buffalo's rough hide had almost worn the skin from off my knees and legs, and unaccustomed as I was to riding, my bones all ached, my eyes were nearly blind with crying, and my head was like to burst asunder. In this sad plight I lay shivering and cold all night, and in the morning was to have begun another journey like the first, but the same kind man who pitied me before, said something to him who had me in his charge, and gave him money; and then the good man took me up behind him on his horse, and put a soft felt under me, and tied a band round my body and his own that I might not fall off; and when I cried because the horse went fast and pained my galled limbs, he made it go more slowly. It seemed strange to me that a man so kind at heart should have banded with such ruffians as the rest. We travelled several days with the other captives, and then we took another road, and went in one day more to the kind man's house.

"At first his wives scowled on me, but he said something to them, and then they were very kind, and told me I was going to the King, and flattered me with tales of grandeur, so that their kindness and their tales had almost soothed my sorrow. And they gave me fine clothes and ornaments to wear, and said, when I was a great person that I must remember them and their kindness. Here I remained many days, I know not how many, when one morning a strange man came, and then they told me I must go to the King; but I had never seen a King, and I was much afraid, and begged to be allowed to stay, and cried, but they persuaded me to go. We journeyed many days, and at last arrived here, where his majesty, the King of Kings, was pleased to accept me, and here I have remained not unhappy until three days ago. Now, alas! my sorrows have begun afresh. Where shall they end? God only knows-for I am truly wretched."

Here she stopped, and wept most bitterly. I had not wept since I had been a boy, but now my tears began to flow, I know not why, for it appeared to me, that she had much cause to be happy, after so much misfortune, to find herself in the Haram of the King of Kings. I tried to sooth her, told her she was fair, most fair and beautiful, and that she would

not fail to find favour with the King, and that she might be mother to a prince, perhaps that prince be King hereafter; and on the whole the daughter of a poor Armenian priest, she ought to be most thankful for God's bounty, which had made her what she was. But she still wept the more. At last she bade me go and come tomorrow, and she should tell me all the rest, for she had seen my sorrow for her, and she knew me to be kind. I took my leave with a heavy heart partly because her story shewed heavy misfortunes for so young a female to have endured; partly because I liked to be in her company, and was sorry to part from her; and partly because I thought I had been somewhat rash in my promises of service, and felt much concern for the nature of the business she might wish to put me to. At the same time, I felt that whatever it might be, I should be obliged to do it; so completely had she got possession of my mind. I conjectured a thousand things that she might have to disclose, and rejected them all. At last, having tired myself with guessing and imagining, I began to have an intuitive perception that the hour of dinner was not very distant, and accordingly made some inquiries on the subject. As I had not yet summoned resolution enough to face my wife, who was a terrible virago at times, God rest her soul, I sent for my dinner, and was informed that it waited me in the inner apartments. I told my servant to get it, and bring it to me, but when he went for it he got nothing but abuse, and a blow on the mouth with a slipper. He was at the same time desired to tell me, that if I did not choose to come for my dinner, I should want it. This was a serious consideration, and I sat down to deliberate on what was best to be done. At last I resolved to go to the house of my friend Futtah Alee Khan, and thereby gain a triumph over my wife. I accordingly set out, but had not gone far, ere I met the poet himself, walking quicker than he was used to do.

"Where are you going?" said I to him. "I am going," said he, " to dine with you, for my wife has turned me out without my dinner, because I told her she was too old now to paint her eyebrows."

"I wonder," said I, "that a man of your sense should say such a thing to a

woman, however old she may be. You know that none of them can endure such remarks. By the head of the King, your wife is right to be offended. Who made you judge when a woman is too old to paint her eye-brows? Let us go back to your house, and I will make up the matter."

"I have no objection," said the Khan," but first tell me where you were going, at this your usual dinner hour?"

