to show that I was worthy of the bread and salt, took possession of your lala* Abaza, and I resolved to avenge the innocent blood of my Padishab. He related and justified the measures which he had taken for the extermination of the janissaries; and concluded this extraordinary address by saying, Whatever I have done has been from pure zeal for the interests of the true faith and the Sublime Porte; and now the sword hangs over my neck, and I have come from Erzroom to suffer as a victim, if such be the will of my sultan: so saying he knelt down with his face towards the kiblah (Mekka,) and began to recite his profession of faith;" but at this juncture the grand vizir Khosroo, and the other great officers of state, interceded, as had been probably arranged beforehand, for the life of the penitent. Mourad, appearing to yield to their solicita tions, ratified the pardon which Khosroo had granted in the camp of Erzroom; and the janissaries, with fruitless rage, saw their indomitable enemy issue from the presence of the Sultan in safety and honour. During the stay of Abaza in Constantinople, he resorted daily to the At-meidan or Hippodrome, where his matchless horsemanship and dexterity in the use of the bow and the jereed attracted the admiration of the Sultan, who was himself equalled by few of his subjects in personal strength or skill in martial exercises; but in a short time (according to the policy then usual with the Porte, of conferring on pardoned rebels the government of districts remote from the scenes of their former career) he received the pashalik of Bosnia — an appointment fully justified on the principle above referred to, by his utter ignorance of even the geographical position of his new sandjak, if credit is to be given to a story related by the imperial ambassador Küfstein, who describes Abaza as gravely enquiring of him whether Bohemia and Vienna were not two fortresses on the confines of Bosnia and Hungary !+ Even in this remote province, however, the mutual hatred of the janissaries and the avenger of Osman was not stilled; and the severity of the governor towards those quartered on the frontier provoked an attempt to assassinate him while hunting; but two of the assailants fell beneath the scimitar of the valiant pasha, and the third was transpierced in his flight by an arrow from his bow. The traitorous attempt was punished by the decimation of the oda to which the culprits belonged, and the execution of the chiefs of the family of Lob-oghlu, who were accused of connivance in the plot; and the Sultan applauded the rigid justice of his lieutenant. The sway of Abaza in Bosnia continued nearly four years, and an autograph letter from his hand, addressed during this period to the imperial government on the subject of the frontier regulations, is still preserved in the archives of Vienna; but the com. plaints of the Venetians, whose territory he had attacked in the midst of peace, at length caused his removal; and after residing for some time at Belgrade, and in vain soliciting the important pashalik of Buda, he was transferred to Widdin, and invested with the command of the troops assembled, in the prospect of a rupture with Poland, in the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The Poles, threatened at the same time by the Swedes, the Russians, and the disaffected Cossacks, were anxious to avoid incurring the hostility of the Porte, and Alexander Trzebinski was directed to proceed to Constantinople for the purpose of conciliating the sultan; but Abaza, eager to acquire glory in a new field of action, detained the envoy on the borders of Moldavia, and, crossing the Dniester with his troops, effected a juuction near Kaminiek with the Tartar Khan, and attacked, at the head of this combined *Lala, or preceptor, was the customary appellation of the pashas when addressing, or addressed by, a youthful sovereign.-See GIBBON, ch. lxviii. note. † De Tott relates a somewhat similar conversation between an Anatolian pasha and the Venetian envoy at the Porte. The pasha enquired whether the Venetian and Muscovite territories were not contiguous ? "Nearly so," replied the Venetian, "there is only the Ottoman empire between them!" Since that period the progress of the Russians has, in a great measure, deprived the retort of its point. force, the intrenched camp of the Grand-Marshal Koniek polski, (October 1633.) But the strength of the position defied the efforts of the assailants. An attempt to surprise a pal anka, or fortified post on one of the isles of the river, was equally unsuc cessful; and though the country was laid waste, far and wide, by the Tartars, and a number of Polish prisoners of both sexes sent to Constantinople as the trophies of a pretended victory, the representations of Trzebinski, (who had succeeded in reaching the presence of the Sultan,) at length procured a ratification of the previously existing treaty; and Abaza, recalled from his post in satisfaction of his precipitate commencement of war, was retained at Constantinople near the person of the Emperor. Mourad had now attained the full maturity of manhood; and the sanguinary determination of his character, to which fear and mercy were alike strangers, developed itself in acts which inspired with terror even the lawless troops whose arbitrary caprice had reigned uncontrolled and irresistible since his