saluted the squadrons of gilded cuirasses with cries of Long live King John Sobieski!' and the cry, repeated along the Christian line, startled the Mussulman force. 6 "Sobieski charged in the centre, and directed his attack against the scarlet tent of the sultan, surrounded by his faithful squadrons-distinguished by his splendid plume, his bow, and quiver of gold, which hung on his shoulder-most of all by the enthusiasm which his presence everywhere excited. He advanced, exclaiming, Non nobis, Domine, sed tibi sit gloria!' The Tartars and the spahis fled when they heard the name of the Polish hero repeated from one end to the other of the Ottoman lines. • By Allah,' exclaimed Sultan Gieray, 'the king is with them!' At this moment the moon was eclipsed, and the Mahometans beheld with dread the crescent waning in the heavens. "At the same time, the hussars of Prince Alexander, who formed the leading column, broke into a charge amidst the national cry, God defend Poland!' The remaining squadrons, led by all that was noblest and bravest in the country, resplendent in arms, buoyant in courage, followed at the gallop. They cleared without drawing bridle, a ravine, at which infantry might have paused, and charged furiously up the opposite bank. With such vehemence did they enter the enemy's ranks, that they fairly cut the army in two,-justifying thus the celebrated saying of that haughty nobility to one of their kings, that with their aid no reverse was irreparable; and that if the heaven itself were to fall, they would support it on the points of their lances. "The shock was so violent that almost all the lances were splintered. The Pachas of Aleppo and of Silistria were slain on the spot; four other pachas fell under the sabres of Jablonowski. At the same time Charles of Lorraine had routed the force of the principalities, and threatened the Ottoman camp. Kara Mustapha fell at once from the heights of confidence to the depths of despair. 'Can you not aid me?' said he to the Kara of the Crimea. 'I know the King of Poland,' said he, ' and I tell you, that with such an enemy we have no chance of safety but in flight.' Mustapha in vain strove to rally his troops; all, seized with a sudden pa. nic, fled, not daring to lift their eyes to heaven. The cause of Europe, of Christianity, of civilisation, had prevailed. The wave of the Mussulman power had retired, and retired never to return. "At six in the evening, Sobieski enter ed the Turkish camp. He arrived first at the quarters of the vizier. At the entrance of that vast enclosure a slave met him, and presented him with the charger and golden bridle of Mustapha. He took the bridle, and ordered one of his followers to set out in haste for the Queen of Poland, and say that he who owned that bridle was vanquished; then planted his standard in the midst of that armed caravansera of all the nations of the East, and ordered Charles of Lorraine to drive the besiegers from the trenches before Vienna. It was already done; the Janizzaries had left their posts on the approach of night, and, after sixty days of open trenches, the imperial city was delivered. "On the following morning the magnitude of the victory appeared. One hundred and twenty thousand tents were still standing, notwithstanding, the attempts at their destruction by the Turks; the innumerable multitude of the Orientals had disappeared; but their spoils, their horses, their camels, their splendour, loaded the ground. The king at ten approached Vienna. He passed through the breach, whereby but for him on that day the Turks would have found an entrance. At his approach the streets were cleared of their ruins; and the people, issuing from their cellars and their tottering houses, gazed with enthusiasm on their deliverer. They followed him to the church of the Augustins, where, as the clergy had not arrived, the king himself chanted Te Deum. This service was soon after performed with still greater solemnity in the cathedral of St Stephen; the king joined with his face to the ground. It was there that the priest used the inspired words- There was a man sent from heaven, and his name was John.'"-III. 50. 101. During this memorable campaign, Sobieski, who through life was a tender and affectionate husband, wrote daily to his wife. At the age of fifty-four he had lost nothing of the tenderness and enthusiasm of his earlier years. In one of them he says, “I read all your letters, my dear and incomparable Maria, thrice over; once when I receive them, once when I retire to my tent and am alone with my love, once when I sit down to answer them. I beseech you, my beloved, do not rise so early; no health can stand such exertions; if you do, you will destroy my health, and what is worse, injure your own, which is my sole consola tion in this world.”. When offered which has taken place in France since the throne of Poland, it was at first · her political convulsions commenced, proposed that he should divorce his and the new field which their genius wife, and marry the widow of the has opened up in historical disquisilate king, to reconcile the contending tions. On comparing the historians faction. “I am not yet a king,” said of the two countries since the restohe, “ and have contracted no obliga- ration, it seems as if they were teemtions towards the nation : Let them ing with the luxuriance of a virgin resume their gift; I disdain the throne soil; while we are sinking under the if it is to be purchased at such a sterility of exhausted cultivation. price." Steadily resisting, as we trust we shall It is superfluous, after these quo- ever do, the fatal march of French tations, to say any thing of the merits innovation, we shall yet