unimportant one with reference to the numbers engaged, must not be omitted. Intelligence had reached the Russian commanderin-chief, which induced him to despatch Lieutenant-colonel Boutenieff with a battalion of infantry, a squadron of Cossacks, and a couple of light field-pieces, to intercept Abdullah, the bey of Daghistan, on his way to Schamil with a large supply of muchneeded arms and ammunition, escorted by about 500 men only. Boutenieff, a very zealous officer, marched with such speed, that he reached the spot in which he was to lie in ambush at about nine on the following morning-two hours before his prescribed time. Abdullah had also marched with unusual celerity, so that when the Russians halted, he was not more than a verst (about a mile and a quarter) distant; and but for the timely warning of a scout, would have debouched in a few minutes from the hilly ground by which he was concealed into the valley lying between him and Boutenieff. As it was, the bey's position was nearly a desperate one—to retreat being almost as perilous as to advance, as he must necessarily be seen by whichever way he emerged from the ravine in which his men and the precious convoy they had in charge were for the moment screened. In this extremity, a Pole, of the name of Kovinski, a deserter from the Russian army, in which, since the capitulation of Warsaw, he had been, with many thousand others of his countrymen, compelled to serve, ventured his life for the chance of striking a good blow at the destroyers of Polish nationality. Abdullah knew his man; and after a brief conference together, a paper was written and deposited with great apparent cunning within the lining of Kovinski's boot; and trusty messengers were sent off, by paths only traversible by accustomed and unencumbered mountaineers, to Schamil-a distance of about ten versts by the way they took, and perhaps half as much again by the ordinary road. A quarter of an hour passed, and then Kovinski, who had accomplished a considerable détour unobserved, was seen galloping past the Russian ambush. To the challenge of the Cossack vedettes, he replied by setting spurs to his horse; but he was quickly overtaken, and brought before Boutenieff. He first said he was neither a Pole nor a deserter, but his tongue, and the dress he wore, were sufficient denial of that assertion; and the lieutenant-colonel informed him, that his only chance of saving his neck from a speedy halter, was by rendering his old masters some essential service at the expense of his new friends. Kovinski sullenly replied: "That he knew nothing of any importance, and could therefore reveal nothing.' These words were

hardly spoken, when the men, who were searching his person and clothes, lit upon the concealed note, which, on being handed to the lieutenant-colonel, proved to be an obscurely-worded missive from Schamil himself to Abdullah, apparently reproaching him for his tardiness. There could be no further doubt of the prisoner's character and vocation; still the Pole continued obstinately dumb, and it was not till the rope was actually round his neck, that his

firmness yielded to the terror of immediate death, and the promises of Boutenieff not only of life, but freedom and reward, if by his means the bey of Daghistan and his important convoy were captured. Kovinski, having reluctantly, as it seemed, consented to lead the Russian troops in the necessary direction, was placed in the centre of a clump of Cossacks, and securely fastened upon a horse behind one of them, who were all very distinctly charged, in his hearing, to shoot or spear him upon the slightest indication of treachery. The troops then moved on, and were soon lost in the gorges of the mountains. They had been marching about three hours, and, according to Kovinski, were approaching Abdullah's encampment, when suddenly a shrill cry, like that of a bird of prey screaming overhead, was heard, echoed with the quickness of thought by thousands of others, and at the same moment a multitude of Schamil's horsemen, commanded by the Imâm himself, burst out of the clefts of the surrounding hills upon the Russians. Resistance was vain-flight, which was almost as desperate, was alone attempted; and a score of Cossacks, and some half-a-dozen mounted officers, most of them wounded, were all that made their way out of the tumultuous massacre that immediately ensued, to the Russian head-quarters. Kovinski was killed, but whether he had been slain by friend or foe in the fierce hurlyburly, could not be ascertained.

