Sardinian Government in appointing to office | teries of Kinburn. Their galleys often asthe son of a refugee. If we are correctly in- sembled at a little narrow harbor of the formed, a diplomatic agent, instructed by the Tauric Chersonese, for ages the refuge of piBritish Government, has been sent to Florence rates, now famous through the world under to bring Lord Normanby to views more worthy the name of Balaklava. Ages passed on; of his position, and we trust that his efforts Constantinople fell before the Crusader, a may be ultimately successful. In the mean- yearly decreasing circle marked the limits of time our Minister gives his support to the its imperial sway; when the Sultans were at Grand Duke and Count Buol, who have thus Broussa and Adrianople the city of the Bosbeen encouraged in their violent and insult-phorus knew its impending fate; yet, though ing course. Whatever may be the result, it will be the duty of the nation to see to this. It cannot allow any man to desert the first duties of his office. As Lord Normanby will doubtless be called upon to defend his conduct, we shall say no more; but he may be assured that this is no small matter, and that the examination will be as severe as the charge is serious. From The Times, 24 Oct. CONSTANTINOPLE AND RUSSIA. the Russian was still in the heart of his des erts and the Ottoman was almost on the imperial throne, the legends of the Greek still pointed to the yellow-haired race who were to bear rule in the latter days. The old wars were now over, the Muscovite worshipped according to the ritual of Eastern orthodoxy, and confessed the primacy of the Byzantine Patriarch; he was no longer a terror, but a hope; he was to rise up as an avenger, and to deliver the sacred dome of St. Sophia from the pollution of Moslem rites. No sooner was Mahomet sovereign of the city than the A PROPHECY has for a thousand years hung duration of the Ottoman sway was predicted. over the East, - for a thousand years Con- It was to last 400 years. No prophecy is more stantinople has believed that it saw in dim explicit, has been more widely extended, or prophetic vision its ultimate lords. That city has raised greater expectation. From the of decaying empires has always dreamt of the White Sea to the Persian Gulf it has been barbarians who were to come — a race fiercer, the belief of millions. Its origin we know more crafty, and more enduring than that not; but, unlike most predictions, it has been which overthrew old Rome. The great Leo equally received by those who feared and withstood the full tide of Saracen invasion; those who hoped its fulfilment. Greek, though, while Charles Martel has been Russian, and Turk have alike accepted it. handed down by fame for defeating a preda- It has stimulated the ambition of the Czars, tory band of Arabs, the deeds of the great it has encouraged the obstinacy of the Rayahs, Byzantine Emperor, the real saviour of it has unnerved and depressed the Turks, Europe, are almost forgotten. Constantino- made them more reckless of the future, and ple rolled back the tide of Saracen conquest, more selfish in the concerns of to-day. The and from that hour the empire of the Caliphs Christian has never ceased to speak of Roubegan to decline. The Imperial city was melia as his country and St. Sophia as his doomed to fall seven centuries later beneath church; the Mussulman has acquiesced, and the sway of the race which had succeeded to often seeks to bury his dead on the Asiatic the Arab inheritance of empire. But neither shore, that they may rest in peace in their when the Isaurian Emperor was threatened own land. Natural causes seemed so likely by the fleets of the Caliph, nor when the last to have inspired and to be tending to fulfil Palæologus perished by the Ottoman sword, the prophecy, that even Gibbon -no ready was there any belief that the Moslem was the believer - gives an car to its revelations. true destined lord of Constantinople. Super-Perhaps," he says, "the present generastition and history both pointed to the North. tion may yet behold the accomplishment of New Rome would fall under a race which the prediction of a rare prediction, of should come like the Goth and Lombard from which the style is unambiguous and the date the great nursery of nations. When, in the unquestionable. ninth century, the name of Russia was first heard by the pilots of the Euxine, the old vague belief was strengthened, and the faith in predestined empire added to the terrors inspired by the fiercest and most powerful of the northern hordes. In the course of two centuries Constantinople was four times attacked by the Russian fleets. Their port for preparation or retreat was the estuary of the Borysthenes, the spot where the flags of France and England now wave over the bat The prophecy, however, is not yet fulfilled. Its accomplishment seems more distant to us than it did to a historian of the reign of Catherine. We are now engaged in a struggle against the last of the barbarians, and as yet its course promises well for civilization. The Russians are not now descending the Dnieper to carry terror into the Golden Horn. On the contrary, the ships of the West have burst the gate which defends the last stronghold of the Czar's naval power. CONSTANTINOPLE AND RUSSIA. and are preparing to strike a blow which race were reprobated and doomed to vassalwill crush it for at least a century. Kinburn age or extinction. The manifest destiny of and Oczakoff have both bowed their necks to others was to rule and regenerate. The the allies. Nearly a thousand years ago the Russians were elected and called to the emRussians were terrible at sea, while on land pire of the Old World. To speak of resistthey were scarcely a match for tribes that ing them was a folly, showing only a narrow have long perished. Now their courage and education and a limited intelligence. Yet skill in the field are