poets and beauties from Charles the Second to Queen Anne. We were first disposed to echo her question "who cares to inquire after the original of their Belindas and Clorindas,-their Chloes, Delias, and Phillisses;" but they assume, under her pen, a vivacity and interest, which, Heaven pardon her! is widely foreign to truth.

Stella and Vanessa next occupy her attention, and Dean Swift meets with harsh treatment at her hands. The general tone of her remarks on the great satirist, may be gathered from the following extract.

"Thus perished these two innocent, warm-hearted, and accomplished women; so rich in all the graces of their sex-so formed to love and be loved, to bless and to be blessed,-sacrifices to the demoniac pride of the man whom they had loved and trusted."

This is severe, and we think unjust; the apparent duplicity in Swift's conduct can be easily explained, without accusing him of brutal selfishness. He had, from an early period of life, studied mankind with no ordinary power of observation, and calmly estimated the means of happiness the world presented; he adopted the course which appeared in his peculiar case the most excellent, and finally in part abandoned it for the sake of another. Miss Johnson, celebrated under the name of Stella, was the daughter of Sir William Temple's steward. Sir William, it is well known, was Swift's earliest influential friend; the poet resided in his house, and must then have formed the first acquaintance with the lady. He quarrelled with his protector in 1694, and left him when she was about fourteen years of age.. Five years after, Swift was appointed to the living of Laracor in Ireland, and Sir William dying at the same time, Stella, accompanied with a Mrs. Dingley, considerably older than herself, at the invitation of the Dean, passed over into Ireland and resided near him. This state of things continued for sixteen years; he never, in a single instance, during all that time, had an interview with either Stella or her companion, not witnessed by a third person; and proposed to realize Platonic friendship,—a species of sublimated intercourse the lady it appears did not appreciate. Finally, in 1716, he was privately married to her, but their meetings being conducted with the same punctilio, the connexion was kept secret until her death, which took place eleven years after. There is no authentic testimony that Swift ever in his life professed any thing but simple friendship for this woman. He had a clear, and, it would seem, prophetic, intimation of the terrible ruin that awaited his intellect; for years he constantly prayed for immediate death, and his farewell to a friend was accompanied with a wish they might never again see each other. A circumstance that occurred during his residence in Ireland, is painfully indicative of the misery occasioned by this

unrelenting thought. Riding in the country with some acquaintances, he suddenly passed before them, with great rapidity, until out of view; when his companions came up, they found him dismounted from his horse, and in violent agitation. "Gentlemen," said he to them, "pray join your hearts in fervent prayer with mine, that I may never be like this oak tree, decayed and withered at top, while the other parts are sound." With this consciousness of approaching evil, was it not in mercy to Stella, of whose attachment he was aware, as well as justice to himself, that he long avoided a connexion, which, by accumulating petty cares, might bring the curse of insanity prematurely upon him?

We have said that Swift was aware of Stella's deep attachment to him; and he returned it as far as fidelity to himself would permit. Proud and splenetic in his very nature, he wrote, as he tells us, to vex, not to please, mankind; and Stella, with the rest of his friends, must have occasionally suffered from his disposition yet it was her own choice, and not wholly without a recompense. The inviolate decorum observed by Swift in all their interviews, shielded her from calumny; and through him she enjoyed the first society of the age. The only part of Swift's conduct that will not admit of satisfactory explanation, is the secrecy preserved relative to his marriage; in his case, the reasons which induced the ceremony would require its recognition; it should not have been hidden for years; so that at last, when alarmed by her declining health, he urged its public acknowledgment, she felt and answered it was too late. The delicacy, the pride, the suppressed tenderness of her woman's mind

"Whispered the o'er fraught heart and bade it break."

And she died the victim to a presentiment of his own future madness, and a vain attempt to avert it.

The story of Vanessa, (Miss Van Homrigh,) is briefly this; and surely it exhihits no "demoniae pride" in Swift. During the year 1709, the Dean visited intimately the family of a Mrs. Van Homrigh, at London; and presuming upon his superior years, sacerdotal profession, and known admiration for poor Stella, he assumed as a friend the direction of her eldest daughter's (Vanessa's) studies. The susceptible young lady became deeply enamoured of her preceptor, and with uncontroulable ardour confessed to him her passion, and demanded his hand. The Dean answered her by writing Cadenus and Vanessa, in which, after expressing shame and disappointment that he had been so misunderstood, he alludes to his own insensibility, his declining age, and the scandal that might attach to his character if he listened to her proposals. One might suppose this was suf ficiently explicit; but the lady was still unsatisfied: she follow

ed him to Ireland, and continued to harass him with solicitations, which Swift uniformly met with coldness and raillery. He was acquainted probably with the violence of her disposition, and wishing gradually to dissipate her fondness, he still at times visited her, and urged her acceptance of the proposal of marriage of a reverend brother, which she declined. At last, in 1723, disgusted and exasperated, in no measured terms he communicated to her his union with Stella, and Miss Van Homrigh was killed by disappointment and refined jealousy. She survived, however, sufficiently long, to cancel a will made in his favour, and order that after her death their correspondence should be published; but her executors, in kindness to the lady's character, suppressed her own fervent epistles, and gave the Dean's letters, passionless and correct, to the world.