accession. The year 1632 had been signalized by a tumult of more than ordinary violence. The refusal of the Sultan to pronounce the death of Hafez-Pasha endangered his throne; and the noble self-devotion of the aged general, who voluntarily gave himself up to his murderers, only partially appeased the fury of the revolters, who dragged from the palace and publicly gibbeted three of the favourite associates of Mourad; and, pressing into the inner court of the seraglio, refused to retire till they had been satisfied by occular proof that the four brothers of the Sultan were still in existence, if the deposition or death of the present occupant should create a vacancy in the succession! But scarcely had the janissaries returned to their barracks, when they were astounded by the intelligence that the grand. vizir, Rajeb, the secret instigator of the late commotions, had, on repairing to the palace, been instantly beheaded in the presence of the Sultan ; and this act of vigour was speedily fol lowed by the secret seizure and punishment of numerous ringleaders of the mutineers, who thus felt the first outbreak of that ferocity which marked with blood all the subsequent years of the reign of Mourad. The execution of the mufti, Akhi Zadah, on New-Year's Day, 1634, gave a fresh proof of the terrible inflexibility of the Sultan, as the life of that sacred functionary had hitherto been held inviolate; and the consternation of the janissaries was augmented by the arrival, on the same day, of their deadly foe, Abaza, who was invested with the new title of seghban-bashi, or general of the seghbans, and became a distinguished favourite of the sovereign. Attended by his new confidant, and surrounded by an armed guard, Mourad traversed the streets of his capital by night, and in disguise: the smallest infraction of the police regulations, the use of tobacco, or of wine, or even of coffee,* was sufficient to consign the culprit to instant death; and the dead bodies of janissaries and spahis, who had taken a share in the late disturbances, found daily in the outskirts of the city, or floating in the Bosphorus, verified the Oriental adage, that" the blade of the Sultan's sabre grows till it overtakes the offender, even on the further side of the mountain of Kaf." A tumult, which was preceded by the well-known sign of janissary discontent, the refusal of their soup, was announced to the Sultan; but Abaza, with his usual fearlessness, interrupted the dismayed messenger by undertaking to quell the rising storm by his personal authority. Attended by his guards, he rode into the midst of the crowd assembled at the At-meidan, and demanded of the malecontents, "Wherefore do ye thus reject the bounty of your Padishah, O sons of Hadji-Bektash?" The fiercest of the janissaries quailed before the aspect of the Circassian, who, after devastating half Anatolia, and shedding the blood of so many thousands of their brethren, had stood a vanquished rebel before the presence of the terrible Mourad, and had issued from his presence invested with a robe of honour. "A sup The legality of the use of coffee was long a disputed point among Moslem divines, who doubted whether it should be classed with intoxicating liquors. A controversial tract on this point is published in De Sacy's Chrestomathic Arabe. pressed murmur was heard from their ranks, and they began to eat their soup as if they would have swallowed the dishes-such was the awe his appearance and name excited among them!"-Evliya. Every day saw the influence of Abaza over the Sultan increase; and his gallant deportment and chivalrous frankness of manner maintained and justified his popularity both with the prince and the people. Though he possessed no vote in the Divan, every measure of state policy was submitted to his approbation; and his supremacy over the modes of dress and equip. ment, (as far as the little-varying customs of the East admit of the power of example,) was not less un equivocal: the peculiar fold in which the shawl was wound round the cap of his turban, and his method of attaching the scimitar to his side, were copied by the monarch and his whole train, and still bear at Constantinople the name of their originator. But the sombre and cruel temperament of Mourad was incapable of permanent friendship or attachment: his jealousy, once roused, was sated only by the blood of the victim; and the fall and ruin of Abaza was as precipitate as his rise to imperial favour, a few months previously, had been sudden. The details of his disgrace and death are variously stated by different authors. Evliya asserts that the refusal of the janissaries to march on the Persian expedition, as long as the counsels of their enemy were in the ascendant, compelled the Sultan to yield a reluctant assent to the death of his unpopular adviser. But the closing scene of the career of Abaza, preceded by more than eight months the display of the imperial standards in Asia; and it is possible that Evliya, who had been one of the chosen companions of Mourad in his social hours, may have been willing, by this tale, to screen from further obloquy the memory of his master. According to the narrative followed by Von Hammer, Abaza, alarmed by the change in the demeanour of the Sultan, had already prepared horses at Scutari to facilitate his flight into Asia, when he was summoned to the Divan