lished a right to be remembered with honour. How many hundred Scotch families are there not who have produced, I will not say one distinguished man, but a whole series of distinguished men, distinguished in all branches, as soldiers, seamen, statesmen, lawyers, or men of letters. It is true the highest names of all will not be found in the Peerages and Baronetages. The highest of all, as Burns says, take their patent of nobility direct from Almighty God. Those patents are not made out for posterity, and the coronets which men bestow on the supremely gifted among them are usually coronets of thorns. No titled family remains as a monument of Knox or Shakespeare. They shine alone like stars.. They need no monument, being themselves immortal. A Dukedom of Stratford for the descendants of Shakespeare would be like a cap and bells upon his bust. Of Knox you have not so much as a tombyou do not know where his bones are lying. The burial-place of Knox is the heart of Protestant Scotland. drop out. The Nelsons and the Wellesleys step into their places. Warriors, lawyers, politicians, press perpetually to the front. Each age has its own heroes, who in its own eyes are greater than all that went before. The worn-out material is for ever being replaced with new. Each family thus raised is on its trial. Those which survive remain as links between the present and the past, and carry on unbroken the continuity of our national existence. In such families the old expression Noblesse oblige is a genuine force. In a chapel attached to the church of Cheynies in Hertfordshire lies the honoured dust of ten generations of the house of Russell. There is Lord William, carried thither from the scaffold at Lincoln's Inn. There is Lady Rachel. There are the successive Earls and Dukes of Bedford, who, wise or unwise, have been always true to the people's side through three centuries of political struggle. At one end of the chapel are the monuments of the first Lord Russell, King Henry's minister at the Reformation, and of the first Lady Russell, from whom all the rest are descended. There she lies, a stern, austere lady, as you can see in the lines of her marble countenance, evidently an exact likeness, modelled from her features. I could not but feel, as I stood in that chapel, what a thing it would be to know that in death one has to be carried into the presence of that terrible ancestress and that august array of her descendants, and to be examined whether one had been worthy of the race to which one belonged. But, speaking generally, the landed gentry are enduring witnesses of past worth and good work done, and until they forfeit our esteem by demerits of their own, they deserve to be respected and honoured. High place is lost so easily that when a family has been of long continuance we may be sure that it has survived by exceptional merit. Nature rapidly finds out when the wrong sort have stolen into promotion. When a knave makes a fortune his son spends it-one generation sees an But enough of this, and I will end of him. Even among the best bring what I have to say to there is a quick succession. The an end. It appears to me, for marble monument in the church the reasons I have given, that outlasts the living one. There are a landed gentry of some no Plantagenets now; no Tudors and few Stuarts of the old stock. The Lacies and the De Courcies sort must exist in a country so conditioned as ours. The only question is whether we shall be satisfied with those that we have, or whether we wish to see them displaced in favour of others, to whom the land would, or might, be a mere commercial speculation. Abolish primogeniture, compel, either by law or by the weight of opinion, a subdivision of landed property, it will still be bought up and held in large quantities, but it will be held by successful men of business, who, being no longer able to look forward to permanence of occupancy, and therefore having no motive for wishing to secure the goodwill of the people living around them, will regard their possessions from a money point of view, and will aim at nothing but obtaining from them the largest possible amount of profit and pleasure for themselves. A change of this kind will not conduce to our national welfare. It is perhaps coming; but I think it is still far off. The revolutionary wave which began to rise in the middle of the last century seems for the present to have spent its force. Men no longer believe that revolution will bring the Millennium. They have discovered that revolution means merely a change from an aristocracy to a plutocracy, and they doubt more than they did whether much advantage comes of it after all. The aristocracy are learning, on their side, that if they are to keep their hold in this country they must deserve to keep it. And just so far as a conviction makes its way among them that they exist for some other purpose than idle luxury, they will take out a new lease of recovered influence. No one grudges the hard-worked member of Parliament his holidays on the moor or in the hunting-field. The days by a salmon river with the flood running off, the south-wester streaming over the pool, and the fish fresh run from the sea, are marked with chalk in the lives of the bitterest Radicals of us all. Amuse ment is the wine of existence, warming and feeding heart and brain. But amusement, like wine also, if taken in excess, becomes as stupid as any other form of vulgar debauchery. When we read of some noble