fertility, its mines of iron, its capital, Chalcis, its monuments, its temples, its poetic renown through the verse of Homer, its historic glory through the first naval battle of Themistocles against the Persians, near Artemisium; the long rivalries of Sparta, of Athens, of Macedon, in disputing for it; its commerce, which enriched Venice; its bridge fortified with towers, which opened or shut to it at will the entry of the continent; in fine, the fleets and the troops of Venice which were kept there on foot, in the heart the seas and territories now in Ottoman possession,—all these made Negropont the Gibraltar of Greece, of Epirus, and of Thrace. To strike the Venetians in Negropont, was to reach them in Venice.

The grand vizier Mahmoud-Pasha, removed, as has been seen, after the Caramanian war, had been recalled by Mahomet to the rank of captain-pasha or high admiral of his fleets. He sailed with three hundred and fifty large vessels towards the Venetian island, while Mahomet himself was advancing by land with one hundred thousand men, and encamped on the same promontory which had borne the tents of Xerxes in front of the fortified isthmus which links the island to the continent.

The fleet of Venice, intimidated for the first time by the innumerable fleet of Mahmoud-Pasha, remained shamefully at anchor, aloof from the field of battle, under the batteries of the island of Salamis in the gulf of Athens. The tomb of Themistocles, which the Venetian admiral, Canale, could contemplate from the deck of his vessel, inspired him with no heroism. Mahmoud was able to form with impunity a floating bridge, with his vessels at anchor chained to each other, to pass from the continent to the island.

The capital alone remained free behind its walls. The governor, Paul Erizzo, worthy of other auxiliaries, defended himself for glory rather than for safety. Three assaults in seventeen days' siege, precipitated vainly twenty thousand Turks into the sea or the ditches. A traitor, bribed by the gold of Mahomet, Thomaso Schiavo di Lebano, commander of the artillery of the Venetians, sold him his place. Erizzo, who was apprised too late of the perfidy, had the traitor strangled, and his body suspended from the window of his palace to terrify his accomplices.

A fourth assault, in which the very women fought upon the breaches, left fifteen thousand Ottoman bodies beneath VOL. II.-8

the bullets or the rocks precipitated from the height of the ramparts. The fifth carried the city, and left Erizzo no other refuge than the citadel. Encumbered with a famished population, he capitulated, on conditions of safety and honor for his soldiers and people. Mahomet promised all and eluded all. Massacre acquitted the promise. Erizzo was sawed in two, the Venetians impaled, racked, stoned upon the ruins of their bastions; the Greeks were spared as subjects of the Sultan, and led into slavery to Constantinople.

The only daughter of Erizzo, a Venetian worthy of the harem of Mahomet, was carried a present to the murderer of her father. Mahomet, ravished with her beauty, wished to dishonor her with his love. She resisted to death, was punished by him for her grief and her virtue, and poniarded by the eunuchs in the arms of her profaner.

XXXIV.

The captain-pasha, Mahmoud, appeared to have recovered by this campaign the esteem of his master. He was, in consequence, re-established in the post of grand vizier to push the armaments, with the order, the promptitude, and the energy which had obtained, under his first viziership, such signal triumphs to his master. The two great Mussulman nations, the Persians and the Turks, were about to come into conflict for the first time in Asia. Let us suspend a moment the recital of the reign of Mahomet, to characterize the people who came to dispute Asia Minor with the race of Ōthman. The original enmity between the two Mahometan races, founded on a schism in their common creed, and fomented eternally by rival ambitions and by popular prejudices, makes part of the history of the Turks as of the history of the Persians. This enmity, fatal to the Ottomans as to the Persian and Arab races, has alone saved the West from the universal invasion of Islamism. It would appear as if Islamism, divided at its birth by the schism of the followers of Omar and the followers of Ali, carried the germ of its own weakness in its internal dissensions.

BOOK FOURTEENTH.

I.