"To tell the truth," said I, "my wife refused to send my dinner to my Khulvut, and as we have had a difference, I refused to go into the Underoon.+

"This is most absurd conduct in you, Meerza Ahmed," said the Khan. "What does it signify where you eat your dinner? and if you do not go into the Underoon, how can you make up

The Khan carried the day. I returned reluctantly to my own house. We discussed the whole matter in dispute, and the Khan decided, that we were both right. He said that I was right, having had no evil intention towards Sheereen, the young slave girl, and that my wife, believing me to have been wickedly inclined, was right in what she had done. The decision satisfied us both, for we were by this time tired of the quarrel. We ate an excellent dinner, and I had a very learned discussion with the Khan, on the merits of a passage in Anweree,+ in which it seemed to me that I had the advantage.

• Private room.

+ Women's apartment.

THE worthy Laureate is one of those men of distinguished talents and industry, who have not attained to the praise or the influence of intellectual greatness, only because they have been so unfortunate as to come too late into the world. Had Southey flourished forty or fifty years ago, and written half as well as he has written in our time, he might have ranked nem. con. with the first of modern critics, of modern historians, perhaps even of modern poets. The warmth of his feelings and the flow of his style would have enabled him to throw all the prosers of that day into the shade-His extensive erudition would have won him the veneration of an age in which erudition was venerable-His imaginative power would have lifted him like an eagle over the versifiers who then amused the public with their feeble echoes of the wit, the sense, and the numbers of Pope. He could not have been the Man of the Age; but, taking all his manifold excellencies and qua

lifications into account, he must have been most assuredly Somebody, and a great deal more than somebody.

How different is his actual case! As a poet, as an author of imaginative works in general, how small is the space he covers, how little is he talked or thought of! The Established Church of Poetry will hear of nobody but Scott, Byron, Campbell: and the Lake Methodists themselves will scarcely permit him to be called a burning and a shining light in the same day with their Wordsworth even their Coleridge. In point of fact, he himself is now the only man who ever alludes to Southey's poems. We can suppose youngish readers starting when they come upon some note of his in the Quarterly, or in these new books of history, referring to "the Madoc," or "the Joan," as to something universally known and familiar. As to criticism and politics of the day, he is but one of the Quarterly reviewers, and scarcely one of the most influential of them. He puts

forth essays half antiquarianism, half prosing, with now and then a dash of a sweet enough sort of literary mysticism in them—and more frequently a display of pompous self-complacent simplicity, enough to call a smile into the most iron physiognomy that ever grinned. But these lucubrations produce no effect upon the spirit of the time. A man would as soon take his opinions from his grandmother as from the Doctor. The whole thing looks as if it were made on purpose to be read to some antediluvian village clubThe fat parson-the solemn leechthe gaping schoolmaster, and three or four simpering Tabbies. There is nothing in common to him and the people of this world. We love himwe respect him-we admire his diligence, his acquisitions, his excellent manner of keeping his note-books-If he were in orders, and one had an advowson to dispose of, one could not but think of him. But good, honest, worthy man, only to hear him telling us his opinion of Napoleon Buonaparte!—and then the quotations from Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, Landor, Withers, old Fuller, and all the rest of his favourites-and the little wise-looking maxims, every one of them as old as the back of Skiddawand the delicate little gleams of pathos -and the little family-stories and allusions and all the little parentheses of exultation-well, we really wonder after all, that the Laureate is not more popular.

The first time Mr Southey attempted regular historical composition he succeeded admirably. His Life of Nelson is truly a masterpiece;-a briefanimated-glowing-straightforward -manly English work, in two volumes duodecimo. That book will be read three hundred years hence by every boy that is nursed on English ground. All his bulky historical works are, comparatively speaking, failures. His History of Brazil is the most unreadable production of our time. Two or three elephant quartos about a single Portugueze colony! Every little colonel, captain, bishop, friar, discussed at as much length as if they were so many Cromwells or Loyolas -and why?—just for this one simple reason, that Dr Southey is an excellent Portugueze scholar, and has an excellent Portugueze library. The whole affair breathes of one sentiment,

and but one-Behold, O British Public! what a fine thing it is to understand this tongue-fall down, and worship me! I am a member of the Lisbon Academy, and yet I was born in Bristol, and am now living at Keswick.

This inordinate vanity is an admirable condiment in a small work, and when the subject is really possessed of a strong interest. It makes one read with more earnestness of attention and sympathy. But carried to this height, and exhibited in such a book as this, it is utter nonsense. It is carrying the joke a great deal too far.-People do at last, however good-natured, get weary of seeing a respectable man walking his hobby-horse.