unquestionable, but they have been resisted, the tide has turned, their navy seems an expensive and sickly ex- no man now speaks of their invincibility, otic. All has changed but the obstinate and few even remember the doctrine of their inaggressive spirit which the Greek fire of the evitable future. Let us, therefore, take new Byzantine galleys could hardly tame, and courage, and believe that men and nations which now, through unceasing disaster and make their own destinies. We were not the reprobation of the world, still resist the born into the world only to witness a catasarms and the arguments of the West. conviction of the strength, the endurance, overspread Europe it will be our own fault, A trophe. If barbarism and slavery are to and the ambition of the Russians gave rise and not a misfortune decreed by fate. Rusto a series of prophecies, which have nearly sia is still vast, powerful, and threatening; caused their own fulfilment by the despond- but this is not the first time that civilization ency they have generated. wonder that the unlettered conquerors of deed has saved it. It is the property of such We cannot has been menaced, and that a single heroic Constantinople and their angry and brood- aggressive empires, when withstood and ing vassals should believe when the calm and turned back in their course, to wither or fall reflective historian of an age that talked to pieces. It may be said that we cannot largely of reason was almost convinced. is better, transform herself. crush Russia; but she may destroy, or, what whole sense and aim of the national exWhen the istence is disappointed, other forces will come into play, and for the result we can afford to wait. clear; we must persevere until the aggresAt all events, our course is sive power of the enemy is destroyed. There is no reason that we should look forward to remote posterity, and hesitate to act because nothing that we can do will last forever. It is said that the result of this war cannot be foreseen. It is true, yet we will proceed, conscious that where our cause is just the result of success will be prosperity and peace. It is urged that we only see a step before us; then we shall see a step still further. Many we answer that we will take that step, for things that are dark will make themselves plain as we go on. fook vast at a distance will be easily surMany obstacles that mounted. If we cannot regulate Europe for posterity, we will for our own time, and enable it to defend itself. Before courage give posterity a vantage-ground which will and an active will the dreams of destiny and an inevitable future vanish. Political fatalism has nearly given Europe to the most barbarous and crafty of its foes; a brief period of courage, endurance, and sacrifice has already broken the spell and falsified the prophecies of a thousand years. There is encouragement to proceed when the history of the past and the experience of the present point out the same course. We have no faith in historical parallels, nor do we wish to make a display of learning. There is a moral to be drawn from these old prophecies about the Russians, from the despair and cowardice which have nearly fulfilled them, and, lastly, from the courage which, once put forth, has, in less than a twelvemonth, shown their vanity. The Eastern world believed that the Ottoman was to fall before the Muscovite in the year 1853. An English politician would smile at the superstition, but what would be his own language? "After all," he would say, "it is evident that the Russians must have Constantinople some day. which it is impossible to attack with success; Russia is a country Turkey is worn out and can no longer resist; the Czar wants an outlet for his navy, which is divided and shut up in two inland seas; he is bent on possessing the Bosphorus, and I do not see how it is to be prevented. It is a gloomy prospect, but it is the natural course of things and we must be content." Were not those who uttered, or at least felt these arguments, a majority three years since? Even now it is asked why we should attack an enemy whom we cannot crush. Englishmen have been under a spell, as well as the tribes of the East. Philosophical historians have equalled in superstition the priests of Moscow or the peasants of Roumelia. The evil has increased in our own day. The theory of race has been carried so far as to become a kind of ethnological Calvinism. Certain portions of the human LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 602.-8 DECEMBER, 1855. From the Edinburgh Review. 1. The History of the United States of Amer- 2. Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the 4. Collections concerning the Early History 5. Felt's Salem. Salem: 1845. 8. The Scarlet Letter. By NATHANIEL HAW THORNE. For we may add the resources for such a work are peculiar in a very obvious sense. The States of America, unlike the States of familiar history. They possess what no naEurope, have originated within the limits of tions of the Old World are able to boastwritten annals ascending to the earliest period of their existence. Of these annals it is open to us at this day to obtain the great majority in the form of reprints, the originals usually finding their way to America. If, however, occaisonally, as is still possible, especially at some old mansions in the eastern counties or the west of England, we fall in with a shelf of the little brown quartos, which were the current coinage of the Puritan mint, we may AMERICAN archæologists, especially of late find among them, in their earliest shape, a years, have been smoothing the way for few of these first records of the English miAmerican historians. The work which stands gration. In these old tracts for they are first in the foregoing list has, therefore, some little more-contemporary archives of intrepid positive advantages over its predecessors. In adventure, and redolent