nally aroused such as the sea-stories of Michael Scott, the exaggerated but often forcible inventions of Dr. Samuel Warren, and the crowning triumphs of Sir Bulwer Lytton. But "Marston" has high merits of its kind and to those who relish the introduction of political and historical portraits, mingling on the stage of the action, after the manner of Scott in "Peveril," or of the last-named maestro in "Devereux"-these "Memoirs of a Statesman," walking and talking with statesmen French and English, during the agitating years of the French Revolution, are replete with attraction. The principles in politics, the elucidation of which had occupied Dr. Croly's mind while engaged on the biographies of Burke and Pitt, he had now an opportunity of illustrating in the form, and with the vivid aids, and the appliances and means to boot, of fictitious narrative-philosophy teaching by example-and this opportunity he turned to account with skill, and with fair success. It involved the peril of indulgence in disquisition, and of postponing story to argumentative discourse (which the subscribers to Hookham's, Ebers', Mudie's, &c., profanely style "prosing"), and of making plot and passion yield the pas to dissertation and description; but the writer was too experienced in his craft, and too lively in his ideas, ever to become absolutely dry; too animated in his perceptions, and too graphic in the expression of them, ever to be voted unconditionally "slow,"-unless, peradventure, by some of those very "fast" fellows, who are themselves superlatively slow in their upper-works-in the mechanics (it were absurd, in their case, to say the dynamics) of vous.

Of Dr. Croly's minor tales, one of the most remarkable is that entitled "Colonna the Painter," a tale of Italy and the Arts, with la Vendetta for its stirring, thrilling, all-absorbing theme. The conduct of the narrative is admirable; and the diction, like that of its imaginary manuscript, lofty and impassioned-occasionally rising into a sustained harmony, a rhythmical beauty and balance, consonant with the locale and the accessories of the story. There is masterly art in the narrator's prefiguration of the catastrophe by the picture in Colonna's Saloon, and his gradual development of the events of which it was the dark culmination. The whole is highly wrought, but without any of the strain and startling distortion of the French school. The "Tales of the Great St. Bernard," some of which made a sensation when they appeared, we can do no more than name. And to the same nominative case, in the plural number, must be referred the diligent author's edition of Pope, his Reign of George the Fourth, and other miscellaneous works.

Theology falls not within our province; yet, omitting mention of the Rector of St. Stephen's (Walbrook) general performances in this department, we are tempted to bestow a parting word on that particular book of his, which, from the nature of its subject, of all others, it might seem our chiefest duty to leave undisturbed-his Commentary, namely, on the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine. This exposition it is almost difficult to reconcile with our previous impressions of the writer, as a man of highly cultivated intellectual power, and gifted with much practical sagacity-indeed, one of his critics defines his intellectual distinction to be strong, nervous, and manly sense. But he is also of an imaginative and ardent temperament,-and to this he seems to have yielded the direction of his exegetical pen, when transporting himself in spirit to the isle called

Patmos, and interpreting the mysteries of the seven-sealed scrolls. ebullient Protestantism and his rampant

him, and fired him to explain the vast anti-m

His

better of

m got the be sublimest, inscrutable of apocalyptic symbols, by their " things of the day." He could desery, in the spelling of Apollyon a dreadful identity with that of Napoleon. His eager snatches at allusions and analogies may remind us of Wordsworth's smile

At gravest heads, by enmity to France
Distempered, till they found, in every blast

Forced from the street-disturbing newsman's horn,
"For her great cause record or prophecy

Of utter ruin.

17.

Coleridge, whose liaison with Edward Irving must have imparted to him
a special extrinsic interest in the theme of this Commentary, was even
vehement in the tone of his strictures upon it. We find him writing as
follows, in a letter to Dante Cary :-"I have been just looking, rectius
staring, at the Theologian Croly's Revelations of the Revelations of St.
John the Theologian-both poets, both seers-t
-the one saw visions, and
the other dreams dreams; but John was no Tory, and Croly is no conjuror.
Therefore, though his views extend to the last conflagration, he is not,
in my humble judgment, likely to bear a part in it by setting the Thames
on fire. The divine, Croly, sets John the Divine's trumpets and vials side
by side. Methinks trumpets and viols would make the better accom-
paniment the more so as there is a particular kind of fiddle, though
not strung with cat-gut, for which Mr. Croly's book would make an ap-
propriate bow. Verily, verily, my dear friend! I feel it impossible to
think of this shallow, fiddle-faddle trumpery, and how it has been
trumpeted and patronised by our bishops and dignitaries, and not enact
either Heraclitus or Democritus. I laugh that I may not weep. You
know me too well to suppose me capable of treating even an error of faith
with levity. But these are not errors of faith; but blunders from the
utter want of faith, a vertigo from spiritual inanition, from the lack of all
internal strength; even as a man giddy-drunk throws his arms about,
and clasps hold of a barber's block for support, and mistakes seeing double
for additional evidences.'"* The most sage and sensible of men appear,
somehow, liable to monomaniac tendencies on the one subject of prophecy:
even Newton was crotchety here; and Dr. Croly but adds another name
to the list of those celebrated by his satirical fellow-countryman, such as
Whiston, who learnedly took Prince Eugene