These great successes inflamed the enthusiasm of the mountaineers to fever-pitch. Whatever enterprise the Imâm or his subordinates undertook, was almost sure to be carried victoriously through; and the imperial government were made aware, by dearly-bought experience, of the nature of the gigantic and utterly hopeless task in which they had so unwisely engaged. It was, however, resolved to make another strenuous effort to realise the Paskiewitch policy. In the event of failure, if we may judge from what has since actually occurred, it was arranged that, after the manner of the Circassian precedent-so that Western Europe may not be too wise in the matter-they should abandon, for a time at all events, the attempt to subjugate or control the south-eastern, as they already had the north-western mountain regions, and content themselves with holding their own in the plains, whilst awaiting as patiently as might be for some conjuncture favourable to the renewal of aggressive war. With this immediate and contingent purpose, the armies of the Caucasus were once more strongly reinforced; General Neidhart, who had been as unfortunate as General Grabbe, was, like him, recalled; and Prince Woronzoff left St Petersburg to assume the chief command, armed with the amplest powers, civil as well as military.

The first care of the prince-general, after selecting and concentrating the army with which he proposed to march against renowned Darga, the exact situation of which had, it was believed, been ascertained, was to organise his commissariat in an efficient manner. With this object, an officer was despatched to Astrakhan,

furnished with silver rubles to the amount, in English money, of L.180,000, for the purchase of provisions and other necessaries. The prince-general stumbled heavily at this his first important step in the enterprise assigned him. He never saw agent, money, or money's worth again; and after several weeks of impatient suspense, concluding that his envoy must have been intercepted, and the money transferred to Schamil's treasury, applied again to St Petersburg for the indispensable rubles. These and the necessary stores were at length obtained; and on the 13th of June 1845, a powerfully organised force of between 30,000 and 40,000 men, moved rapidly in the direction of Darga, the capture of which tremendous stronghold would, it was believed, regloss the tarnished lustre of the Russian arms. The troops were no sooner fairly in the mountains, than the resistance opposed to them assumed a determined, ferocious character. Every step was obstinately disputed; barricades formed of trunks of trees, fragments of rock, and double rows of strong stakes, the interstices filled up with earth, had been thrown across the narrow passes, and but for the Russian cannon, would have effectually barred the advance. As it was, the carnage at each of these positions, flanked as they all were by Schamil's tirailleurs, was terrific; and there were in one portion of the route eighteen barricades counted in as many miles! Still, slowly, and at a dreadful sacrifice of life, as it might be, the Russian columns_pressed steadily and resolutely on, and at last reached Darga-Darga! consisting of forty or fifty hut-houses on a lofty plateau, environed by enormous birch-trees! Worse even than this disappointment, the plateau was quickly found to be commanded by inaccessible rocksinaccessible, that is, from Darga-upon which the Imâm had, with keen military prevision, contrived to perch hundreds of his best marksmen, who shot down the Russian officers at their leisure, and almost with impunity. The place was clearly untenable for any length of time; but the troops required repose, and Prince Woronzoff was, moreover, exceedingly desirous of dating his bulletin of 'victory' from Darga. Prompt measures were therefore taken to check the fire of Schamil's rock-perched riflemen; and on the following day, Generals Von Klukerau, Passek, and Victoroff, were despatched with ten battalions to bring up a quantity of stores left behind under a strongly-posted and numerous guard. Schamil encountered these troops on their return; and a bitter fight ensued, in which the Russian generals Passek and Victoroff were killed, and Von Klukerau was barely enabled to rejoin Prince Woronzoff by sacrificing the stores he had been sent to bring up, his artillery, and heaps of wounded soldiers, whose writhing bodies tracked his march to the very verge of the plateau of Darga. The position of Prince Woronzoff was by this time well-nigh desperate. To force his way back with such terribly diminished numbers, in the face of the Imâm's hourly-increasing and now victorious forces, was felt to be out of the question; and

