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required. M. Sue is not content with these, he makes his lion-tamer invulnerable; that is to say, Morok always wears a complete suit of chain-armour underneath his clothes, so that when the lions bite they only grind their teeth against steel. To pass by the absurdity of this,-to admit that the chain-armour could be worn without detection, or that a lion seizing a man's leg in his mouth would not crush that leg in spite of the armour,―would only be granting the author that licence of probability of which he so liberally avails himself. But there remains a weightier objection,-Morok being invulnerable is no longer terrible. There is no bravery in his entering a lion's cage with a red-hot iron in his hand, with which he can inflict the most agonizing pain, if sure that the armour he wears protects him from the fury of the animal. Van Amburg would gain no admirers in this way. But M. Sue was not content with the skill and courage of a Van Amburg; he wanted some one more terrible, and he invented Morok.

We need occupy no more of our reader's time with an exposition of the absurdities of M. Eugène Sue. We should not have dwelt on them so long, had not the extraordinary popularity of his last two works compelled us. But we could no longer remain silent; and we were glad to seize the opportunity of illustrating that curious tendency in the English public, to hate vehemently and unreflectingly whatever it is told to hate, and to read admiringly and unreflectingly whatever it is not told to shun. The same public that will not read George Sand, devour Les Mystères de Paris.' We do not say that George Sand is not open to most of the objections which "mothers of families" and rigid critics conceive it necessary to make; but we do say that 'Les Mystères' is incomparably more open to them, and is, upon any received notions of immoral novels, one of the most immoral we ever read.

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ARTICLE VIII.

1. History of the Greek Revolution. By THOMAS GORDON (8 General in the Greek service). 2 vols. 8vo. Edinburgh, Blackwood, 1832.

2. Greece as a Kingdom; or a Statistical Description of that Country, from the arrival of King Otho, in 1833, down to the present time. By F. STRONG, Esq., Consul at Athens to the Kings of Bavaria and Hanover. London: Longmans, 1842.

3. L'Etat actuel de la Grèce. By Prof. THIERSCH. 2 vols. 8vo. Munich, 1832.

4. The Hellenic Kingdom. By G. FINLAY, Esq. 1 vol. 8vo. London, Murray, 1836.

5. Das Griechische Volk, vor und nach dem Freiheitskampfe bis zum 31 July 1834. Von GEORG LUDWIG Von Maurer. Heidelberg, 1835.

6. Parliamentary Papers.—Correspondence relating to recent Events in Greece: 1843 to 1844. Presented to the House of Commons by Her Majesty, in pursuance of their Address of March 14th, 1844.

7. Commercial Tariffs and Regulations. Part IX.-Greece. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty, July 14th, 1843.

8. Histoire de la Régénération de la Grèce. By Monsieur POUQUEVILLE. Paris, 1824.

FEW, we are persuaded, will participate in the sentiment with which M. La Martine surprises his readers in the account of his few days' visit to Greece, given in the Pilgrimage to the East:'

"C'est là Argos; tout près de là est le tombeau d'Agamemnon. Mais que m'importe Agamemnon, et son empire? ces vieilleries historiques et politiques ont perdu l'interêt de la jeunesse et de la vérité. Je voudrais voir seulement une vallée d'Arcadie; j'aime mieux un arbre, une source sous le rocher, un laurier rose au bord d'une fleuve, sous l'arche écroulée d'un pont tapissé de lianes, que le monument d'un de ces royaumes classiques qui ne rappellent plus rien à mon esprit que l'ennui qu'ils m'ont donné dans mon enfance.”

We venture, nevertheless, to think that these classic regions still have some interest,-that Homer and Herodotus are something more than the names of dull school-books-Athens

and Mycena spots where some associations linger. It seems to us that the scene, which the French poct looked at as a mere picture, should bring to the scholar's mind the doomed. fortunes of "Atreus' royal line," and the immortal trilogy of Eschylus. But even if "these old histories" have lost, or could ever lose the power to charm, there are not wanting associations which have all the freshness of youth. By the modern Greeks the national assembly of Argos is regarded as the flower of the great aywva, or struggle for national freedom, and the destined seed-vessel of constitutional liberty. Some excuse, however, may be made for M. La Martine's indifference. At the time of his visit to Nauplia in 1832, the Assembly had been lately closed amidst factions called into life by the tyranny of Capo d'Istria. We happen to know also that at that period occasional partics of Palikars might be seen crossing the plain of Argos, and that the ring of the 'Toupiki' was now and then heard on the rocks of Mycena. Classical and poetic sympathics might therefore be a little disturbed, and it is not impossible that the prudence of the pilgrim-poct had as much to do with his affected want of interest, as the reminiscences of weary school-tasks, relieved by the occasional stimulant of birch or cane. Certain it is that he declined the escort that was offered him, and preferred a trip upon his Pegasus, to a canter over the kingdom of Agamemnon upon the Arab of an ambassador.

