature which comes the nearest to mere amusement, gives the mind the least trouble of reflection, and furnishes the readiest means, as well as the most unanswerable excuse, for flying out of himself and from the dull monotony of home. Hence it is that the Théâtre Français is crowded with an eager interest, which our gorgeous and gigantic theatres seldom witness:-and this at least must be said for it, that it affords always a decent and intellectual entertainment; a French tragedy may be to us but a dull and unimpassioned production, but it is creditable to a people to require no stronger stimulus, to be content with feeding the ear and the intellect, without demanding the pantomimic melo-drames and monstrous nothings, which the countrymen of Shakspeare and Jonson have learned to consider as indispensable to their gratification.

We must not suffer ourselves however to wander into this subject; what has been said will perhaps explain sufficiently why we intend to devote a few pages to the examination of a popular French tragedy. Sylla has been eminently successful, and was announced, we believe, lately for the sixtieth representation; but it is not the only thing in the volume upon which we mean to remark; M. Jouy has prefaced it with rather a long discourse, which he calls a Préambule Historique, and a curious specimen it is of brilliant French writing, sometimes when it sounds most finely and is most antithetically balanced, having no definite meaning, and at other

VOL. XXVIII. NO. LV.

G

other times when the meaning is clear, being inconsistent with itself, and with the authorities on which it professes to rely.

It begins with the following oracular sentence

'Reputations are formed by accident; contemporaries receive them ready made, and generally hand them down without discussion and without examination. Years, ages roll away, and the echo of the passions of the moment, repeated from age to age, forms that equivocal and monotonous rumour, which we call history.'

We have ventured a translation of these words,' as Hamlet would have called them; and if our readers should derive from it no very precise idea of what was intended to be conveyed, we cannot plead guilty to being the cause of that obscurity-in the original they would have found more brilliant words,' but not a more definite meaning. M. Jouy intended perhaps to say that history, for the most part, was built upon the prejudice and passion of the moment, and that the tale which they handed down, passed without examination till the means of contradiction were out of our reach. If this be really his opinion, it was a superfluous labour in him to run, even so cursorily as we suspect he has done, through the authors named in a subsequent page of the preface; for his own speculations, or at least the sketch of Montesquieu, might be taken to be of as high authority as this equivocal and monotonous rumour, which we call history.'

It can be hardly necessary to spend time in maintaining that History does not deserve this appellation. Undoubtedly a great part, perhaps the greater part, of past events are utterly unknown to us

but as to these history does not exist. Undoubtedly also we may concede, that even of events, which history has presented to us in correct and philosophical narration, other details have also been given full of fable and false reasoning; and that many men, nay many writers, entirely neglect to discriminate between the two, relying with as much confidence and as little inquiry on the report of credulity, or prejudice, or ignorance, as on that which comes vouched by the eye-witness or the laborious investigation of sensible and impartial historians. But is history to be blamed for this? —she has done her part; if people will collect their ideas of the Grecian annals, for instance, from Plutarch, and turn aside from Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and the contending orators of Athens, they may be sensible of great obscurity in their dates, and improbability or inconsistency in their facts; events may seem to flow from inadequate causes, and to hang together by no natural connection-but still the Grecian history is handed down to those who will study it in the right sources, not indeed in perfect integrity, but in a clear and intelligible detail:-the characters of the leading men, the general principles of politics, the grand divisions of par

ties, and the manners, customs, and genius of the people may all be fully as well known, as the same things in any country in Europe within the last twenty years.

We will not follow M. Jouy through a rapid historical sketch of his hero's life, which he affixes, with some inconsistency, to his general denunciation against history-it is not very correct, but that is of the less importance, as the character which he draws in the play does but imperfectly correspond with it. His most remarkable error seems to have been in the notion of Sylla's character, which he states himself to have borrowed from Montesquieu.

'Quant à son terrible caractère, aucun de ses historiens n'a su le pénétrer; et Montesquieu est le seul qui ait éclairé cet abîme d'un rayon de son génie. Sous la plume de l'auteur immortel de la Grandeur et Décadence des Romains, Sylla devient le réformateur de Rome; il asservit les Romains pour leur faire haïr l'esclavage, il veut les ramener à l'amour de la liberté par les horreurs de la tyrannie; et quand il a suffisamment abusé du pouvoir dans l'intérêt de la république, qu'il ne sépare pas de ses vengeances personnelles, satisfait de la leçon sanglante qu'il a donnée à ses compatriotes, il brise lui-même la palme du dictateur, qu'il a usurpée, et vient avec un sourire effrayant se confondre parmi les citoyens dont chacun peut lui demander compte d'un acte de sa cruelle dictature. Ainsi toute cette vie est une combinaison, toute cette tyrannie est un calcul, toute cette audace est du sang-froid et du raisonnement.'-p. viii.

We confess that this interpretation of Sylla's conduct a little astonished us. According to our experience, men do not in general act upon such circuitous and far-fetched systems; and to say that Sylla became the sanguinary enslaver of his country for the purpose of reforming and making her free, implied a degree of theorising absurdity in his character which we could not reconcile with his acknowledged and practical ability;-the whole seemed more like the antithesis of the French tragedy than the simplicity of nature. Montesquieu's authority, however, pressed upon us, and we turned to him with some anxiety, which was relieved by finding that he certainly, when rightly understood, gives no countenance to the theory built up in his name. Instead of considering the abdication of Sylla as the result of a long matured plan, by which, after a severe discipline, the Romans were to be restored to the spirit and enjoyment of freedom, we found him speaking of la fantaisie, qui lui fit quitter la dictature; instead of considering the cruel proscriptions as a severe mode of restoring public virtue and independence, we found him speaking of them as having made it impossible dès lors de s'attacher davantage à la république: we found him tracing all the steps by which Sylla had acquired his power, and a large proportion of his acts while in power, and declaring that they