preying upon each other from want? Why then recur to foreign aid? Parga is sufficient both to nourish and to defend you. Ali cannot take her by land he cannot blockade her by sea, by which your countrymen in the Islands can always supply you with food, and which, in case of extremity, will always afford you an easy escape; though I, for my part, let the danger be ever so great, would never exhort you to go forth vagrants and beggars, with your wives and children, into a foreign land. Let us all die here at home; and when no way of safety remains for the city, set it on fire, that these Infidels may only triumph over our ruined houses and mangled carcasses. However, this danger cannot last long: for as much as Ali is now old, and his head is always under the sword of the Sultan, whose wrath, though it has so long slept, should it at length awake, no Turk will be able to escape. At all events, as long as you remain masters of your own city, so long will you be able to follow that line of conduct, which, under the mercy of God, circumstances may render fit. The Infidels, indeed, may force you to give them battle, and reduce you to great extremity: yet you will slay many of them to appease the blessed souls of so many Christians slain by them. But, once garrisoned by strangers, you will be subject to the will of another; you will not be able to use good fortune, should it ever befal you; and you will for ever lose the right of defending your country, and even of burying yourselves beneath its ruins near your dear forefathers."

"For

In spite of this remonstrance, the majority of the meeting resolved to accede to the propositions of the English, and to sign the declaration required; upon which the old man, refusing to set his hand to it, finally reminded them to be careful in enforcing the condition expressed in the English offer, that they should follow the fate of the Seven Islands. you may be sure," added he, "that the English will employ every art of sophistry to subject as much as they can of Greece to the Porte, in hope of strengthening it against the dreaded preponderance of the Russians. Perhaps when they have once acknowledged your natural dependence upon Corfu, they will be unable to betray you, without sacrificing at the same time all the Seven Islands to the Infidels; a sacrifice which would cover them with infamy, although in proportion as men are powerful, they care less for dishonour." He then made his admonition be recorded in the archives of the city; and the assembly, coming out of the church before daylight, drew up and addressed to the English commander the following explicit declaration.

"We, undersigned Primates of Parga, engage, on behalf of the population, that at the moment when the frigates of his Britannic Majesty shall appear before our fortress, we will subject our country and territories to the protection of the invincible arms of Great Britain, and will plant on the walls of our fortress her glorious flag-it being the determination of our country to follow the fate of the Seven Islands, as we have always been under the same jurisdiction.-17th March, 1814."

In the course of the day, the Bacchante appeared in the roadstead; and the British flag displayed, not from the ramparts of the citadel, but from a low spot near the shore. Our officers were not satisfied with this; and, after some negociation, intimated, that unless the inhabitants hoisted the British flag on the proper flagstaff of the citadel, they would make sail the day after, and leave them to their fate. The French commander had threatened to blow up the town by firing the magazine, if any attempt was made to dislodge him; and some speedy and decided measure therefore now

became necessary. Next morning very early, a widow, pretending business with the commander, went into the citadel with the flag concealed under her clothes. She was followed by a lad who used to sell fruit and vegetables to the soldiers, and was accordingly admitted without suspicion. After ascertaining that everything was in the situation on which his friends had reckoned, he gave the signal, by pronouncing, as in the course of crying his vegetables, a Greek word on which they had previously agreed; and instantly the sentinels were knocked down, and a crowd of armed citizens sprung at once upon every point of the works, some mounting by escalades, and others by different passages. In a few minutes they were complete masters of the place, and the British flag was triumphantly hoisted on the top of the castle. The Bacchante immediately came up to the fort. The French garrison were allowed to capitulate honourably; and, on the 22d of March, Sir Charles Gordon landed with his detachment, sent off the French to Corfu, and with his troops took full and solemn possession of the place. Some time after, Lord Bathurst, by the command of the Prince Regent, expressed to the King's commissioners for the government of the Ionian islands, the royal approbation of what had been done in regard to the occupation of Parga.