We can readily account for the opprobrium that after misfortune and death attached to Swift's name. His bitter sneers fell upon the world like the dragon's teeth which Jason scattered on the rank soil of Colchos; they gradually quickened into a malignant life, but dissimilar in one respect to the fable, did not venture to assail him until he was destitute of weapon and power. Those, who, while he lived, had writhed under his satire and been silent, took a mean revenge upon his memory, and the public gave easy credence to their falsehoods. It is at length time that a great writer should receive the yet higher praise of having lived as an honest man; we may at present not only feel respect for the boldness that singly dared mankind, and exposed their weakness; but commiseration and humility, that a mind so powerful, should have been utterly destroyed in its rational endeavour to avoid calamity.

Our author's two subsequent chapters are devoted to Pope; resembling his friend Swift in a more delicate though less withering power of sarcasm, Pope found in Martha Blount, what his cotemporary wished, but did not find in Stella-a companion who would relieve with a softer charm, the bickerings and jealousies of an eminent career. "Her undefined connexion with Pope, though it afforded matter for mirth and wonder, never affected her reputation while living; and has rendered her name as immortal as our language and our literature." The celebrated lady Montague attracted Pope's admiration; but there being a great deal of vanity on both sides, they soon quarrelled and became the bitterest enemies. Poetical old bachelors, such as Gray, Collins, etc. our author mercifully bestows a few pages upon; perhaps as much as they deserve, in a work professedly illustrating the influence of the sex, which their celibacy tacitly disavowed. Madame du Chatelet, the "respectable Emilie" of Voltaire, is the subject of some discriminating remarks. She was

a woman of superior abilities and attainments, but miserably deficient in all that constitutes feminine worth.

"Madame du Chatelet maintained her power over him (Voltaire) for twenty years; during five of which they resided in her chateau at Cirey, under the countenance of her husband; he was a good sort of man, but seems to have been considered by these two geniuses and their guests as a complete nonentity. He was Le bon homme, le vilain petit Trichateau,' whom it was a task to speak to, and a penance to amuse. Every day, after coffee, Monsieur rose from the table with all the docility imaginable, leaving Voltaire and Madame to recite verses, translate Newton, philosophise, dispute, and do the honours of Cirey to the brilliant society who had assembled under his roof."

She died in her forty-fourth year. Madame de Gouverné was an earlier flame of Voltaire's:-they were soon separated, and after an absence of fifty years, the poet paid her a visit which terrified them both: a half century had played no gentle game with their personal appearance. Voltaire returned to his companions exclaiming-" Ah, mes amis! je viens de passer a l'autre bord du Cocyte," and the lady immediately sent him his youthful portrait, which she had preserved through the long interim of separation. Madamé D'Houdetot, the Sophie of Rousseau, and the Doris of St. Lambert, is the theme of a few subsequent remarks; plain in figure and face, she owes her celebrity to the fascination of manner and conversation. She was rather profligate, in a very abandoned age; but with better culture, the soil was capable of better fruit. Our author concludes with several finely wrought allusions to the heroines of modern poetry; some, over whom the grave has recently closed, and "some that even now move gracefully through the shades of domestic life."

We close our notice of the Loves of the Poets, with an impression very favourable; the sickly and morbid feelings that so much disfigured the author's former production, the Diary of an Ennuyée, have been repressed; and notwithstanding the exaggeration into which she is at times betrayed by enthusiasm for her subject, we may commend the work as frequently beautiful, and throughout entertaining and correct.

ART. II.-RUSSIA AND TURKEY.

1.-History of the Ottoman Empire, from its establishment, till the year 1828. By EDWARD UPHAM, Esq. M. R. A. S. Author of "the History of Budhism," &c. 2 vols. Edinburgh: 1829.

2.-History of Russia and of Peter the Great. By GENERAL COUNT PHILIP DE SEGUR, Author of the History of Napoleon's Expedition to Russia in 1812. London: 1829.

JE me défie de l'histoire et même de celle que j'ai écrite;such is the reflection with which the industrious Levesque closes the preface to the improved edition of his history of Russia; "I distrust History, and even that which I have written." And yet Levesque has gained the approbation and the confidence of men who were well fitted to investigate the value of evidence, and has met with general acceptance even among the Russians themselves. As his narrative and its continuation approach our own times, the influence of the public mind in France may not unfrequently be discerned in the colouring which he gives to events, and his continuator must indeed be read with extreme distrust. For all this, the work of Levesque still continues to hold the reputation of being the most convenient and trustworthy history of the Russian empire.

The popular works, of which we have placed the titles at the head of this article, but which we shall follow very little, are convenient and interesting books, on topics to which public attention is at present very generally directed. The first, a portion of Constable's very neat miscellany, contains a concise, and, we believe, generally an accurate sketch of the public events in the history of the Turkish empire.* It is on the whole a convenient and satisfactory sketch.

The most elaborate work of Von Hammer, reaches as yet no farther than the year 1623. Thus far, we have four volumes of it, containing almost three thousand pages. The profound erudition of the author gives it a high and permanent value. He is undoubtedly the most eminent oriental scholar that has ever appeared in Germany; he has, except in Sylvester de Sacy, no rival in Europe. But his acquisitions are not limited to the east. He is well versed in the several dialects of the cultivated nations of western Europe; and cherishes the language of Calderon as of Saadi. We mention it as a proof of the rapid circula

We would observe, that the name Turks is never applied to themselves by the subjects of the Ottoman race. It is considered a term of reproach, and by them is always used to express contempt for rudeness and want of culture.