yet to a discerning a negative sense it is also acceptable, because fancy of icy blasts and the foam of the sea, it is not made the vehicle for any of those we have the story of the founders of our ambitious inferences and speculations which delight our American brethren. In this instance we encounter the muse of American History descended from her stump and recounting her narrative in a key adapted to our own ears. For the first time, we believe, we have here the story of the founders of our New England colonies recorded in an ample and explicit manner, with a consistent care to exclude errors and exaggerations. Mr. Hildreth is not only conscious of the spirit in which he has addressed himself to his task, but he has stated it frankly at the commencement of his preface. "Of centennial sermons and Fourth of July orations, whether professedly such or in the guise of history, there are more than enough. It is due to our fathers and ourselves, it is due to truth and philosophy, to present for once on the historic stage the founders of our American nation unbedaubed with patriotic rouge, wrapped up in no fine-spun cloaks of VOL. XI. 37 DCII. LIVING AGE. early colonies, as far as they thought fit to make it public in England. The regions in which such tracts are chiefly to be found, comprising the homesteads of those who emigrated under the auspices of the Council for New England, implies that they were addressed to sympathizing readers; and accordingly we learn that it was a tradition of the "Old Planters "that " a letter from New England was venerated as a sacred script, or, as the writing of some holy prophet, it was carried many miles, where divers came to hear it." * These "sacred scripts are not, however, on a par for authentic candor with the ancient records to which their readers piously compared them, and we cannot accept their partial version of colonial history. In the New England States it usually happened that the ministers were at first the only annalists; the chief priests and scribes were identically one, and *Appendix to "Anniversary Discourse," Mass. Hist. Coll. (2nd Series), vol. 1. p. 20. THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND. like a The sea-serpent was already an exhibitor in truth was not much advantaged by the combination. They warred alternately with the sword of the spirit and the sword of the flesh. In the colony of New Plymouth, for example, Winslow was accredited to fulfil its controver-fornian El Dorado before the colonists had sial requirements with his pen, as Miles Stand- been twenty years in their settlement. Darby ish was commissioned to do battle for it with Field, for instance, brought report of certain his sword. At the same time, as contemporary White Hills with shining stones, "which inrecords of facts, there is no dispensing with duced many to travel thither to no purpose."† these pamphlet-narratives or denying their Others, again, at the dictates of their terrors value; and, treating them with the caution or imagination, peopled the interior with which is always allowable to a suspicious monstrous races, reproducing many of the witness, we may gather enough from the extravagant fictions which are told in the Hubbards and Mathers to substitute for the earliest books on America. For a long time evidence of the rest. were menaced by the most terrible wild beasts it was a matter of general belief that they of the Old Continent. lost in the woods have heard such terrible "Some likewise being roarings as have made them much aghast, which must either be devills or lyons." In fact, some of their maps contained in the corner the figures of lions or leopards, as of beasts native to the country. Passing over the motives which led to the migration, and which have been variously represented, we may, first of all, take account of the physical circumstances in which the colonists found themselves in their adopted country. It was a characteristic of the first planters of New England that they were almost to a man prepared, by their antecedents, to regard their settlement in the light of a home. Their "greatest ambition," as they stated to Charles II., 66 was quiet life in a corner of the world; " and their to live a expressions consequently manifest the excitement of an enduring interest in the objects they encountered. Their terrors and privations are recounted in the style of men who had set their lives upon a single cast, whose hopes and desires were for ever bounded by the pathless woods and the desolate shore. At one time they bemoan the piercing cold; at another they gaze in terror at the Atlantic rolling beneath its unparalleled tempests; or they shudder with awe at the Northern Lights, which seem to their eyes fiery that they may be regarded as the herso bloody and alds of the Second Advent."* times their impressions are of a more genial At other cast, exhilarated, for instance, by the "sweete cristall fountaines," which "jet most jocundly over the pebble-stones," or refreshed by the great abundance of fruits, 66 circumstances, the tendency to dwell upon As might have been expected in these novel impulse. As colonists they conceived they the supernatural received an extraordinary had a stronger title to the intervention of particular providences, while they imagined that the fiends of the pit were in league against them, in order to discourage and baffle their enterprise. Occasionally they were cheered by mysterious tokens. As early as the year 1619, a blazing star in the west had announced their coming: while the Indians had been swept out of the circuit of their first settlement by the convenient mercy of an exterminating pestilence. At Waterbetween a mouse and a snake, in which the town (July, 1632) was observed a combat his interpretation upon the phenomenon in the mouse conquered. The Rev. Mr. Wilson put manner of an Egyptian soothsayer. snake of course was their enemy, the devil, the mouse as obviously "the poor people who almost," they had come over." In a similar manner they as wild as the Indians." A great obtained intimation of various dangers which source of astonishment was the "ayerie reg-threatened them from the Indians. iment" of pigeons, having neither beginning was the galloping of ghostly chargers, and nor ending of their millions which joined now the whistling of invisible bullets, or an together the pine-trees by their nests, and eclipse of the sun took the shape of a human excluded from the earth the light of the sun.