For the man who must bring the Millennium about;
And Faber, whose pious productions have been
All belied, ere his book's first edition was out.

to

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A GERMAN VIEW OF THE EASTERN QUESTION.

IF contradictions, conflicts, and national wars may be regarded as misfortunes, in that case the peninsula of the Hamus is most assuredly the Pandora's box for European futurity, for its condition presupposes protracted and sanguinary contests. The fact that the Osmanli dominion is gradually drawing to its close-that the suppressed races are incapable, without foreign assistance, of political regeneration, but that the European powers are as little inclined to give up the whole booty to one among their number, as they are able to settle about its division-such is the nucleus of the Eastern question and the torment of diplomatists. No one can furnish any advice in the difficulties raised by the solution of this question; every one feels that the old continental traditions of diplomacy are not capable of arranging this solution, that a re-construction of Europe must be united with it, the plan of which is not yet clearly defined. Hence the universal desire to defer the decision and to maintain the status quo.

Austria feels this desire most heartily, and has entire cause to do so.. When the Osmanli forced their way into Europe, the period of ideal policy was not yet past. People still talked of the unity of Christianity: the Hapsburg emperors were still regarded as the temporal governors of this Christianity; and this was not an utterly empty title, as long as the national policy was silent, in opposition to the Turkish "hereditary foe," and combatants collected from nearly all the Christian countries beneath the banners of the Hapsburgs, in order to support Austria in her defensive opposition to the Osmanli. For the traditions and maxims of the House of Hapsburg, that type of the most corrupt form of Romanism, which was sunk in the slough of apathy and Spanish ceremonial,could never lead them beyond the system of defence. The positive, the aggressive, the initiative, were utterly ignored by these traditions. They caused Austria to be so dependent on the status quo, that is, on the preservation of the Turkish empire; for she felt, that when this empire collapses, Austria must either become positive-that is, give up her nature and traditionsor else perish. She became, as soon as her territories were liberated from the Turkish sway-in just distrust of the expansive abilities of a state which strenuously strove to weaken and suppress her own elements of nationality-the truest and most disinterested friend of the Turks, and remained So, until she was driven from her orbit by the revolution of 1848; and now helplessly oscillates between the past and the futurepowerfully drawn backwards by her traditions, and the interests recently aroused by the present reaction, which represents them; driven forwards by her destiny and the progress of the world.

There is in the life of a nation a certain period, which, in the East, occupies the whole existence of the people, when religion is all in all, and religion and state, unless they wish to perish utterly, are indissolubly connected. A nation which is capable of development breaks through this connexion, and strives to render religion a matter affecting the indi

* Russland, Deutschland, und die östliche Frage. Von Gustav Diezel. Williams and Norgate,

vidual, and to separate it from the state. In such a case it is possible to fuse different religions and nationalities into an harmonious whole; the only condition is, that men, spite of the difference of religion and nationality, regard each other as possessing equal privileges, and that the government protects the life and property of all alike.