lord, with two of his friends, shooting two thousand pheasants in a week, or that another has shot four hundred brace of partridges to his own gun in a day, we perceive that these illustrious personages have been useful to the London poulterers; but it is scarcely the work for which they are intended by the theory of their existence. The annual tournament of doves between the Lords and Commons at Hurlingham leads to odd conclusions about us on the Continent. Every institution-even the institution of a landed aristocracy-is amenable to general opinion; and it may have worse enemies than an Irish Land Act. Fashionable follies are like soapbubbles: the larger they are the nearer they are to bursting. Pheasant battues and pigeon shooting will come to an end, as bullbaiting and cockfighting came to an end. Meanwhile, the world is wide, and the British have secured handsome slices of it beyond our own island. Who in his senses even if it were possible would be the peasant proprietor of half a dozen acres in England when, for the sum for which he could sell them, he could buy a thousand in countries where he would be still under his own flag, among his own kindred; with an unexhausted soil, and a climate anything that he prefers, from the Arctic circle to the tropics? You who are impatient with what you call a dependent position at home, go to Australia, go to Canada, go to New Zealand, or South Africa. There work for yourselves. There gather wealth as all but fools or sluggards are able to gather it. Come back if you will as rich men at the end of twenty years. Then buy an estate for yourselves; and when you belong to the landed gentry in your own person, you will find your eyes opened as to their value to the community. Will you have an example of what may be done by an ordinary man with no special talents or opportunity? A Yorkshireman, an agricultural labourer, that I knew, went to Natal twelve years ago. I suppose at first he had to work for wages; and I will tell you what the wages are in that country. I stayed myself with a settler on the borders there. He had two labourers with him, an Irishman and an Englishman. They lived in his house; they fed at his own table. To the Irishman, who knew something of farming, he was paying fourteen pounds a month; to the Englishman he was paying ten; and every penny of this they were able to save. With such wages as these, a year or two of work will bring money enough to buy a handsome property. My Yorkshireman purchased two hundred and fifty acres of wild land outside Maritzburg. He enclosed it; he carried water over it. He planted his fences with the fast-growing eucalyptus, the Australian gum-tree. In that soil and in that climate, every thing will flourish, from pineapples to strawberries, from the coffeeplant and the olive to wheat and Indian corn, from oranges and bananas to figs, apples, peaches, and apricots. Now at the end of ten years the mere gum-trees which I saw on that man's land could be sold for two thousand pounds, and he is making a rapid fortune by supplying fruit and vegetables to the market at Maritzburg. Here, as it seems to me, is the true solution of the British land question. What a Yorkshireman can do I suppose a Scotchman can do. There is already a New Scotland, so called, in South Africa; a land of mountains and valleys and rocky streams and rolling pastures. And there is gold there, and coal and iron, and all the elements of wealth. People that country, people any part of any of our own colonies, from the younger sons who complain that there is no room for them at home. Match the New England across the Atlantic with a New Scotland in South Africa; only tie it tighter to the old country. Spread out there and everywhere. Take possession of the boundless inheritance which is waiting for you, and leave the old Island to preserve its ancient memories under such conditions as the times permit. A NOTES ON THE TURK. BY EDWIN DE LEON.' LITTLE more than four cen opportunity of making acquaintance of several persons who had resided at his who told me many particulars about him. court, and consequently knew him well, In the first place, as I have seen him frequently, I shall say that he is a little, short, thick man, with the physiognomy of a high cheek bones, a round beard, a great Tartar. He has a broad and brown face, and crooked nose, and little eyes. His favourite amusements are hawking, hunting, and drinking. It is evident that the head of turies a Burgundian genago, tleman, Bertrand de la Bixquière by name, travelled on a political mission through the greater part of the then Ottoman dominions, and subsequently published the impressions and incidents of his travel in partibus infidelium. Among other points of interest, visited and described by him, was Adrianople, then, and for twenty years after, the chief seat of government of the Ottoman rulers, Constantinople having been wrested from the Greek Emperors a quarter of a century later. At the former Even at that early day the Turkish capital he was graciously accorded power was so great and so threatenseveral interviews with the Granding, that the Burgundian, after thus Turk, or 'Soldan,' who kept his court describing him, goes on to say: there, and who appears to have been very much of a Tartar in temper as well as in blood. The Burgundian Knight draws the portrait of this potentate with photographic fidelity and apparent fairness; and from it we may judge what manner of man this Grand