THE empire of the Ottomans is the most extraordinary instance in history of an empire raised by the sword, governed by the perpetual effusion of blood, despising all civilisation, corrupted by the grossest excesses of private life, disordered in every function of government, constantly exposed to the greatest military powers of Europe, yet advancing from conquest to conquest for three centuries without a check, (from 1299 to 1566,) and retaining its vast possessions unimpaired for three centuries more.

The first approach of the Turks to Europe was at the close of the thirteenth century, when Othman, the son of a Turcoman chieftain in the service of Aladin, Sultan of Iconium, on the memorable 27th of July 1299, made a descent on the rich territory of Nicomedia. The Asiatic dominions of the Greek Emperors were lost in a struggle of two centuries, when Mohammed the Second assaulted Constantinople, on the 29th of May 1453. The body of the last emperor was found buried under a heap of slain, and Constantinople became the capital of a new faith, a new people, and a new sovereignty. His immediate successors wasted the blood, but exercised the valour of their troops, in expeditions to Armenia, the Caucasus, and Persia. But the nobler prize lay to the west. All solid sovereignty belongs to the hardy frames and the regular opulence of Europe. Soliman the First, named the Magnificent, and if a conqueror can deserve the name, deserving it by the vastness of his designs and the splendour of his successes, threw himself upon Hungary. Combining the unusual tactique of an army and fleet, in itself an evidence of the superiority of his genius to that of his time, he at once overran the dominions of the Hunga.. rian king, and assaulted Rhodes, held by the famous Knights of St John of Jerusalem, and regarded as the bulwark of Christendom. By the reluctant aid of the Venetians, Rhodes was stormed, after a desperate siege. Soliman marched to the conquest of Austria at the head of 200,000 menan army which no European potentate, in the rudeness and distractions of the

age, could hope to oppose. On its way, it trampled down the army of Hungary, which had the madness to meet it; and marching over the bodies of 20,000 men, with their monarch, on the field, converted the kingdom into a Turkish province, and invested Vienna. The strength of the ramparts and the approach of winter alone saved the Austrian capital from following the fate of the Hungarian. But while all Christendom trembled at the sight of the horse-tails, Soliman died-living and dying, the greatest conqueror since Charlemagne.

But with him the empire had reach-. ed its fated height. Thenceforth it was to descend. The seraglio has been the ruin of Turkey. The secresy of its bloody transactions-its habitual separation of the sovereign from the people-its desperate dissoluteness-and the sullen ignorance, brute vengeance, and helpless effeminacy, which must be nurtured within such walls, extinguished all the rude virtues of the barbarian. Soliman, a hero and å legislator, always exposing his life in the field, or holding in his own hand the helm of his vast empire, reigned almost half a century. The reigns of his successors have been proverbial for their brevity. The janizaries became the true disposers of the throne. From the time of Mustapha the First-whom they strangled for his effeminacy, and Achmet, whom they placed on the throne and then strangled for his usurpation-the janizaries were the recognised makers and executioners of the sultans.

The first decisive recoil of the Ottoman power was in 1683, when Sobieski, at the head of the Polish army, forced the Vizier Kara Mustafa to raise the siege of Vienna, on the 12th of September. But a power more formidable than even Austria now began to threaten the Porte on the feeblest part of its frontier. Peter the Great, breaking the treaty of Carlowitz, invaded Moldavia in 1711. But, though forced to make an ignominious convention for his escape, the Russian never forgot the hope of conquest, and has since never abandoned the opportunity.

The nineteenth century commenced

in an aggravation of those horrors which had become characteristic of the Turkish throne. Selim the Sultan dethroned and strangled; Mustapha the Usurper dethroned and strangled; Bairactar, the famous Vizier, in the attempt to avenge the death of Selim, blown up by his own hand, and thousands of his adherents slaughtered by the janizaries; the accession of Mahmoud, the late Sultan, signalized by the total massacre of the janizaries in Constantinople, and the extinction of their order through. out the empire; -all less resembling the transactions of an established government, than the last desperate convulsions of a suicidal empire. Yet some extraordinary influence seems, for the last century, to have saved her from hourly ruin. Her time has clearly not come yet; and political prophecy has been once more put to shame. Turkey, mutilated of the two horns of her crescent, Greece and Egypt, still retains the solid centre of her possessions;

and when all human probability looked for her immediate dissolution, by the advance of Russia on one side and Egypt on the other, she has found a sudden protection in the tardily awakened vigilance of England, Austria, and France.