never be of M. Salvandy's work. It unites, found wanting in yielding due praise in a rare degree, the qualities of phi- to the splendour of French talent; losophical thought with brilliant and and in the turn which political spevivid description; and is one of the culation has recently taken among numerous instances of the vast su- the most elevated minds in their periority of the Modern French His- active metropolis, we are not withtorians to most of those of whom out hopes that the first rays of the Great Britain, in the present age, can dawn are to be discerned, which is boast. If any thing could reconcile destined to compensate to mankind us to the march of revolution, it is for the darkness and blood of the the vast developement of talent revolution. THE EGLANTINE. BY DELTA. The sun was setting in the summer west From early morn the day. had o'er me passed It is a melancholy thing, ('twas thus Time and Fate Year after year such alteration find Or make, that, when we measure infancy With boyhood-boyhood with maturer youthAnd with each other manhood's ripened years, Our own selves with our own selves—there is seen, Less difference 'tween the acorn and the oak, Than that which was, with that which is : -But yet, So melt insensibly day into day, Month into month, the summer's mellowing heat To yellow autumn-a vicissitude Unjarring, though continuous, that we seem To know not of Life's onward voyage, until Earth's headlands are lost sight of in the deaths Of those we prized-rocks interrupt our pathsOr shipwreck threatens in fate's lowering storm. Thus pondering as I paced, my wanderings led To a lone river bank of yellow sand, The loved haunt of the ouzel, whose blithe wing, Wanton'd from stone to stone,--and, on a mound Of verdurous turf with wild-fowers diamonded, (Harebell and lychnis, thyme and camomile,) Sprang in the majesty of natural pride An Eglantine-the red rose of the woodIts cany boughs with threatening prickles arm'd, Rich in its blossoms and sweet-scented leaves. The wild-rose has a nameless spell for me; And never on the road-side do mine eyes Behold it, but at once my thoughts revert To schoolboy days: why so, I scarcely knowExcept that once, while wandering with my mates, One gorgeous afternoon, when holiday To Nature lent new charms-a thunder-storm O’ertook us, cloud on cloud-a mass of black, Dashing at once the blue sky from our view, And spreading o'er the dim and dreary hills A lurid mantle. To a leafy screen We fled, of elms; and from the rushing rain And hail found shelter, though at every flash Of the red lightning, brightly heralding The thunder-peal, within each bosom died The young heart, and the day of doom seemed come. At length the rent battalia cleared away, The tempest-cloven clouds; and sudden fell A streak of joyful sunshine: On a bush Of wild-rose fell its beauty :-All was dark Around it still, and dismal; but the beam (Like Hope sent down to re-illume Despair) Burned on the bush, displaying every leaf, And bud, and blossom, with such perfect light And exquisite splendour, that since then my heart Hath deem'a it Nature's favourite, and mine eyes Fall on it never, but that thought recurs, And memories of the bye-past, sad and sweet. AUDUBON'S ORNITHOLOGICAL BIOGRAPHY.* WILSON'S AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY." John Wilson. SECOND SURVEY. Among the many million moods of a building of much magnitude and our own mind, that come and go like magnificence; but the Cretan Labyrainbows, uniting heaven and earth rinth was a joke to it in inextricable by lovely lines of living lustre-alas!. intricacy; and though, when looking too evanescent-one has frequently at it from without, and at some disa visited us with soft and sweet solici- tance, you suppose it illuminated, tation to indite in a few wee bit like a large cottonmill in honour of bookies, in themselves a Library of the Glorious Unit, yet on entering it, Useful and Entertaining, or, in other either by vestibule or postern-gate, words, Instructive and Interesting you find yourself in the predicament Knowledge-The Lives of the Natu- of the Jewish lawgiver on the going ralists. out of his candle-all the interior is Compare naturalists with any other dark as Erebus. The mental eye, sect, religious or irreligious, such as turn inwards as it may, sees not a poets, philosophers, physicians, die single particle or article of any sort vines, admirals, generals, or worthies whatsoever, any more than in an unin general, civil or military, lay or cle- born, or rather unconceived magarical, and you will acknowledge that zine, or other miscellaneous work. they are, peculiarly,a peculiar people, There is an unaccountable noise, zealous in good works. Poets are per- very like the sea; and the poor phihaps not always very unamiable; but losopher is afraid to set one foot bethey are most of them oddities, and fore the other, lest he should walk are too often unintelligible both in over the edge of an abyss like that theory and practice. The acquired which, among the Peaks of Derbyhabit of employing a language such shire, bears the name of an indivi. as no plain prose person in his seven dual at once illustrious and obscure, senses might, could, would, or should but who,on the present occasion-for employ, were you to bribe him with there are persons and places which a stamp-mastership, seems to have a we never mention 'fore ears polite strong, but, under the circumstances, must, like most of our other contrineither a strange nor singular influ- butors, remain anonymous. Neverence on the original constitution of theless, though the truth should not their whole character. Let us not always be spoken in plain and plump mince