We come now to the last act of the tragedy. The Congress of Vienna was in session when this little republic, and the greater part of the Ionian islands, had been thus taken possession of by the English; and their policy in 1814 being to strengthen Austria, as a counterpoise both to France and to Russia, all those places would probably have been made over to that power, along with the Istrian, Dalmatian, and Venetian provinces that were then assigned to her. But after the return of Napoleon, the tardiness of Austria, and the great influence acquired by Russia in the Congress of Paris after the victory at Waterloo, led to a different, and, in so far as the Pargiots were concerned, much more fatal arrangement. The islands were left to us but it was agreed, in pretended conformity with the treaty of 1800, that the ex-Venetian towns on the coast should be given up conditionally, and in full sovereignty to the Porte-or, in other words, to Ali, who took the title of its officer, and was already in possession of all of them but Parga. In conformity with this arrangement, Parga was totally extinguished, and its bare and deserted walls delivered over to the barbarian by the agents of that free government to whose honour it had committed itself! By what motives our negociators were induced to consent to this miserable sacrifice, it would now be idle to enquire. The common opinion on the Continent is, that Lord Castlereagh was cajoled into it by the Russians, who wished to abase. our national character, and to embroil us with the Turks, by making us dependent on such a neighbour as Ali for the provisioning of our forces in the Islands. But for our parts, we have no great faith in those refinements of Machiavelian policy; and are of opinion, that the worst and most fatal acts of public men are far more frequently the fruit of mere ignorance and inattention, than of deep-laid schemes of perfidy or ambition. We think it by no means unlikely that the Noble Lord was actually ignorant of the compact made between our officers and the Pargiots, and are almost certain, that he was not at all aware of the vast importance of that place for the victualling of the islands which we were to retain ;-while it is difficult to imagine, that he was correctly informed either as to the tenor of the treaty of 1800, on which he professed to act, or as to the events that had subsequently occurred to discharge all claims under it. Such ignorance, we certainly

VOL. IV.

2

think, is not less criminal in a minister, than the intentional violation of his duties, which leads to the same results; but it is rather more credible; and requires to be even more loudly reprobated, both as more likely to recur, and more possible to be prevented.

We have spoken of all those occurrences in the calm and dispassionate tone of history; and trust we shall not be thought to deviate from it when we add, that an arrangement more ungenerous, cruel, and unjust to those who were the objects of it, and at once more dishonourable and injurious to those who conducted it, cannot well be imagined, than that we are now considering. In the first place, it was most impolitic and injurious to our interests, as possessors of the Ionian Islands; because Parga was almost the only remaining channel through which they could be supplied with provisions; and the Turk, who was known to be thirsting to regain them, would thus not only have a prodigious advantage in the event of hostilities, but would be constantly tempted to seek a pretext for hostility, in order to make use of this advantage. In the second place, it was in the face of a treaty recently entered into by our officers, and subsequently approved of by our commissioners in the islands, and by the Lord Bathurst, in name of the Sovereign. We know very well that it may be argued, that our officers had no proper powers to enter into such a treaty; and that the approbation of the Prince Regent, however generally expressed, should be understood as applying only to the military occupation of a place previously held by the French. But when it is considered, that the place had actually been delivered up to us on the faith of that treaty, and retained, to our great profit, for upwards of a year, without the least surmise that any of its articles were to be objected to,—and especially that the consequence of our tardy disavowal of it was, not to replace things in statu quo, as ought to have been done upon the most rigorous application of the rules of diplomacy-but to make over to their bitterest enemy, as a property or conquest of our own, that which, but for such a treaty, we should never have had the power to dispose of—it must appear that there never was a case in which this special pleading, or quibbling rather, on the law of nations, could be resorted to to with so ill a grace or so little plausibility.—But, in the third place, the treaty of 1800, to which we pretended to recur, had been annulled and abandoned by all the parties to it, and especially by the Turks, over and over again, from the year when it was adopted down to the year 1815. The leading stipulation in that treaty was the establishment of the Seven Islands, under the joint protection of the Porte and Russia. But, so early as 1802, the Porte admitted Great Britain as a guarantee of their independence; and, after the peace of Tilsit, they were all turned into French Colonies, with the assent of Russia. It was sufficiently manifest, then, that the whole of that original treaty was abrogated and gone. If any thing more, however, was wanting, it was supplied by the transactions of 1809, when the Turks themselves concluded a peace with Bonaparte, by which they confirmed to him the whole of those conquests, including Parga, in which he had placed a garrison. Soon after, Lord Collingwood took from him Zante and Cephalonia; and the Turk then professing neutrality, our ambassador at Constantinople solemnly protested, "that some of the Ionian Islands having been delivered from the French by our arms, without the assistance of any of the other powers by whom they should have been protected, his Majesty has a right to proceed to the settlement of those islands without consulting themand that he will accordingly do so, if the Porte will not now renew its gua

rantee for their protection;" and not only was this guarantee refused, but their pretended neutrality openly violated-not only by supplying the enemy at Corfu with stores and provisions, in defiance of our blockade, but by allowing our merchantmen to be taken and condemned as prizes by the French privateers within the bounds of the Ottoman ports and harbours. Possession was accordingly retained of these conquests, and of the others made in 1814, without any reclamation or complaint on the part of the Turks. In the Congress of that year, the basis of the whole proceeding was, that all conquests made from France by any of the allies should be at the disposal of the whole powers armed against her; but the Porte was not of this number, having all along remained at peace with Napoleon, and therefore had no right nor interest in any partition of those conquests. Accordingly, the independence of the Seven Islands, and of their dependencies, was expressly stipulated by several treaties signed with Russia, Austria, and France; and, in the Congress of Paris in 1815 and 1816, the Turk had no minister or accredited agent, and was no party to their proceedings-so that nothing could be more preposterous and unmeaning, than to refer, as to a document of binding authority, to a treaty long ago and repeatedly annulled by all the parties to it-and to a stipulation in it, introduced solely for the benefit of a power that was in fact making no claim-and of whose claims it was at any rate impossible to take cognizance, without utterly disregarding the very basis and foundation of the whole scheme of adjustment. If we had any right at all to dispose of Parga, it was on the supposition that we had taken it by force of arms from France;-but all conquests from France were to be distributed among the powers allied to control her-and the Porte neither was one of these powers, nor one of the parties assembled to deliberate on the partition. She neither had any right, nor pretended to any.