At this stage of its development the state is capable of unbounded ex- 1 tension, as it everywhere recognises the existing. But so long as it remains in this stage, fusion, assimilation, both national and religious, are connected with this expansion, and when this appears impossible, the expansion ceases. Austria found, from her inability to raise herself from this lower stage of political development to a higher one, the bounds of her expansion in the Greek-Byzantine empire-although it was of the highest importance for Austria, composed as she is of so many various nationalities, which can never be fused into a whole, to emancipate the state from everything connected with dogmatism. She felt that she neither possessed the power to catholicise these countries by force, nor was she able to join them to herself by the propagation of a system of cultivation in a perfect state of independence on religious rela-tions. Hence she fell into a state of stagnation, wasted away, and pretended to believe in the eternal duration of the status quo. Hence, too, she was lauded for her deep political wisdom-for the maintenance of the status quo in Turkey was a subject of intense interest to all; but while England and Russia were growing stronger, and so became more able to assert their claims in the settlement of the Turkish inheritance whenever the catastrophe could no longer be deferredAustria became,-by this status-quo policy, by this purposed suppression of the national energies, by this systematic exclusion of progress,-each day more powerless, more incapable for action when the catastrophe arrived. She sedulously played into the hands of her future rivals, who were gradually growing more prepared to accept the inheritance, while she was continually becoming weaker.

This is the necessary consequence of that unhappy Spanish policy, which in the 16th century opposed the Reformation-not recognising it as a necessary expression of the national vitality-and suppressed it by bloodshed in the Austrian family lands. The sins of this policy-which only fools can call conservative, for it is not conservative to engraft Spanish corruption on a healthy nationality-have not yet borne all their fruit; but the time is at hand when the ulcer will burst and the atonement will ensue.

Russia has displayed less reluctance to attack the status quo generally, and in Turkey more especially. This is very natural. Russia has managed to fasten to its interests all that fancied itself menaced by the revolution in the widest extent of the term, but is itself thoroughly revolutionary in its being. If we comprehend by revolution the compulsory alteration of all existing relations, Russia is, in fact, the revolutionist among European states. Its mere appearance in the European state family was an act of revolution: the balance of power was disturbed by this very fact. The creator of modern Russia was the most terrible revolutionist whom the world ever saw, although he was seated on a throne: nothing existing was sacred to him; all that was ancient and venerable he overthrew, and he refrained from no measures, however.

repulsive they might appear to morality, religion, or humanity, as long as they helped him in the furtherance of his designs. The problem, which is before the Russian state, involves the utter subversion of the European edifice, and can only be solved by the overthrow of the most solid and deepest foundations of the European system. If Russia ever perform this task, it will have to remain for a long while revolutionary or non-conservative. Still Russia is very clever in giving to all these revolutionary movements, when it thinks proper, the appearance of legality. When opposed to Turkey, religion, the identical element which had set bounds to Austria, furnished suitable means, and laid the foundation of that supremacy which Russian policy has maintained over the Austrian, during the last eighty years, in the East.

Russia was christianised from Byzantium, and for a length of time influenced by its religion. The old Varagian grand-dukes attempted in vain to render Russia independent in ecclesiastical affairs. Through the Muhammadan conquest, which gave the Christians of the Greek empire Moslem masters, and placed them in a state of subjection and vassaldom, this object was attained. Russia had from that epoch its own independent patriarch, whom Peter the Great, in consequence of the clergy opposing his changes, removed without any difficulty, and substituted a synod under the immediate authority of the state. Since then the Church in Russia has become a mere instrument of the government, which must assure it an influence over the masses, who are so ignorant and so devoted to religious forms. But it also contrives most cleverly to exercise this influence externally. The Byzantine Greeks were a dead nation long before they had fallen under the yoke of the Osmanli. Their rich political and moral life had sunk into corruption, and this had smoothed the path for the unrestrained, obstinate dominion of dogmatism. Religion was the only thing which the old dying world had still to show; the religious society had swallowed up the political. But, while in the west the Germans, benefited by this religion, furnished the materials for an entirely new national and political development, which extended during the next centuries in the richest abundance and variety, the dogma found nothing in the Byzantine empire which was capable of fertilisation and expansion. By a simple comparison, we can here estimate the great importance which must be attached to the Germanic influence upon our western civilisation. In the Greek empire Christianity remained without blossom or fruit. It was only the expression of exhaustion and atrophy. And yet the Hamus territory was in some measure revived by the infusion of new blood. It has been satisfactorily proved, that through the continual immigration from without, the original Greek blood was considerably mixed and transformed. Still no new political life was imparted by this mixture of races, when connected with the collision with the old forms of society. The Sclavons either became Hellenised, i. e. were drawn into the Greek corruption and were lost in it, or they retained their savageness and barbarism, like the Sclaves who had remained at home, and restricted themselves to the external assumption of Christianity.

A celebrated writer upon these historical and ethnographical relations only mentions one effect of this Sclavonic invasion of Greece. "As long as Eastern Rome," says Fallerameyer, in his "Fragmente aus dem