to answer * a charge of having received 20,000 piastres from the Armenians as the price of his support in their dispute with the Greeks for the possession of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. Abaza confessed that he had received 12,000, and was immediately ordered into custody in the garden of the seraglio, while the grand vizir was directed to decapitate all the Armenians who presented themselves at his levee, as a punishment for their attempt to pervert the course of justice! This sanguinary order was only partially executed; but the intervention of a day produced no change in the deadly purpose of the Sultan, who on the following morning, before daybreak, delivered, with his own hand, to the BostandjiBashi, a firman for the death of Abaza. The destined victim heard his doom with the same undaunted courage which had characterised every action of his life. He calmly performed the prayers and ablutions prescribed to Moslems in the hour of their fate, and, delivering himself to the Bostandji, was executed in the kiosk of the palace, (August 24, 1634.) His body was honoured with a public funeral. The vizirs and officers of state followed the bier in procession to the mosque of Sultan Bayerid, where the customary prayers were read by the mufti; and the corpse was at length deposited in the same vault where reposed the remains of Abaza's ancient enemy, Mourad-Kouyoudji, from whose mandate of death he had been saved at the outset of his public career by the interposition of Khalil. "Thus" (says Evliya) “ did Abaza finally receive according to his actions.-May God have mercy on him!" 66 In ordinary cases a narrative of personal adventures terminates with the death of the subject; but the career of Abaza, if we may give credit to an anecdote related by Evliya, forms an exception even to this generally received rule. In 1646, (twelve years after his supposed death,) a person arrived by the route of Persia at Erzroom, where Evliya was then resident as part of the suite of the governor Soliman-pasha, and announced *"If the Sultan," said they, "wishes to march to Erzroom, let him do so with Abiza only." himself to his old partisans as the long lost Abaza. According to the account which he gave, Sultan Mourad, though compelled (as Evliya's version of the fate of Abaza, quoted above, states him to have been) to yield an apparent acquiescence to the demands of the janissaries, had, nevertheless, determined to save his life, and had caused a criminal to be put to death under his name, while the real Abaza was privately conveyed in a galley to Gallipoli, and placed on board an Algerine corsair, of which he shortly after obtained the command. In this capacity he cruised for seven years against the Christians in the Mediterranean, till on the very day of Mourad's death his vessel was captured by a Danish ship. He now became a slave, and apparently was sent to the Danish settlements in the East Indies, as it is said that, after seven years' captivity among the Danes, he was transferred to the Portuguese, and made his escape, three years after this exchange, by the wreck in the Indian seas of the ship to which he belonged. He now determined to return to the scenes of his former life, and after passing from India, by Bokhara and Khorassan, into Persia, at last reached Erzroom from Ispahan; and "soon after his arrival," says Evliya, " began to find out his old acquaintances, and was the chief of a party, to whom he related all his remarkable adventures," while Soliman-Pasha assigned him an al. lowance, and reported the case to the Porte. The functionary to whom the execution of Abaza had been intrust ed, was summoned before the reigning Sultan Ibrahim, and examined; but as he could only depose that he had executed a person who was said to be Abaza, but whose features he had not scen from the shroud in which he was enveloped, the affair was still involved in mystery; and at length a capidjibashi was dispatched to Erzroom, who seized and decapitated the real or pretended Abaza, and carried his head to Constantinople. Such is the romantic story which Evliya narrates, immediately after his account of the supposed execution of Abaza under the reign of Mourad. It is obvious that the number of years assigned to the wanderings of the hero, do not correspond with the true time which had elapsed between the presumed death of Abaza in 1634, and NO. CCXCVIII. VOL. XLVIII. the appearance of the claimant to his name in 1646; and Von Hammer, with most other historians, unceremoniously dismisses the latter as an impostor. The features, indeed, of the head which was sent to the capital, were so disfigured by death, that even the mollah, Mohammed Sandjari, who had been khoja or chaplain to Abaza, professed himself unable to decide whe.