other superior officers threw themselves on the protection of the Silihhdar-pasha, and were sent to the camp as prisoners; but the remainder of the garrison, after a short and fruitless struggle against the overwhelming numbers of their enemies, gave way, and crowded in wild confusion towards the Gate of Darkness, "invoking blessings" (in the quaint language of the Turkish narrative before quoted) "on the whip and the stirrup, by the aid of which they hoped to urge their horses in successful flight." But this hopedfor avenue of escape was already in the possession of the troops of Damascus and Egypt, and all who attempted to issue from it were instantly cut to pieces. The Persians, surrounded on every side, were exposed without defence to the murderous fire of the artillery, which wrought fearful havoc among their dense and disordered masses; and the scimitar and yataghan completed the horrible butchery. Through the whole day the massacre continued; the vaults and cellars* were choked with the bodies of victims who had in vain sought concealment; "the blood flowed in a torrent which would sweep away a horse, and the faces of the orthodox soldiers attained resplendent whiteness from their holy zeal in the extermination of the Sheahs, whose presence had profaned the city of the caliphate!!" Of 30,000 men, the number of which the garrison had originally consisted, scarcely 300 remained alive. And on the evening of Christmas-day, the 116th anniversary of the fall of Rhodes before the

arms of Soliman the Magnificent, Mourad-Ghazi entered Bagdad through the white gate, surrounded by the ensigns of imperial pomp, and, traversing the corpse-encumbered streets, took up his residence in the palace of the governor; whence, on the following day, after having published an amnesty for the lives and property of the resident inhabitants, he repaired in state to the shrine of the Imam.. Azem Abu Hanifah, in order to offer thanksgiving for the restoration of the city to the rule of the Soonis, and to superintend in person the obsequies of the slain grand-vizir, who was interred with the honours due to a martyr in the burial-place of his father, a former pasha of Bagdad, close to the venerated tomb of the Imam.

The mercy at first extended to the peaceful inhabitants has been attributed by some writers to the emotions of pity excited in the mind of Mourad by the plaintive strains § of Shah-Kouli, (servant of the Shah,) a famous Persian musician, who was a prisoner in the Turkish camp; but this unwonted mood was of short duration; and the slaughter of the Soonis which had marked the occupation of Bagdad by Shah Abbas fifteen years previously, was destined erelong to be fearfully avenged. The explosion of a powder magazine, by which 800 janissaries were killed and wounded, aroused the sanguinary temperament of the Sultan to fresh deeds of destruction; the calamity was attributed, without examination or proof, to a conspiracy among the Persians; and a firman was pro

claimed through the army by the tchaooshes, ordaining the instant execution of every one of that nation, without distinction, in the camp or the city! The streets again ran red with blood; two Koordish soldiers, detected in attempting to favour the escape of one of the proscribed creed, were summarily impaled alive as a warning to their comrades of the danger of misplaced humanity. And while the lower classes were confounded in indiscriminate doom, a thousand captives of superior station, including three hundred pilgrims on their way to the shrines of Meshed and Kerhelah, were marshalled before the tent of the Sultan. A soldier, with ready weapon, was posted at the side of each victim. After an interval of dreadful suspense, the curtains of the pavilion were thrown open on a signal given; and, as Mourad ascended his throne, a thousand severed heads fell in the same instant to the ground, and the skill of the executioners was rewarded by a donation from the monarch! "Having thus," in the words of the Otto man historian Abdul-Rahman Effendi, 66 effectually cleansed Bagdad from the presence of a pestilent sect who were equally unfit to live and to die ;" and, having restored to their pristine splendour the tombs of the Sooni Imams, which had been despoiled of their trea sures and rich ornaments by Shah Abbas, Mourad at length bade adieu to the blood-drenched ruins of the fallen Queen of the East, and, after appointing the aga of the janissaries Pasha of Bagdad with a garrison of 12,000 men, set out in triumph with the rest of his army, (February 1639,) on his return to Constantinople.

The martial pomp of the procession which signalized his entry into the capital has been described in detail by several Turkish annalists, and merits commemoration as the last occasion on which the people of Constantinople witnessed the spectacle, so frequent in earlier times, of their monarch returning victorious from the scene of his warlike achievements. Mourad arrived by sea from Nicomedia, escorted by a squadron of fifty-eight galleys, on the

9th of June, and on the following morning "repaired to his palace with a splendour and magnificence which no tongue can tell, nor pen adequately illustrate. The balconies and roofs of the houses were every where thronged with people, who exclaimed with enthusiasm, The blessing of God be on thee, O conqueror! Welcome, Mourad! May thy victories be fortunate!' The Sultan was sheathed in resplendent armour of polished steel, with a leopard skin thrown over his shoulders, and wore in his turban a triple aigrette, placed obliquely in the Persian mode. He rode a Nogay charger, and was followed by seven Arab led horses with jewelled caparisons, while trumpets and cymbals resounded before him, and twenty-two Persian Khans* were led captives at the imperial stirrup. As he passed along, he looked proudly on each side, like a lion who has seized his prey, and saluted the people, who shouted Barik-Allah ! and threw themselves with their faces to the ground.