But in the fourth place, and finally,-if all these things had been otherwise-if we had had no interest to keep Parga from the Turks-if they had never renounced and annulled the treaty of 1800-if they had been belligerents allied against France, and parties to the Congress which was to dispose of what that alliance had wrested from her; we say, with the most unlimited confidence, that all this would have afforded no justification, or apology even, for the act of which we are now speaking, and would still have left it, though stripped, no doubt, of some aggravations, one of the most flagrant instances of impolicy and oppression of which history has preserved any record;-and that because what was then done in pretended implement of the treaty of 1800, was no implement of that treaty, but a mere sanction to the Porte to violate it in all that gave it a colour of justice, as it had already shown its determination to violate it. That treaty, no doubt, after stipulating as its main object for the independence of the Seven Islands, did also provide that the political dominion or patronage of the exVenetian towns on the coast should be given up to the Porte;-but then it was an integral part and express condition of this stipulation, "that no Mahomedan should acquire property or settle in any of those towns-nor build mosques within their territory-nor change their laws or internal polity, nor levy taxes or duties beyond those that were payable of old by the Venetians;—and that the powers and functions of the bey or officer who was to attend to the interest of the Ottoman in the place, should be determined to the entire satisfaction of the republic of the Seven Islands."-These were the stipulations of the treaty of 1800;-but when we thought fit to revive

that treaty in 1815, and to plead the necessity of adhering to it, as à reason for disavowing the compact by which, and by which alone, we had got possession of the place in question, we did not think fit to renew any one of these stipulations-but gave up those who had trusted every thing to our generosity and honour, without even a recommendation to the mercy of their most inveterate enemy. Nor could we possibly suppose that these conditions would, without express stipulation, be fulfilled for Parga, which had been broken in every other quarter. Ali had taken possession of the other towns referred to in the treaty of 1800, not in virtue of that treaty, but by force of arms-and all, except one, before the treaty had been thought of. It was notorious that he had dealt with them all like conquered places--built mosques and seraglios within them-subverted the laws, alienated the property, and enslaved the people. He had afterwards made the same attempt repeatedly on Parga-and had only been prevented from reducing it to the same condition, by the valour of its inhabitants, and the extraordinary strength of its position. In these we have seen that the wisest of its citizens were still for confiding, when it was given up to us, and to our promises of protection, in 1814—and in less than two years after, it was transferred unconditionally to Ali, who never disguised his intention to treat it like a conquered place, nor pretended the least regard to the stipulation in its favour contained in that treaty of 1800, in conformity to which we held ourselves bound to place it at his disposal!-Nothing, we think, but utter helplessness could have extorted from us a sacrifice so lamentable and degrading;—and if England, in the Congress of 1815, to which the Turk was not so much as a party, had actually been in such dread of the Turk as to be obliged to do an unjust and dishonourable act to appease him, we cannot help thinking, that it would have been less humiliating to have made the melancholy submission directly and openly, than to seek to disguise it under the pretence of fulfilling a treaty no longer in existence, and which we did not even attempt to enforce, in those reciprocal conditions under which alone the party to whom we yielded could ever have pretended a right to its fulfilment.

If minor considerations could have any chance of being listened to, when those higher ones had failed, it might also, one would think, have occurred, that the Porte could not be very seriously desirous to increase the power of a subjet already so formidable-and that the whole history of Ali had shown, both that concessions increased his insolence, and that he could never be a good neighbour to those of whom he did not stand in awe. It is true that, like other savages, he hates those whom he is compelled to fear; but it is not less true, that fear is the only feeling by which his ferocity can be controlled. The Russian commanders always treated him with insult, and were always flattered and courted in return. One of them struck one of his Beys in his presence, upon which the tyrant quietly withdrew, and propitiated the offender with presents. In the same way, after murdering General Roze, who had treated him with uniform kindness, he submitted to the daily checks and menaces of Pouqueville, by whom he was replaced. The instances of his abusing the good nature of the English are innumerable. Having been permitted by Sir Hudson Lowe to repair two custom houses on a point opposite to our island of Santa Moro, he instantly changed them into two strong forts, with batteries commanding the island, and capable any day of reducing it. On another occasion, he seized on a citizen of Prevesa, who was brother to the contractor who supplied our troops in