but for the highly-bribed treachery of two Caucasian prisoners, who undertook to convey a message, by a secret track across the mountains, to the fortress of Gersel-Aub, where General Freestag, one of the most energetic officers in the Russian service, was posted with a large force, the prince could not have escaped the shame and ruin of an unconditional surrender to Schamil and his mountaineers, whom he had but lately affected to hold so cheap! General Freestag marched instantly to Woronzoff's relief - -a movement unheard of by the Imâm till too late to arrest it. Immediately the junction of the Russian forces was effected, the retreat began, which, but for the almost frenzied exertions of the Generals Freestag and Von Klukerau, who commanded the rear-guard, and the desperate energy of the Russian artillerists, Schamil's furious and incessant assaults must have speedily changed, from a hurried and disorderly march, to a headlong flight. Even so, the Russian army, but a few days previously so elate with pride, and confident of facile victory, emerged from the mountains in such a wretchedly disorganised condition, that after halting at Jani Ouchi, in Georgia, where crestfallen Prince Woronzoff hoped tremblingly that he was tolerably safe, the mere sound of Schamil's advancing squadrons sufficed to create a disgraceful panic in their ranks; and when the mountaineers actually burst in amongst them, they broke almost immediately, after offering the faintest possible resistance, and were pursued and mercilessly cut down for many miles. More than 200 officers were slain in this disgraceful flight alone; and Prince Woronzoff could subsequently muster but about 12,000 out of the 50,000 men originally composing his own and General Freestag's armies.

4

Schamil Bey, after achieving this decisive blow, ravaged the plains with impunity, not in Georgia alone, but on the north of the Caucasian chain, carrying off numerous prisoners from under the very guns of the fortresses on the Kuban and the Terek. He failed in his attempts to storm Nucha and Zakatalé; but the aggressive war of Russia against the mountaineers was at an end, and there has since been no serious effort made to renew it. The latest intelligence, via St Petersburg, of the war in the Caucasus that we have seen, dated in August last, relates with pomp and circumstance an exploit by Lieutenant-colonel Prince Tschelokajeff, who, it seems, at the head of 746 militia and. 4 Don Cossacks, had chastised three villages, taken seventeen mountaineers prisoners, and obtained a booty of several head of cattle, with of course very trifling loss to the Russians-three killed and nine wounded only! To such puny dimensions, even as viewed through Muscovite spectacles, have Schamil and his lieutenants reduced the enterprises and successes of the puissant czar in this once tremendous conflict.

The Imâm, as soon as he was relieved of the active pressure of the Russian armies, is understood to have devoted his remarkable energies to the bringing about of a federal defensive union between

all the tribes of the Caucasus, which, if successfully accomplished, will render any future attack of Russia upon their independence utterly vain and ridiculous; for what power, what combination of powers, could hope to make a permanent impression on a tolerably united nation of hardy soldiers-fortressed by mountains covering an area almost equal to that of England and Wales-veterans in the only mode of warfare possible in such a country, and abundantly supplied with all the necessaries of life? The history of all mountain warfare supplies the answer, and none more strikingly than this one of the struggle in the Caucasus, in which the resources of a vauntedly powerful empire have been remorselessly exerted during many years against a heterogeneous and feuddivided mountain population, and the sole result has been bitter discomfiture and disgrace; beside so draining and crippling the finances of the Emperor of all the Russias, as to compel him to the humiliation of soliciting the merchants and money-lenders of Great Britain for the means of constructing a railway between his two capitals!

The final 6 pacification' of the Caucasus-so perseveringly promised as the certain result of each successive campaign, by the victory' gentlemen who write, or used to write such a bold hand in the St Petersburg Gazette-may be regarded as substantially effected by the only mode, as our own comparatively trifling Afghan experience teaches us, such a people, so situated, can be pacified' namely, by ceasing to molest them; and although we may be sure the northern emperor will never confess a defeat, it is not the less certain that he has been wise enough to tacitly, with the quietest, least obtrusive grace possible, submit to one.

6