All the vessels of war fired constant salutes, so that the sea seemed in a blaze; and seven days and nights were devoted to constant rejoicings." The next day the Sultan gave audience in grand divan to the residents of the European powers, and received the felicitations of his ministers, and the adulatory odes of the court poets on his recent conquest. A passage from one of these compositions, by Jouri, the most celebrated Turkish lyrist of the age, may be cited as a delectable instance of the extravagance of Oriental panegyric." Thou (Mourad) art the magnetic pole towards which the universe turns trembling, like the needle of the compass: but trembling not with the dread of annihilation from thy might, so much as from the earnest desire of laying its homage, in token of absolute submission to thy will, before thy august footstool!"

The catastrophe of Bagdad, however, closed the long and desolating series of wars in which the two empires had been engaged, with the exception of short and hollow intervals of peace, for near a century and a

half: the enervated Shah-Soofi shrunk from a prolonged contest with the energy and ferocity of Mourad; and a Persian envoy arrived at Constantinople in September, bearing full powers to conclude a definitive treaty. The pacification of 1555, between Soliman the Magnificent and Shah Tahmasp, was assumed as the basis of the territorial arrangements. Eriwan was restored, as a frontier fortress, to Persia, which solemnly ceded in perpetuity Bagdad with its dependencies, and most of the other extensive territories subdued by the Turks along the eastern boundary and the friendly relations thus established remained undisturbed for eighty years, till the overthrow of the house of Soofi by the Affghans. But Mourad did not long sur vive to enjoy the glory of having thus victoriously terminated the tedious strife between the Porte and her hereditary enemy. Early in the ensuing year he was seized with a fever, in consequence of a debauch of wine, a vice with which he had been infected from the example of the renegade Persian Khan of Eriwan, Emir-Gounah, who had become, under the Turkish name of Yusuf- Pasha, one of his favourite associates; and, though the strength of his constitution at first promised to overcome the malady, the superstitious dread which overwhelmed him at an eclipse of the sun in the same sign of the zodiac which it had occupied at his birth, gave a fatal shock to his faculties; and, on Feb. 9, 1640, "Sultan Mourad," in the words of the Turkish annalist, " after having been lord of the carpet (confined to his bed) for fifteen days, quitted this transitory world for the kingdom of eternity" before he had completed the twenty-eighth year of his age. In his last moments he gave peremptory orders for the death of his brother Ibrahim; but the execution of this savage mandate, which would have extinguished at a blow the whole Imperial family, was eluded by the contrivance of the officers of the palace and the Sultana-Walidah, and the eyes of Mourad were closed in death without his becoming conscious of the deception which had been practised.

The character and reign of MouradGhazi form a remarkable episode in the drama of Ottoman history. That he was, as Von Hammer calls him, "a tyrant in the widest acceptation of the

term, a tyrant insatiable of blood and vengeance," appears on the first view too palpable a truth to be either denied or palliated. In utter recklessness of human life, and in the sanguinary and inexorable punishments which instantly followed the smallest breach of his mandates, even his ancestor Selim I., though distinguished among the descendants of Othman by the epithet of Yavooz, or Ferocious, falls far short of him: and the catalogue of executions and massacres which mark his reign, and particularly the last seven years, after he had established his ascendency over the janissaries, presents an appalling register of bloodshed. Yet justice requires, that before we consign Mourad to execration as a sullen and brutal despot, (in which light the generality of European historians have represented him,) we should take into consideration the circumstances under which he was placed on the throne, and the state of the empire in the years immediately preceding and following his accession. By the murder of his brother Osman, (towards whom he is said to have felt the strong attachment of a youthful mind,) and the deposition of his uncle Mustapha, the nominal sovereignty devolved on him be fore he had passed his eleventh year; and his boyhood was spent amid scenes of sedition and bloodshed from the uncontrolled violence of the soldiery, in which his friends and ministers were repeatedly sacrificed before his eyes, and his own life more than once placed in the extremest peril: but he continued to cherish a deep and deadly thirst for vengeance on the authors of these outrages; and the dissimulation which he was compelled for several years to practise, imparted a character of fierce and vindictive cruelty to the retribution which he afterwards exacted. Still his measures of severity, though unsparing even to extermination, were directed principally against those guilty or suspected of offences against the state: he is charged with few of those wanton and capricious acts of useless barbarity which stain the annals of the Seffavean monarchs of Persia; and the new aspect which the administration assumed under the later years of his rule, shows that the searching and summary justice of the scimitar and bowstring had proved, at least for the time, an effectual remedy for the manifold disorders which the