the matter—but say at once expression, it should always be writthat many of them are inspired idiots, ten, figuratively or in apothegm; , i while too many drop the adjective, and therefore we say-Sages are and are simply (it is all one in the Sumphs. Of physicians, thank heaGreek, dwans) private gentlemen. ven, we know nothing and nonePhilosophers, again, are sad simple- except our family physician, who, tons—especially such as have been we devoutly trust and pray, will long afflicted with the metaphysics. It is keep out of the Family Library, which their affair to study the human mind, treats but of the defunct. Their as it exhibits itself to what is called lives are all led in one long line of the mental eye, which mental eye prescriptions; and though Cholera turns inwards, we are told, and nar- Morbus and other diseases are, on rowly inspects all the premises. The Burke's principles--pain, danger, fear, palace of the soul is unquestionably and terror-exceedingly sublime, • Edinburgh : Adam Black ; R. Havell, junior, engraver, 77, Oxford Street, and Longman and Co., London ; George Smith, Liverpool ; F. Fowler, Manchester ; Thomas Robinson, Leeds; E. Charnley, Newcastle ; Pool and Booth, Chester ; Beilby, Knott, and Beilby, Birmingham, + Constable's Miscellany. yet we take leave to think a cholic more so than a dose of glaubers, and the patient on a bed, from which he has kicked sheets, blankets, and coverlet, and is writhing away like a wounded worm or a scotched serpent, out of all sight more impressive than the doctor, with his FEE-fa-fum, sitting with all due composure on a quiet chair, where "he expects the issue with repose." Of divines, thank heaven, we know even less, if that indeed be possible, than of physicians. A few of the old English ones, such as Jeremy Taylor and Isaac Barrow, were " the wale o' auld men;" and we shall ever venerate the memory of Dr Macknight. But of the Lives of British Divines-and there are none else the less that is written the better-they are almost all so wearisomely worthy-so fatiguingly free from those faults without which a man may be respectable, but can never hope to win our admiration. Therefore "dinna wauken sleepin' dougs," but let the clergy sleep and snore, and sermonize on in that peaceful privacy so engaging in the Christian life, whether it be a life enlightened by Episcopalianism, redolent of Presbytery, or embued with dissent without dissention, a nonconformity conformable with all the laws of good citizenship, morality, and religion. With all admirals have cultivated friendship we since first we launched, on the mare parvum of a puddle pretending to be a pond, a boat of bark, with paper sails, drawing the eighth of an inch of water, tonnage one hundred wafers, and celebrated in the naval annals of Mearns, under the name of The Butterfly, for freight and passage apply to the King of the Fairies, in the holms of Humby, close by the Brigg of Yearn. Since that service, we have occasionally circumnavigated the globe, till, in fact, we began to get sick of doubling Cape Horn. The last great action, in which we more than assisted, was the attack on Algiers. We stood by the side of the gallant Mylne, in the form of a volunteer, and are ready to say that considerable execution was done on our quarter-deck, by the splinters of our crutch. We attribute our deafness to the noise we made in the world on that day, but we cannot lament the loss of a single sense 1 a sufficient number remain unimpaired-incurred in liberation of the Christian captives. Campbell's Lives of the Admirals is one of our vademecums, and so is the Naval Chronicle, which, from the necessary number of volumes, became, however, rather a heavy work. James's Naval History-we love to carry our head high even in sleep-we use as a pile of pillows on Clerk of Eldin's book about Breaking the Line (an old achievement), which has long been, our bolster; and had we not got. through so much of our longevity, we should cheerfully accept Mr Murray's very handsome, indeed generous offer, of five thousand guineas, for a more Philosophical and Poeti cal and Political History of the Flag that has "braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze." But we reluctantly leave the glory of that great work to Basil Hall, than whom the British navy contains not a man better skilled in the science, not even excepting Maryatt, both of pen and cutlass. He is a true son of a seagun. Generals, again, are our particular friends, "and that is sure a reason fair" not to write their biographies. Impartiality could not be reasonably expected from a person not only on the crutch, but the staff. To that excellent periodical, then, the United Service Journal, we leave our great commanders" alike of, the battalion, light-bobs, and grenadiers-not forgetting the rifle-brigade, the bravest of the brave, and with all kind regards to Captain Kincaid, whose Memoirs of the GreenGlancers would inspire with valour a constitutional coward, had he even been suckled by a White Doe. Peace to the manes, and fame to the name, of Sir Sidney Beckwith! A man, as Napier says, who was equal to any emergency, and more than once in Spain retrieved a disastrous day. As for Napier himself, his "Spanish Campaigns" are immortal. His famous passage about "the astonishing infantry," the fifteen hundred unwounded survivors of the six thousand British heroes, crowning the hill with fire, and dying it in blood,.... at Albuera, will be quoted as long as we are a military people, and that we trust will be till we fade away within the Millennium, (yet we devoutly hope afar off,) as the most spirit "" 1 9 |
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