Turk' really was. This Sultan was Amurath II., father to the more famous Mahomet II., who captured Constantinople, or Byzantium, and built up the Ottoman Empire in Europe. The Burgundian envoy, who had been sent on a secret mission of ob servation (as the Turkish advance was beginning to disquiet Christendom), in his Memoirs describes both the court and the personal peculiarities of the Soldan, with much minuteness of detail, from personal observation. His description of the Grand Turk' is as follows: During my stay at Adrianople I had the 1 Islam of that day did not observe the Mohammedan law in regard to the fluid refreshments of which he partook. Fortunately he has no great passion for war; for in fact he has thus far met with such trifling resistance from Christendom, that were he to employ all his power and wealth on this object, it would be easy for him to conquer great part of it. Whenever his soldiers go on an expedition, and make choosing one out of every five. They say a capture of slaves, he has the right of he is very generous He loves liquor, and those who drink hard. As for himself, he can easily quaff off from ten to twelve gondils of wine, which amount to six or seven quarts. When he has drunk much he becomes generous, and distributes great gifts. His attendants, therefore, are very happy when they hear him call for wine. Sultan verified the correctness of Twenty years later, the son of this Bertrand's judgment and the good grounds for his fears by the capture of Byzantium, the capital and centre of the Christian world of that day, to the confusion and terror of all Christendom besides. The conqueror immediately overran and appropriated most of the remaining possessions of the Byzantine Empire, [Many years U.S. Consul in Egypt.] and built upon its ruins the tottering fabric of Turkish power in Europe, now slowly but surely crumbling into ruins, and already in part disintegrated by the successful rebellion of Greece, and the quasi-independence of sach provinces as own buta nominal allegiance to Constantinople. The vitality of the Ottoman Empire in Europe is a perplexing problem to those who have most closely watched its varying phases for the last half-century, each succeeding decade of which seemed destined to witness its dissolution. Yet the Sick Man' at Stamboul has not only survived his over-officious physician, Czar Nicholas, and his 'nearest friend,' the Emperor Napoleon, but to-day seems to have a good deal of fight in him under a complication of maladies equally chronic and incurable, and constantly aggravated by the patient's imprudences. The Turk truly presents a puzzling case to his civilised brethren, to whom a continuance of life under similar conditions would be impossible, even were it desirable. Corruption, like a cancer, has long been eating into the very vitals of Turkey in all its administrative and executive departments; and successive Sultans, with their mouths full of phrases of reform, have vied with each other in profuse and profligate expenditure, and wilful waste of the resources of the empire, by grinding taxation of its impoverished population, Mussulman and Christian, and reckless squandering of the large loans which the greedy usury of Europe still furnished on such remaining securities as the Turk could yet rake up from his diminishing resources. If ever the terrible Scriptural image of the 'whited sepulchre' was applicable to a nation, it long has been to Turkey. And yet, in the great family of nations, she is but a younger sister; her decay and decrepitude are not due to age: the Turkish empire has become rotten ere it was ripe. Its only period of vigour, health, and progress was in its early youth; and, following the usual law of development, that the most perfect fruits of body and mind are those which are the most slowly developed and ripened, the rapid rise of the Ottoman race has been succeeded by as rapid a decline, until the vanishing point of that race, from its European field at least, seems plainly perceptible-a question now of years only, not of generations. For the Ottoman Empire, so short a time since a terror to Christendom, whom she menaced with sword and crescent, is now a suitor and a suppliant in the antechambers of European monarchs for her territorial integrity, and an importunate beggar in the money markets for the very means wherewith to live, while her great line of Sultans ends in a madman and an imbecile. Seldom has the irony of fate been more strongly manifested than in the history of the successors of Amurath, whose thirst, and not whose courage or genius, seems to have descended to the two last degenerate scions of his line-the dead Abd-ul-Aziz and the languishingly-living Murad. At this moment, therefore, a true sketch of the Turk, as he was and as he is, divested of the glamour which Poetry and Fiction (the latter often masquerading in the dress of History) have thrown like a halo around him, may be worth looking at. The Turk never was, even partially, understood in nature and character until very recently; and the Crimean War first dissipated many popular delusions concerning him which poets in verse, such as Monckton Milnes, and prose poets, such as the author of Eōthen, had done their best to perpetuate. While he was invested with a romantic interest, which there really was nothing in his actual life and character to justify, he was also painted much blacker in manners and morals than there was any fair warrant for. |