But the day of Turkish independence is at an end. She may live by the protection of the great states, but without it she cannot live. She is now a throne under tutelage; and remarkable as have been the instances of European recovery from national misfortune, there is nothing in the doctrines of Islamism, or the habits of the Asiatic, to administer that energy by which alone nations can stand on their feet again, after having been once flung on the ground. The grave of her despotism has been dug, but neither Russian nor Egyptian must be suffered to lay the body of the last of the Sultans there.

SULTAUN, Sultaun!*

Thou art lord of the world!

The last Constantine

At thy footstool is hurl'd. Now trembles the West,

The East kneels before thee_
Joy, joy to the breast

Of the mother that bore thee!
Earth's tale shall be told,
Ere thy banner's green fold
Is dust, or thy name
Is no longer a flame!

Hark, hark to the shouts

Of the hordes as they lie
Round the feast, on the ramparts
That blaze to the sky.
Where the battlements reek
With the gore of the storm,

And the spoils of the Greek

With his heart's blood are warm :
And his new-wedded bride,

By the Turcoman's side,

As his corpse, pale and cold,
Sits in fetters of gold.

High hour in the palace!
There sits at the board,
By his chieftains surrounded,
The King of the Sword.

And shouting, they quaff
The infidel wine,
And loudly they laugh
At the hypocrite's whine-
Let women and boys
Shrink from earth and its joys,
Was the grape only given
For houris and heaven?

Now the banquet is ended;
The cannon's last roar
Has welcomed the night

On the Bosphorus' shore.
Now the sweet dew of slumber
Has fallen on each eye,
And, like gems without number,
The stars fill the sky;

And no echo is heard

Save the night chanting bird;
And the tissues are drawn

Round thy chamber, Sultaun.

"Is this the roused desert Before the simoom?"

There is pomp in that chamber

That dazzles the eye; The gold and the amber,

The loom's Indian dye. The wall sheeted with gems,

That its keen lustre flings, Where the mighty lamp streams On the king of earth's kings. Yet the pale watching slave, Who hears thy lips rave, And hears that heart-groan, Would shrink from thy throne!

Sultaun, Sultaun !

Why thus writhe in thy sleep?
Why thus grasp at thy dagger?
Why shudder and weep?
There are drops on thy brow,
Thick-falling like rain;
The wringings of woe

From the heart and the brain.
And thy cheek's now blood-red,
Now pale as the dead-
Art thou corpse, art thou man,
Sultaun, Sultaun?

There are visions unsleeping
Before that closed eye,
There are thousand shapes sweeping
From earth and from sky;
Sons of splendour and heaven,
On pinions of flame;
Sons of guilt unforgiven,
Whom chains cannot tame!
The Sultaun feels a grasp
Like a serpent's strong clasp ;
And from earth he upsprings,
In a whirlwind of wings!

Now he sweeps through the clouds
Till the sounds of earth die;
Through fire and through floods,
Till the stars seem to fly.
Then he shoots down again,-
He is standing alone
On a measureless plain :
And around him are strown

Wrecks of time-moulder'd bones
Crush'd under their thrones,
And the viper's dark swarms,
Twining jewels and arms.

Then, deep as the thunder-peal,
Echo'd a voice:

"Wilt thou see what shall come?
Man of fate, take thy choice.
Who the future will know,
Shall see clouds on his dawn."-
"Come weal, or come woe,"
High spoke the Sultaun.

Then the plain seem'd to reel
With a clashing of steel;
And upburst a roar,

Like the sea on the shore.