Melancholy to say, the History of the Peninsular War is, in spite of an intensely interesting theme, and copious materials of real value, little better than another Caucasus of lumber, after all. If the campaigns of Buonaparte were written in the same style, they would make a book in thirty or forty quarto volumes, of 700 pages each. He is overlaying the thing completely

he is smothering the Duke of Wellington. The underwood has increased, is increasing, and ought without delay to be smashed. Do we want to hear the legendary history of every Catholic saint, who happens to have been buried or worshipped near the scene of some of General Hill's skirmishes? What, in the devil's name, have we to do with all these old twelfth century miracles and visions, in the midst of a history of Arthur Duke of Wellington, and his British army? Does the Doctor mean to write his Grace's Indian campaigns in the same style, and to make them the pin whereon to hang all the wreck and rubbish of his commonplace book for Kehama, as he has here done with the odds and ends that he could not get stuffed into the notes on Roderick and My Cid? Southey should have lived in the days of 2000 page folios, triple columns, and double indexes-He would then have been set to a corpus of something at once, and been happy for life. Never surely was such a mistake as for him to make his appearance in an age of restlessly vigorous thought, disdainful originality of opinion, intolerance for longwindedness, and scorn of mountains in labour-Glaramara and Penmanmaur among the rest.

In all these greater histories, the Laureate has been much the worse for some unhappy notion he has got into his head, of writing à la Clarendon. Clarendon is one of the first English classics, and one of the first historical authors the world can boast; but nobody can deny that he is, nevertheless, a most prolix penman. The things that carry him through, in spite of all his prolixity, are, first, the amazing abstract interest of his subject matter; secondly, his own prodigious knowledge of human nature; and, thirdly, the admirable opportunities he had for applying this knowledge to the individual characters he has to treat of, in the course of a long life spent in the most important offices of the state, and during the most important series of changes that the state has ever witnessed. Now, the Doctor, to balance a caricature of the Chancellor's tediousness, brings really but a slender image of the Chancellor's qualifications. He writes not about things and persons that he has seen, and if he did, he has extremely little insight into human character, and a turn of mind altogether different from that which is necessary for either transacting or comprehending the affairs of active life. He has the prolixity-without the graphic touches, the intense knowledge, the profound individual feeling, of a writer of memoirs. He reads five or six piles of old books, and picks up a hazy enough view of some odd character there, and then he thinks he is entitled to favour us with this view of his, at the same length which we could only have pardoned from some chosen friend, and life-long familiar associate of the hero himself.

Perhaps Southey's Life of Wesley is the most remarkable instance extant, of the ridiculous extremities to which vanity of this kind can carry a man of great talents and acquirements. Who but Southey would ever have dreamt that it was possible for a man that was not a Methodist, and that had never seen John Wesley's face, nor even conversed with any one of his disciples, to write two thumping volumes under the name of a Life of Wesley, without turning the stomach of the Public? For whom did he really suppose he was writing this book? Men of calm sense and rational religion, were certainly not at all

likely to take their notion of the Founder of the Methodists, from any man who could really suppose that Founder's life to be worthy of occupying one thousand pages of close print. The Methodists themselves would, of course, be horrified with the very name of such a book, on such a subject, by one of the uninitiated. Probably, few of them have looked into it at all; and, most certainly, those that have done so, must have done so with continual pain, loathing, and disgust. But our friend, from the moment he takes up any subject, no matter what it is, seems to be quite certain, first, that that subject is the only one in the world worth writing about; and, secondly, that he is the only man who has any right to meddle with it. On he drives-ream after ream is covered with his beautiful, distinct, and print-like autograph. We have sometimes thought it possible that the very beauty of this hand-writing of his, may have been one of his chief curses. One would think, now, that writing out, in any hand, dull and long-winded quotations from Wesley's Sermons, Whitefield's Sermons, their Journals, their Magazines, &c. &c. &c., would be but poor amusement in the eyes of such a man as Southey-more especially as it must be quite obvious, that they who really think these people worthy of being studied like so many Julius Cæsars, will, of course, study them in their own works, and in the works of their own ardent admirers; and that, as to mankind in general, they will still say, after reading all that the Laureate has heaped together, "Did this man never read Hume's one chapter on the Puritan Sects ?"