‡ say, 66 * New England's Plantation. New England's Prospect. + Id. The Now it' * Josselyn's "Two Voyages to New England.” New England's Prospect. Hubbard. Savage's "Winthrop." scalp, or the more discerning beheld with con- ing out its principles with a mordant rigor, sternation that the form of an Indian bow which is one of the most instructive examples was delineated along the sky.* From a in history. It may be thought superfluous throng of these supernatural incidents we select the following for what may have been its literary significance. Josselyn, in one of his voyages to New England, picked up a story of a Mr. Foxwell, who, passing in a shallop along a barbarous strand, was awakened at midnight by a loud voice calling upon "Foxwell, Foxwell," to come on shore, and who at the same time beheld a great fire upon the sand, and men and women dancing round it in a ring; whereupon, when he landed the following morning, he found the traces of feet "shod with shoes," and an infinite number of half-consumed brands. Later we have another story of something similar, respecting which Endicot writes inquiringly to Winthrop; and possibly the former of these stories, comunicated in one of the "Sacred Scripts," may have reached the ears of the youthful Milton, who sang in Comus of "Calling shapes and beck'ning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses." Undoubtedly the Puritan divines of England 66 re were indebted for some of their most markable providences" to the experience of their godly brethren on the other side of the Atlantic. At all events there can be little question, that in New England itself the prevalence of such impressions tended to deepen and exaggerate the spiritual convictions which were allied to superstition. The Puritan enthusiasm was heightened in the presence of so many earthly and unearthly wonders, and grew more stern and sombre by their formidable proximity. From its isolation it derived both a motive and an opportunity for carry * Mather. at this day to repeat that the founders of New England were systematic tyrants. But the propriety of reiterating an admitted truth depends upon the sincerity with which that truth is recognized. Those who are conversant with the popular histories of America will be conscious, indeed, that the heroic energy and iron fortitude of the Pilgrim Fathers were not unalloyed with harsh and ferocious bigotry; but they will find their eyes continually diverted by judicious treatment from the darker portions of the picture. When even Mr. Bancroft, a superior example of his class, speaks of "transient persecutions" as of "a train of mists hovering of an autumn morning over the channel of a fine river that diffused freshness and fertility wherever it wound," it concerns us to know that they were not so transient nor so slight as he pictures them, but that they suffused the whole atmosphere of colonial life with a depressing terror and a long-impending gloom. There is the further reason for reopening the case that, thanks to transatlantic diligence, more is known of it. While the sketches of Mr. Hawthorne in the "Scarlet Letter" have been questioned as the coinage of imagination, archæological inquiry has popularized the means of showing that even these fall short of the reality. To comprehend thoroughly the compressive energy of this state of society, we must bear in mind that the Massachusetts polity, which was the leading type of the other New England States, was the identification of Church and State upon a Puritan basis, whereby the senior ministers became virtually the law"According to givers for secular interests. the system established in Massachusetts," says Mr. Hildreth, "the Church and the State were most intimately blended. The Magistrates and General Court, aided by the advice of the Elders (so the ministers were yet here is a great report of it broughte from thence the last designated), claimed and exercised a supreme day of the week." These were doubtless the apparitions control in spiritual as well as temporal matdescribed by Hubbard : On the 18th of January, 1643, there were strange sights seen about Castle Island and the ters; while even in matters purely temporal Governor's Island over against it, in form like a man, that the elders were consulted on all important was seen about eight of the clock in the evening by many. questions. The support of the elders, the About the same time a voice was heard between Boston first thing considered in the first Court of and Dorchester upon the water in a dreadful manner crying out, Boy, boy, come away! come away!' and then it Assistants held in Massachusetts, had been shifted suddenly from one place to another a great distance secured by a vote to build houses for them, voice was heard in the like dreadful manner. Divers sober and to provide them a maintenance at the public expense. "I heare you have great sights upon the water, seen ter in the night ever since the shippe was blowne up, or between the castle and the towne; men walking on the wa fire in the shape of men. There are verie few do believe it, would sometimes cast flames and sparkles of fire. This -about twenty miles. About fourteen days after the same persons were ear-witnesses hereof at both times on the other side of the town towards Noddle's Island." The polity of Mas |