"Those clouds are thy Moslems,
The armies of doom."
Then the Danube was blood
And Buda was flame,
And Hungary's lion
Lay fetter'd and tame.
Then fell proud Belgrade;
Nor the torrent was stay'd,
Till, Vienna, it roll'd
Round thy turrets of gold!

"Ho, princes of Christendom,
Shrink at the sound;
Ho, cling to thine altar,
Old King, triple crown'd!
Ay, look from thy Vatican!
All is despair;

Thy Saints have forgot thee;
No Charlemagne is there!"
But a haze deep and dun
Swept over the sun;
And the pageant was fled-
All was still as the dead.

Then the plain was a sea
Of magnificent blue;
And in pomp o'er its waters
The crescent flag flew.
There the haughty Venetian
Came, sullen and pale,
And on wall and on rampart
The gun pour'd its hail;
Where thy warriors, St John,
Stood like lions, alone,
Till the trench was a grave
For the last of the brave.

Then all pass'd away!

Fleet and rampart were gone; He heard the last shout, The trumpet's last tone. But o'er the wild heath Fell the rich eastern night, The rose gave her breath, The moon gave her light. 'Twas the Bosphorus' stream That reflected her gleam, And the turrets that shone In that light were his own.

"Sultaun, Sultaun!

Now look on thy shame!" In a silken Kiosk

Lay a vice-decay'd frame; And before his faint gaze, To voice and to string, Danced his soft Odalisques, Like birds on the wing. There was mirth mix'd with madness, Strange revel, strange sadness : The bowstring and bowl, The sense and the soul.

THE first translation on our list exhibits Goethe in the light of rather an elegant poetaster: the last does not leave him, so to speak, the likeness of a dog. The intermediate metamorphoses which the illustrious German is made to undergo, differ considerably in degree: in some of them he approaches nearer, and in others he recedes farther, from the common standard of humanity-but in none of them is he elevated into the rank of a human being, much less into that of a great poet. It is only of those portions of Faust that are executed in rhyme that we are now speaking, or that we intend to speak; for, when the translators employ blank verse, their work is frequently praiseworthy, and that of Dr Anster, in particular, appears deserving of considerable commendation. But the original "Faust" is written in rhyme, and in our opinion, cannot be translated into any other form of language without its true spirit entirely evaporating. In blank verse the difficulties are altogether evaded-the pith and dramatic point both of the dialogues and soli loquies are lost-the clear, hard, and well-defined outlines of the original are thawed down into a comparatively watery dilution, and melt away like icebergs that have drifted into the latitude of summer seas.

We apprise our readers, therefore, that it is our intention to sit in judg ment on these translations, only in so far as they are executed in rhyme: and, looking at them in this respect, the contrast between them and the original is very remarkable. In the original "Faust," the first and greatest

excellence that strikes us, is the exquisite freedom, elasticity, and finish of the language. Here we find the most complete realization of what our great poetical reformer Wordsworth has been contending for all his life, both by his theory and his practice-an exact transcript in the highest poetry of the language "really used by men." When, on the other hand, we turn to the rhymed translations, that which strikes us most is, we will not say the total absence of every thing like good English, (for that would but feebly express the case,) but the entire abandonment of every thing approaching to hu man speech. In defence of their barbarous dialect, and strange grammatical contortions, we are aware that these translators will plead the hard necessity of rhyming, and the grievous difficulties it throws in their way, particularly in a dramatic composition. And we at once accept this plea as a very satisfactory explanation of their failures: but it appears to us to afford no sufficient reason why we should not insist upon obtaining, at the hands of every English writer, whether translator or not, whether poet or proseman, a current of real language identical with that actually spoken by his countrymen. We suspect, however, that some of these translators may be inclined to show fight on this point, and to argue that "Faust," being a rhyming play, is already through that circumstance, and in its very conception, so unnatural a species of composition, (inasmuch as actual men never converse in rhyme,) that it can make but little difference in respect to our feelings of the reality of its language, though the

Faust: a Tragedy.

Edinburgh: 1834.

Translated into English Verse,