imbecility of the sovereigns since Soliman had suffered to take root, and which had reached their climax at this juncture. The janissaries, who had disposed, according to their lawless pleasure, alike of the throne of the sultan and the property of the citizen, were reduced to mute and awe-stricken obedience: the spahis were reformed, and deprived of the public domains which they had usurped: the profligate peculation, before which the interior revenues of the state had almost disappeared, was checked by prompt punishment of the offenders, and by the institution of a new and more accurate system of finance regulation while the numerous revolts which had

distracted the provinces, every where disappeared or were crushed, and the ancient frontiers were re-established by the conclusion of a triumphant peace with Persia. The Ottoman empire, in a word, which seemed on the eve of disruption at the accession of Mourad, received, under his fierce but energetic sway, an infusion of new life, and continued to maintain its ancient formidable aspect in the eyes of Europe till the end of the century, when the defeat of Vienna, and the disastrous war which succeeded, broke for ever the spell of Turkish power, and prepared the gradual but inevitable decline which marked its history during the course of the eighteenth century.

Ir not unfrequently happens that some modest youth, some third cousin perhaps, or other indescribably far off relative, who has written, be it prose or poetry, play or novel, desires above all things that we should condescend to read his production, and give him our candid opinion upon its merits. We, with as many turns and doubles as a frightened hare, endeavour to make our escape from the honour about to be conferred. If escape is impossible, we practise as many tricks and artifices in order to convey, in the gentlest of all manners, some advice, which in substance is extremely unpalatable. Of these matters, however, we shall not speak at present; for we are just now in the vein of amiable and indulgent criticism. Amongst the manuscripts which have come into our hands, there is one that has this singularity connected with it; the writer seems really, and in good faith, to have no idea of publishing, to have never contemplated the use of printer's ink. When we mention that this performance is a tragedy !-it will be said at once that it would be mere nonsense to print it; for all this he is not the less singular in his abstinence.

The knowledge that this manuscript, after lying a certain space of time in desk or escritoire, will assuredly be one day torn up in a general massacre of papers, gave it, by one of those caprices of feeling which even critics are subject to, a species of interest in our eyes. "What a world was here!" we said pathetically, as we turned over

the close written pages, "what a world of sentiment, and thought, and character, put together doubtless with infinite pains, and not without bursts of triumph, by this industrious architect

and all for nothing!" We glanced at a line here and there, not with the design of forming any judgment on its deserts-we looked on it as a doomed thing-but with an idle curiosity to see what it was that had been so carefully penned, only to be destroyed. The style seemed to be, at least, without affectation, simple, and not so far removed from the conversation of men as to be dramatically improbable; the thoughts, too, were intelligible, and there was a touch of melody in the verse; a matter which our playwrights very wisely give themselves little concern about. last, as we continued this desultory perusal, we took the generous resolution of extracting some fragments from the poem, and thus saving them from that total oblivion for which they were destined. Our readers must determine how far we have allowed a caprice of good-nature to steal a march upon our critical judgment.

At

The subject of this piece—it is called "King Edgar, a play"-is the well known story of the Lady Elfrida, whom Athelwold was sent to woo for King Edgar, and whom he, by treacherously decrying her beauty, obtained for himself. Dunstan, of course, is a conspicuous figure. Fortunately we have no account to give of the plot; it follows the history with great fide

lity. In the characters only is there any attempt at invention; and here, as the historical narrative is very meagre, some recourse to imagination was unavoidable. Of Athelwold the writer has made a young nobleman, who, having been educated at Rome, is not only complete in all the accomplishments of a thane, but in all the learning of his age; a man of honour, whose last bitterness, when the king discovers his deceit, is not the loss of life, but remorse for the unworthy falsehood he had uttered. Edgar is such as we suppose all men would figure him, brave, but ostentatious, fond of power, but devoted to pleasure. The priest, at once ambitious and

fanatical, is portrayed in Dunstan ; but his fanaticism is represented as that of a man of deep reflection; and we are interested in him by reason of those struggles which we see passing in his own mind.

Amongst Edgar's amours, history has recorded one with a fair nun, whom he contrived to carry off from a convent. She is here met with under the name of Gilbertha; and the first scene represents the monarch and his new mistress, who are interrupted in their toying by the ghostly Dunstan. The penance which this subtle priest thinks fit to inflict upon the king, is matter of history.

Edgar.

Come, I will kiss them.

Dunstan.