took place, viz. an extensive cavalry action at Stow-in-the-Wolds, a town of Gloucestershire. Sir Jacob Astley, who commanded for the king, was totally defeated; and the prostration of the Royalists was on that day finally sealed. Now it was some months after Naseby that Milton, without reserve, forgave his erring wife, and reinstated her at the head of his family. Some private calamity must have concurred about this time with their political overthrow to overwhelm the Powels. For a season they were ruined. But Milton, forgetting all injuries, received the entire family into his own house. So much for the real historic Mary Powel as compared with the Mary Powel of romance.

NOTE 11. Page 248.

This closing paragraph must (from internal evidence) have been added at the press, I presume in or about the year 1830 or 1831, when the little sketch was written and probably printed. I have no wish or design to charge the unknown writer with any intentional falsification of my very determinate opinions upon the chief biographers of Milton. Bishop Newton and Archdeacon Todd I believe to have been honest men, but brought unavoidably into positions trying to that honesty, and even into inextricable perplexities, by the collision between two most solemn obligations, viz. on the one hand loyalty to the Church of England, and on the other hand loyalty to the mighty poet whose intellectual interests they had spontaneously engaged to sustain, though well knowing that this great man had ranked as the most undistinguishing, fierce, and sometimes even malicious (though still conscientious) assailant that ever tilted against the splendid Anglican Establishment. Dutiful sons (being at the same time beneficed servants) of that Establishment, could not effectually mediate between interests so radically opposed. Would it indeed be fair to expect from one who had simply promised us a biographic sketch of an individual, that amongst the mere collateral issues emerging as questions incidentally connected with his theme, he should, for instance, exhaust the great problem of Church Government? - whether best administered by Prelates arrayed in purple and gold, or by obscure and dust-begrimed Elders, or (in defiance of all alien authority) administered Independently, —i. e. by each congregation separately for itself, in which case each congregation is a perfect church hanging by its own hook, and owning no debt, great or small, to any brother congregation, except only that of an exemplary kicking in

case such brother should presume to interfere with advice not asked for, or with impertinent suggestion. Newton and Todd extricated themselves with decency from a difficulty which it was impossible to face with absolute success; and the main impression left upon my mind to their disadvantage is, that their materials were chaotic, difficult to organize without the powers of a demiurgus, and accordingly not organized. As to Symmons, he was a Whig; and his covert purpose was to secure Milton for his own party, before that party was fully secreted by the new tendencies beginning to move amongst the partisanships of the age. Until Dr. Sacheverel came, in Queen Anne's reign, the crystallizations of Whig and Tory were rudimental and incomplete. Symmons, therefore, was under a bias and a morbid kind of deflexion. He was, besides, tumultuary and precipitate in his modes of composition. Finally, as regards Dr. Johnson, am I the man that would suffer him to escape under the trivial impeachment of 66 prejudice"? Dr. Johnson, viewed in relation to Milton, was a malicious, mendacious, and dishonest man. He was met by temptations many and strong to falsehood; and these temptations he had not the virtue to resist.

THE SULIOTES.

[A SUPPLEMENTARY PAPER ON THE REVOLUTION OF GREECE.]

WE have thought that we should do an acceptable service to the reader by presenting him with a sketch of the Suliotes, and the most memorable points in their history. We have derived it (as to the facts) from a little work originally composed by an Albanian, in Modern Greek, and printed at Venice in 1815. This work was immediately translated into Italian, by Gherardini, an Italian officer of Milan; and shortly afterwards, with some few omissions, it was reproduced in an English version: but in this country it seems never to have attracted public notice, and is probably now forgotten.

With respect to the name of Suli, the Suliotes themselves trace it to an accident. "Some old men," says the Albanian author, reciting his own personal investigations amongst the oldest of the Suliotes, "replied that they did not remember having any information from their ancestors concerning the first inhabitants of Suli, except this only: - that some goat and swine herds used to lead their flocks to graze on the mountains where Suli and Ghiafa now stand; that these mountains were not only steep and almost inaccessible, but clothed with thickets of wood and infested by wild boars; that these herdsmen, being op

pressed by the tyranny of the Turks of a village called to this day Gardichi, took the resolution of flying for a distance of six hours' journey to this sylvan and inaccessible position, of sharing in common the few animals which they had, and of suffering voluntarily every physical privation, rather than submit to the slightest wrong from their foreign tyrants. This resolution, they added, must be presumed to have been executed with success, because we find that, in the lapse of five or six years, these original occupants of the fastness were joined by thirty other families. Somewhere about that time it was that they began to awaken the jealousy of the Turks; and a certain Turk, named Suli, went in high scorn and defiance, with many other associates, to expel them from this strong position, but our stout forefathers met them with arms in their hands. Suli, the leader and inciter of the Turks, was killed outright upon the ground; and, on the very spot where he fell, at this day stands the centre of our modern Suli, which took its name, therefore, from that same slaughtered Turk, who was the first insolent and malicious enemy with whom our country in its days of infancy had to contend for its existence."

Such is the most plausible account which can now be obtained of the incunabula of this most indomitable little community, and of the circumstances under which it acquired its since illustrious name. It was, perhaps, natural that a little town, in the centre of insolent and bitter enemies, should assume a name which would long convey to their whole neighborhood a stinging lesson of mortification, and of prudential warning against similar molestations. As to the chronology of this little state, the Albanian author assures us, upon the testimony of the same old Suliotes, that "seventy years before" there were barely one hundred men fit for the active duties of war, which, in

ordinary states of society, would imply a total population of four hundred souls. That may be taken, therefore, as the extreme limit of the Suliote population at a period of seventy years antecedently to the date of the conversation on which he founds his information. But, as he has unfortunately omitted to fix the exact era of these conversations, the whole value of his accuracy is neutralized by his own carelessness. However, it is probable, from the internal evidence of his book, which brings down affairs below the year 1812, that his information was collected somewhere about 1810. We must carry back the epoch, therefore, at which Suli had risen to a population of four hundred, pretty nearly to the year 1740; and since, by the same traditionary evidence, Suli had then accomplished an independent existence through a space of eighty years, we have reason to conclude that the very first gatherings poor Christian herdsmen to this sylvan sanctuary, when stung to madness by Turkish insolence and persecution, would take place about the era of the Restoration (of our Charles II.), that is, in 1660.

of

In more modern times, the Suliotes had expanded into four separate little towns, peopled by 560 families, from which they were able to draw 1,000 first-rate soldiers. But, by a very politic arrangement, they had colonized with sixty-six other families seven neighboring towns, over which, from situation, they had long been able to exercise a military preponderance. The benefits were incalculable which they obtained by this connection. At the first alarm of war, the fighting-men retreated, with no encumbrances but their arms, ammunition, and a few days' provision, into the four towns of Suli proper, which all lay within that ring fence of impregnable position from which no armies could ever dislodge them; meantime, they secretly drew supplies from the seven associate towns,