The truth is, that a real historian, either a Hume, or a Clarendon, or a Du Retz, or a Tacitus, would have found no difficulty in concentrating all that really can be said, to any purpose, about Wesley, Zinzendorf, Whitefield, and all the rest of these people, in, at the most, fifty pages. And then the world would have read the thing and been the better for it. At present, the Methodists stick to their own absurd Lives of Wesley, and there exists no Life of him adapted for the purposes of the general reader, or composed with any reference to the ideas of any extensive body of educated men whatever.

Nevertheless, who will deny, that

in these two thick volumes a great deal both of instruction and amusement is to be found? The hero being what he was, it was indeed quite impossible that this should be otherwise. And the complaint is not of the materials, nor of the manner in which the most interesting part of them is made use of, but of the wearisome mass of superfluous stuff with which the Laureate has contrived to overlay his admirable materials, and to make his fine passages the mere oases in a desart; and of that portentous garrulity, for the sake of indulging in which, he has not drawn the extraordinary man's cha

racter.

Wesley was, no doubt, a man of ardent piety; and, no doubt, with much evil, he has also done much good in the world. He was mad from his youth up, and vanity, and selfishness of the most extravagant sort, were at least as discernible in every important step he took in life, as any of those better motives, the existence of which it is impossible to deny. His father was a most reverend, holy, devout, and affectionate old clergyman, who educated a large family upon a very slender income, and spent his whole strength in the spiritual labours of a poor parish, full of ignorant and rude people. When he found himself near death, he saw his wife and a number of daughters likely to be left destitute. He had influence, as he thought, to get his living for his son John; and he called upon him to say that he would take it when he should be no more, and give his mother and sisters a right to keep their home. John Wesley, then in holy orders, and residing at Oxford, said, his spiritual interests were incompatible with his acceptance of his father's benefice, and he allowed the old man to die without comfort, and left his other parent and sisters to face the world as they might.

John Wesley, in America, flirted with a fine lass, a Miss Causton, and offered her marriage; suspecting, however, that she was not sufficiently religious for him, he consulted a committee of six Moravian elders, whether he should, or should not, marry her, as he had told her he would do. They deciding in the negative, by the truly Christian method of casting lots, he drew back. Miss Causton married another man. Mr Wesley upon this

commenced a long series of priestly admonitions and inquisitions, and at length, when she was some months gone with child, the jealous, envious Monk refused her admission to the sacramental table; the consequence of which was a miscarriage, and the great danger of her life.

This was the behaviour of Wesley to his father and his mistress. What wonder that such a man saw no evil in creating a schism in the church? He always determined what he was to do when in any difficulty, by opening the Bible, and obeying what he conceived to be the meaning of the first text his eye fell on. But we have no intention to go into the details of his life and character here. We shall rather quote, from Mr Southey, a few passages about his most eminent rival and disciple, the far more interesting George Whitefield.

"George Whitefield was born at the Bell Inn, in the city of Gloucester, at the close of the year 1714. He describes himself as froward from his mother's womb; so brutish as to hate instruction; stealing from his mother's pocket, and frequently appropriating to his own use the money that he took in the house. If I trace myself,' he says,

from my cradle to my manhood, I can see nothing in me but a fitness to be damned; and if the Almighty had not prevented me by his grace, I had now either been sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death, or condemned, as the due reward of my crimes, to be forever lifting up my eyes in torments.' Yet Whitefield could recollect early movings of the heart, which satisfied him in after

life, that God loved him with an everlasting love, and had separated him even

from his mother's womb, for the work to which he afterwards was pleased to call him.' He had a devout disposition, and a tender heart. When he was about ten years old, his mother made a second marriage; it proved an unhappy one. During the affliction to which this led, his brother used to read aloud Bishop Ken's Manual for Winchester Scholars. This book affected George Whitefield greatly; and when the corporation, at their annual visitation of St Mary de Crypt's school, where he was educated, gave him, according to custom, money for the speeches which he was chosen to deliver, he purchased the book, and found it, he says, of great benefit to his soul.

"Whitefield's talents for elocution, which made him afterwards so great a