THE Perses in their ancient name, the Persians in the modern, are a primordial people, born of itself in the mistcovered cradle of the pre-historic ages. They appear for the first time in fable and in history, but with that character of high civilization, of maturity, and almost of decadence, political, moral, and literary, which indicates the extreme antiquity of nations. They might be called the Greeks and the Italians of the East. All others date from them, and they date from no one. Nature, as much as civilization, has endowed them with an incontestable superiority of sociability over the races who dispute with them both Upper and Lower Asia. As heroic as the Tartars, as philosophic as the Hindoos, as religious as the Arabs, as industrious as the Chinese, as conquering as the Turks, they have, beyond all these nations with which they are conterminous, that promptitude of intellect, that suppleness of wit, that elegance of manners, that heroic grace of chivalry, that activity of habits, of labor, of industry, of politics, of arts, of letters, of poetry, of philos ophy, of religion, which render Persia one of the most brilliant of the focuses of the human mind. It might also be said that they have the vices of their superiority; disdain of the races less endowed than they by nature, instability of their institutions, facility of changing, promptitude to revolt, disregard of oaths, finesse in diplomacy carried to trickery, hypocrisy that leads them to assume or quit all parts, according to their interests rather than according to their convictions; suppleness to tyranny, insolence in liberty; courage by fits, discouragement by lassitude; adulation, that abuse of politeness; faithlessness, that failing in the first essential of an honest man; in a word, all that constitutes

in a people's manners the nobility of nature and the decadence of corruption.

Such was and such is still to-day the genius of the Persian people.

II.

The Persians occupy, from the most primitive times, the vast space, almost all engirded and intersected by mountains, between the river Oxus, which separates them from Tartary and from China; the Persian Gulf, which separates them from India; the Caspian Sea, which separates them from the Scythians and the Muscovites; the Black Sea, which separates them from the Russians; and the great desert of Bagdad, which separates them from Arabia and Turkey. Their soil is light but fertile, their sky clear, their climate healthy. Their race is beautiful, tall, vigorous, skilled in managing the horse, consummate in arms. The Parthians have left them their equestrian traditions, the bow and the arrow shot in flying.

They partake, according to localities and tribes, of all the modes of existence of the oriental nations: here nomad, there sedentary; carrying about their tents in the train of their flocks, from pasturage to pasturage, in the provinces bounding on Armenia; agriculturists in the plains of Shiraz, of Tauriz, and of Ispahan; artisans in their large cities; courtiers in their capital; warriors in their camps; traders in their bazaars; voluptuaries in their harems; poets and philosophers in their leisures; extremes in all, in wisdom as in vice, their dominant attribute is imagination. This imagination. colors to them virtue, glory, passion, love, ambition, crime, with hues so vivid that it gives them at once the omnipotent deliriousness of enthusiasm, and the fickle mobility of inconstancy; a people who might attain all things, could they desire the same thing long.*

III.

Their history has the character of their genius. It resembles the Arabian fables told by the poets beneath the

*The author, it is manifest, is here portraying us his own countrymen (and with a little of the acrimony of the disappointed statesman), still more faithfully than even the Persians. There is more ground, in truth, than he appears to be aware of, for the coincidence. The Persians are the true origin, at least immediate, of the Celtic race.-Translator.

tent.

It is more full of vicissitudes, and ups and downs of fortune, than the history of any other nation. All is strange, marvellous, rapid, fugacious, like the shadows on the sides of their mountains. Their capitals rise and disappear, like fantastic apparitions in the desert. Their dynasties are established, overthrown, substituted, and succeed each other. with the instability of the waves. They conquer and are conquered seven times in ten centuries. The eye can scarcely follow the tumultuous torrent of their destiny. The events

of which it is composed resemble more a poem or a romance, than the slow and regular career of human things. They give a dizziness in whirling before the eyes of the historian.

IV.

Gustasp, who is believed to be Darius I., one of the great conquerors of their annals, banished by his father, king of a province of Persia, took refuge, according to an ancient legend, in the uniform of a simple warrior, and under an unknown name, at the court of the Emperor of the West, or of Constantinople. This Emperor, wishing to give a husband of her choice to the beautiful Katyoun, his daughter, caused to pass beneath the windows of the palace the young nobles of the Empire. Gustasp struck the eyes of Katyoun by his martial beauty. The Emperor is irritated at this preference accorded an obscure stranger. To punish his daughter, he gives her to Gustasp, and abandons her to the obscurity and the indigence of this union. Gustasp leads his wife into Persia, makes himself known to his partisans, levies an army to conquer his right to the paternal inheritance from his brothers. At the moment of combat, the brothers, through respect for his right of primogeniture, surrender to him, and crown him in the camp. His father abdicates in his favor, and retires into solitude to sanctify himself. Gustasp reigns, combats, conquers, reunites entire Persia under his sole sceptre, and invites the Emperor of the West to make a visit to his empire. The Emperor recognizes the stranger whom he had despised in Gustasp, and his daughter in the queen of twelve kingdoms.* It is

* Those who know any thing of the fabulous annals of the Irish, or the actual traditions of their peasantry, will not fail to find an attestation of the genealogy above alluded to, in even the turn and the texture of this story.-Translator.