⠀ ther or not they were those of his former patron; but there must unquestionably have been many in Erzroom by whom the person of their quondam pasha was too well remembered, to admit of an adventurer personating him without detection; and Evliya himself, though he cautiously abstains from giving an opinion on the point, must, from his former intimacy with Mourad, have known Abaza well enough to be able to pronounce on his identity. The entrance of Abaza on the scene of history is marked by his narrow escape from the doom pronounced against him by the relentless Mourad-Kouyoudji; and it would certainly be a consistent close to his checkered story, if it could be proved that, on his disappearance from public life, his existence was, in truth, preserved by an isolated exertion of humanity on the part of the most cruel of the Osmanli sultans ! With the death or disappearance o. Abaza, the party of which he had for so many years formed the head was speedily dissolved; the seditious spirit of the janissaries had been curbed for the time by the severities exercised towards them, and the reduction of their strength in domestic and foreign contests; and Mourad, who had conceived the atrocious design of extirpating the imperial line by the execution of all his brothers, threw aside the weapon which he had used to ensure the tranquillity of his own sway. During his memorable march to Bagdad in 1639, most of the old followers of Abaza, who had been suffered to remain unmolested after the removal of their leader from Asia, were seized and delivered to the executioner; and the same fate was shared by the sheikh of Kaisariyeh, (who had been pensioned and permitted to retire to Sievas,) on his recommencing at a later period his accustomed denunciations of the janissaries. Under the reign of Mourad, the men of the spoon conti N nued to be curbed and awed by his ferocity; but when his weak and detached brother Ibrahim (who had narrowly escaped the bowstring by the disobedience of the officers of the court, who assured the dying Sultan of his execution) ascended the throne, they resumed their ancient audacity and predominance; and the design of suppressing this corps, which had originated with Osman, and which Mou. rad was supposed never to have abandoned, though his death at the age of twenty-eight anticipated its accomplishment, passed away; till after a lapse of nearly two centuries it was revived and carried into effect by Mahmoud II. But at this later period the existence of the haughty stipendiaries, who had so long exercised an uncon trolled veto over the direction of the empire, had become so intimately con. nected and interwoven with every institution of the monarchy, that its destruction could not be effected without a total disruption of the bonds which sustained the union of the whole fabric; and the events which have followed in rapid succession from the era of 1826 have postponed, to an almost hopeless distance of time, the reconstruction of the edifice. The vigorous and scarcely-shaken trunk might have survived, under the rule of the sons of Ahmed, the amputation of a peccant limb; but when the gangrene had reached the heart, the extinction of the disease inevitably involved the cessation of vitality throughout the system. A FEW PASSAGES CONCErning omenS, DREAMS, ETC. You know, my dear Eusebius, some of the peculiar ways of nervousness of our mutual friend, Eugene ; but I think you are unacquainted with their cause. He has very recently been upon a visit with me. Our dis course, the other day, turning upon lucky and unlucky times, on dreams, omens, and all such idle but interesting speculations-phenomena of nature, as he called them-I was much surprised when he told me that something akin to a belief in such matters was a weakness against reason, perhaps worse than a weakness, to which he had to plead guilty. I remembered that I had once myself intended to write some remarks on a lucky and an unlucky year, which were remarkable in my own life-the lucky immediately succeeding to the unlucky. I was, not very long ago, conversing with one who was in the habit of making a mock at the credulity of mankind. He was not aware that he was himself gifted with his full share. I found he attached great importance to the particular number nine, and said he dreaded the coming of every year terminating in nine, for that every such year had been disastrous to him; and he ran over a great number of events, unpleasant indeed enough, all which had occurred in years whose last figure was nine. I know a gentlemen of high attainments and natural strong sense, who always takes off his hat to a magpie. Innumerable are the little superstitions that affect strong minds: perhaps it may be even asserted, that the stronger the mind, the more certain is it to enjoy some such small safety-valve of the imagination, that the general current of thought may be the more free from vagrant fancies. The doubt which often perplexes, is gladly converted into a belief. But I wished to give you, my dear Eusebius, an account of the origin of the nervousness of our friend Eugene. He told me that it came upon him thirty years ago, and in the following sudden manner:-He had been then, he said, remarkably free from those practical reminiscences of our mortal nature which occur in most families. He had never witnessed a deathbed. It was to his imagination an awful thing; but poetically so, if the expression may be allowed; that is, it was a feeling to indulge in when his fancy so willed. It was a part of the drama: a scene to sit and weep over, as over a Juliet in her tomb, and then to return to the world of life, and in a moment know it not-feel it not. The conception was one of highwrought pleasure to sport with-and to discard. He was the child playing at the cockatrice's den; so that this indulgence of his, like most intellectual indulgences in the buoyancy of youth, was but rare-and he was completely |