It is thus that numerous travellers of all countries, grades, talents and professions, pass through, or rather by, Greece, without giving to their respective countries even a proximate idea of the true state of the kingdom of Hellas, of its origin and its prospects. Indeed for the last ten years all interest about Greece had been lost in the dull German system supposed to be quietly carried on there by the Bavarians; and it was only when instalments of loans were called for or paid, that the newspapers condescended to refer to the country, except by the insertion in small print of an occasional letter from Athens or Patras, convenient for filling up a vacant corner. The poetry of the subject, as well as the business. view of it, appeared for a time to have been exhausted, when suddenly last September a Greek revolution was announced to the world, a revolution without bloodshed, without vengeance, begun and ended in a day, effected by the mere

declaration of the will of the people, at once accepted by two of the great protecting powers of Greece, and subsequently by the third, and finally recognized by all the other states of Europe. Interested and excited by this event and its consequences, the public mind has once more awakened to some curiosity about Greece and the Greeks, and begins to realize to itself the important fact, that a million of freemen are associated under a well-defined constitution, in a country between Europe and Asia, of extraordinary natural strength, of which, as mountaincers and mariners, they know well how to take advantage; that about ten times that number, allied to them in blood, religion and language, are dispersed in fruitful lands on the shores of the Egean, the Euxine and the Danube, among an Asiatic people "encamped" for three centuries on this fair portion of Christendom; and that these latter are now melting away and breaking off from their central government, as if the force of cohesion in the Moslem faith had lost its power. What Greece was, is, and must be, is no poet's dream or idle tourist's theory; it is a fact of extreme gravity, in which some millions of the human race are much concerned, and which, looked at under the light of philosophy, religion, politics or commerce, should interest all who feel and acknowledge themselves to be members of the great human family.

Various causes have combined to give us a false or imperfect view of Grecce, whether derived from books or conversation. In spite of the hundreds of travellers who have visited her shores, Hellas is scarcely better known than she was twenty years since. Naval captains have seen her during the war, and, without making any distinction between the Greeks of the Ionian islands and the Levant, and those of Hellas, talk of the pirates or bomboatmen of 1827, and draw general inferences, as if they had the most minute knowledge of the country, moral, statistical and political,-Indians returning to Europe and changing steamboats at Athens, or at most visiting the plains of Argos and Marathon, pronounce a sweeping condemnation, because they find bad dinners and bad lodging,— Dilettanti and classical travellers from England or Germany, condescend to notice nothing later than the days of Pericles or Herodes Atticus, and write treatises discussing inscriptions, ancient manners, or new theories of the gods. Lastly, a

VOL. XVIII. NO, XXXV.

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crowd of young officers or collegians, with a few sketching and journal-writing ladies, land at the Peiraeus, partake of the hospitality of our kind and excellent minister Sir E. Lyons, parade their jewels or their uniforms at the palace, ride bad horses over bad roads, cross gulfs in boats for a fortnight, and, scarcely knowing whether Pericles or St. Paul lived first, or whether the battle of Platea or the siege of Missolonghi was the more ancient conflict, proceed to speak grandiloquently of Greece "à tort et à travers" for the rest of their lives. The merchants who visit Greece from England, do so only in their way to other countries, and seldom afterwards concern. themselves about a place where the small consumption of English goods, bought principally by native Greeks in England, promises small profits. Causes therefore, sufficiently obvious, exist for the ignorance of the detail of Greek life in England, the neglect of the subject, or the prejudice and false views with which it is generally treated.

Nevertheless Hellas is something more than a set of illus trations drawn by nature, to satisfy the readers of Homer, Pindar and Thucydides; and the deep entaglios which Providence has decreed should exist in the character of her inhabitants, have not endured the shock of more ages than her oldest inscriptions, without indicating far other results than the verification of historic doubts, or the correction of manuscripts; we think, therefore, that an acceptable service would be rendered if a faithful account were given of the actual condition of its people, more especially as affected or modified by the late national movement. But as it is impossible rightly to understand or appreciate the late events of which Greece, and Athens in particular, has been the theatre, without a general notion of her history since the epoch of her regeneration, we propose in this article to give such a brief retrospect and summary as may serve to explain and illustrate her present position.

The first great struggle for liberty, after the consolidation of the ancient Greek states, comes down to us stamped more especially with the portrait of one man, Themistocles; and if, after the lapse of twenty-three centuries, we were again to trace to its source the stream of freedom, which has burst forth anew, we should find it in the noble impatience of oppression which animated the breast of a single philosophic

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