"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 Mahommedans 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 Pashas of Aleppo and of Silistria were slain on the spot; four other pashas 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 panic, 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.

เ

"At six in the evening, Sobieski entered 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 caravansery 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 Janissaries 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."”—Vol. 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 consolation in this world." When offered the throne of Poland, it was at first proposed that he should divorce his wife, and marry the widow of the late king, to reconcile the contending faction. "I am not yet a king," said he, "and have contracted no obligations toward the nation. Let them resume their gift; I disdain the throne if it is to be purchased at such a price."

It is superfluous, after these quotations, to say anything of the merits of M. Salvandy's work. It unites, in a rare degree, the qualities of philosophical thought with brilliant and vivid description; and is one of the numerous instances of the vast superiority of the modern French Historians to most of those of whom Great Britain, in the present age, can boast. If anything could reconcile us to the march of Revolution, it is the vast development of talent which has taken place in France since her political convulsions commenced, and the new field which their genius has opened up in historical disquisitions. On comparing the historians of the two countries since the Restoration, it seems as if they were teeming with the luxuriance of a virgin soil, while we are sinking under the sterility of exhausted cultivation. Steadily resisting, as we trust we shall ever do, the fatal march of French innovation, we shall yet never be found wanting in yielding due praise to the splendour of French talent; and in the turn which political speculation has recently taken among the most elevated minds in their active metropolis, we are not without hopes that the first rays of the dawn are to be discerned which is destined to compensate to mankind for the darkness and blood of the Revolution.

THE YEAR OF REVOLUTIONS

BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE, JAN. 1849]

THAT God will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children was proclaimed to the Israelites amidst the thunders of Mount Sinai, and has been felt by every succeeding generation of men. But it is not now upon the third or the fourth generation that the punishment of transgression falls; it is felt in its full bitterness by the transgressors themselves. The extension of knowledge, the diffusion of education, the art of printing, the increased rapidity of travelling, the long duration of peace in consequence of the exhaustion of former wars, have so accelerated the march of events, that what was slowly effected in former times, during several successive generations, by the gradual development of national passions, is now at once brought to maturity by the fervent spirit which is generally awakened, and the vehement passions which are everywhere brought into

action.

Everything now goes on at the gallop. There is a railway speed in the stirring of the mind, not less than in the movement of the bodies of men. The social and political passions have acquired such intensity, and been so widely diffused, that their inevitable results are almost immediately produced. The period of seed-time and harvest has become as short in political as it is in agricultural labour. A single year brings its appropriate fruits to maturity in the moral as in the physical world. Eighty years elapsed in Rome from the time when the political passions were first stirred by Tiberius Gracchus, before its unruly citizens were finally subdued by the art, or decimated by the cruelty of Octavius. England underwent six years of civil war and suffering,

before the ambition and madness of the Long Parliament were expelled by the purge of Pride, or crushed by the sword of Cromwell: twelve years elapsed between the convocation of the States-General in 1789, and the extinction of the license of the French Revolution by the arm of Napoleon. But, on this occasion, in one year, all, in the mean time at least, has been accomplished. Ere the leaves, which unfolded in spring amidst the overthrow of thrones, and the transports of revolutionists over the world, had fallen in autumn, the passions which had convulsed mankind were crushed for the time, and the triumphs of democracy were arrested. A terrible reaction had set in; experience of suffering had done its work; and swift as the shades of night before the rays of the ascending sun, had disappeared the ferment of revolution before the aroused indignation of the uncorrupted part of mankind. The same passions may again arise; the same delusions again spread, as sin springs up afresh in successive generations of men; but we know the result. They will, like the ways of the unrighteous, be again crushed.

So rapid was the succession of revolutions, when the tempest assailed the world last spring, that no human power seemed capable of arresting it; and the thoughtful looked on in mournful and impotent silence, as they would have done on the decay of nature or the ruin of the world. The Pope began the career of innovation decrees of change issued from the Vatican; and men beheld with amazement the prodigy of the Supreme Pontiff-the head of the Unchangeable Church-standing forth as the leader of political reform. Naples quickly caught the flame: a Sicilian revolution threatened to sever one-half of his dominions from the Neapolitan Bourbon; and internal revolt seemed to render his authority merely nominal in his own metropolis. Paris, the cradle in every age of new ideas, and the centre of revolutionary action, next felt the shock: a reform banquet was prepared as the signal for assembling the democratic forces; the National Guard, as usual, failed at the decisive moment; the King of the Barricades quailed before the power which had created him; the Orleans dynasty was overthrown, and France delivered over to the dreams of the Socialists and the ferocity of the Red Repub

licans. Prussia soon shared the madness: the population of Berlin, all trained to arms, according to the custom of that country, rose against the government; the King had not energy enough to permit his faithful troops to act with the vigour requisite to uphold the throne against such assailants, and the monarchy of Frederick the Great was overthrown. Austria, even, could not withstand the contagion: neither its proud nobility, nor its light-hearted sensual people, nor its colossal army, nor its centuries of glory, could maintain the throne in its moment of peril. The Emperor was weak, the citizens of Vienna were infatuated; and an insurrection, headed by the boys at the university and the haberdashers' apprentices in the streets, overturned the imperial government, and drove the Emperor to seek refuge in the Tyrol. All Germany caught the flame: the dreams of a few hot-headed enthusiasts and professors seemed to prevail alike over the dictates of wisdom and the lessons of experience; and, amidst the transports of millions, the chimera of German unity seemed about to be realised by the sacrifice of all its means of independence.

The balance of power in Europe appeared irrevocably destroyed by the breaking up of its central and most important powers; and England, in the midst of the general ruin, seemed rocking to its foundation. The Chartists were in raptures, the Irish rebels in ecstasy; threatening meetings were held in every town in Great Britain; armed clubs. were organised in the whole south and west of Ireland; revolution was openly talked of in both islands, and the close of harvest announced as the time when the British empire was to be broken up, and Anglian and Hibernian republics established, in close alliance with the great parent democracy in France. Amidst such extraordinary and unprecedented convulsions, it was with difficulty that a few courageous or far-seeing minds preserved their equilibrium ; and even those who were least disposed to despair of the fortunes of the species, could see no end to the succession of disasters with which the world was menaced but in a great exertion of the renovating powers of nature, similar to that predicted, in a similar catastrophe, for the material world, by the imagination of the poet :