thropist once said, when he heard that a hundred thousand negroes had been swallowed up by an earthquake in Hayti: Well! if men are to be so swallowed up by earthquakes, I 'would rather that it happened in Hayti than in England." No civilised man is bound to go to Midian, and if he goes there he carries his head in his hand. Captain Burton is evidently not of this opinion; he is full of his discovery of these sites of ancient civilisation, and he thinks that under the progressive and civilising rule of Egypt, which may now be said to have entered into the community of European nations, the 'Khedive has only to speak the word and Midian will awake 'from her long and deadly lethargy.' Such is the glorious future which an ardent enthusiast has constructed on the ruins of three or four old mining-establishments on a line of coast about eighteen geographical miles in extent. But it is not so evident that, even supposing gold to exist in the mountain ranges of that barren coast, it can be found in such abundance as to repay the cost of producing it. Iron, the expedition seems really to have discovered; but it cannot have escaped the observation of so old a traveller as Captain Burton that metals and other minerals exist in enormous quantities in many parts of the world, and yet are impossible to be worked on the score of expense. Let him remember the pure native copper on the shores of Lake Superior, the iron of Lapland, and even his own old favourites, the palagonite tuff and the virgin sulphur of Iceland, and he will readily conceive that the titaniferous iron of the grand filon, on the White Mountain in Midian, may be very abundant, and yet in such a position as to afford no profit to the worker. As to the proposal that the Khedive should undertake that onerous duty, we should be glad to learn what Mr. Rivers Wilson, his Highness's new Finance Minister, has to say to it. The Khedive has certainly brought Egypt into the community of 'European nations,' but hitherto only by incurring such enormous liabilities as to be unable to pay his way except under foreign tutelage. And now we take leave of a very amusing book, which, if it does not record the discovery of gold in Midian, we sincerely hope will cause a considerable amount of that metal to pass into the pockets of our veteran explorer. We anxiously await the confirmation of Captain Burton's discoveries as the result of the second 'serious' expedition; but in gold mining, above all other pursuits, it is well to remember the proverb All is not gold that glitters.'

ART. IX.-A History of Greece from the Conquest by the Romans to the Close of the War of Independence. By GEORGE FINLAY. Seven vols. 8vo. Republished by the Clarendon Press. Oxford: 1877.*

IN

N November 1823, two years after the outbreak of the Greek rebellion and four years before the battle of Navarino, the island of Cephalonia, which was then under British protection, was the gathering-place for a motley company of Philhellenes. There was Lord Byron, just arrived from Italy, helping the insurgents freely both with money and with counsel; there were officers from Germany, doctors from England, and financial agents from Greece eager to negotiate a loan on behalf of the new State. To them entered, after a six weeks' voyage from Venice to Zante, a young Scotchman-Scotch by extraction, though English by the accident of birth-who, in the course of his studies for the bar, had resided for some time at Göttingen, and there, while intending to read Roman Law, had been secretly and almost unconsciously falling in love with Greek liberty. The magnetic influence of Philhellenism was all over Europe in that year, in the class-rooms at Göttingen as well as in Lord Byron's palazzo; and this young law-student, though his favourite study seems to have been rather political economy than the classics, had felt it too, and, drawn by its subtle attraction, found himself one of that strangely assorted group in the island of Cephalonia. His name was George Finlay, and he was destined not to win fame or fortune in the Parliament House of Edinburgh, nor yet to distinguish himself by any dashing exploits in the War of Independence, but to make a contribution of lasting value to literature, as the cold, learned, slightly sarcastic historian of the Hellenic nation under foreign domination.

Sir Charles Napier, the future conqueror of Scinde, was then British Resident, in other words virtually governor, in Cephalonia. Individually he was friendly to the cause of Greek liberation; but certain proprieties had to be observed towards an allied and friendly government like that of the Sublime Porte. Moreover, there was over Napier a somewhat despotic Lord High Commissioner, Sir Thomas Maitland, otherwise called King Tom, who was very much disposed to insist that

The last two volumes of the previous edition, containing the history of the Greek Revolution since 1821, were reviewed in vol. cxvii. (p. 570) of this Journal. We therefore confine our present remarks to the previous volumes.

these proprieties should not be violated, and who was by no means certain not to make his authority felt even by Lord Byron himself. So, as an offering to Nemesis, the German officers and young Finlay were ordered to quit the island in the same boat which had brought the Greek deputies, intent on the negotiation of their loan. A terrific storm arose just as the boat, in the thick November night, was leaving the port of Argostoli, the capital of Cephalonia. Fortunately the boatmen, who were timid sailors, put back to another Cephalonian creek for safety. When day dawned amidst torrents of rain, Finlay saw on the shore the figure of Napier mounted on horseback and muffled in a shaggy Suliote capote. He had passed the night in an agony of apprehension lest the boat sent off by his orders should have gone down in that terrible storm, as she certainly must have done had she held on her course for Zante. Now,' he shouted to them through the buffets of the tempest, you may bring back your boat to Argostoli, and I 'shall go to bed. In a couple of days the wind abated, and Finlay, with his portmanteau, but without a servant, and with & very scanty knowledge of any of the languages spoken in the country, was landed on the shore of Greece.

The thirteen months which he spent in Greece from November 1823 to December 1824 were chiefly important by reason of two friendships which he formed. At Athens he met Frank Abney Hastings, to whom he became warmly attached, whose fortunes he followed in the War of Liberation, and who is almost the only one of the Philhellene leaders of whom he speaks in terms of unqualified praise. At Missolonghi, where he spent two months, he was in almost daily companionship with Lord Byron, who was then drilling his little band of Suliotes, endeavouring to reconcile the discordant factions of Mavrocordatos and Odysseus, and directing the repair of the fortifications of Missolonghi. Finlay quotes with a little inward chuckle the remark made by Mr. Parry in his 'Last Days of 'Lord Byron,' that the poet wasted too much of his time in conversation with Mr. Finlay and such light and frivolous persons.' From Finlay's history of this period it appears that already during the few months of Lord Byron's connexion with the cause of the Greeks he had suffered considerable disenchantment as to the character of the insurgent leaders, though he still admired the brave and independent spirit of the people. One chief urgently invited his lordship to Salamis. Another chief told him he would be of no use anywhere but in the island of Hydra. A third was sure that Greece would be ruined unless he remained at Missolonghi. A fourth, more

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plain-spoken, was sure that Greece would be saved if Lord Byron would lend him a thousand pounds. The poet himself wrote to a friend: Of the Greeks I can't say much good hitherto, and I do not like to speak ill of them, though they 'do of each other.'

At what time the same feeling of disenchantment crept over Finlay himself it would be difficult to say. He sometimes writes as if he had shared it with Byron at the very outset of his own career; but when we look at the story of his life we feel that this can hardly have been so. Having sickened with fever, he left Greece in December 1824, passed the summer and winter of 1825 in Scotland, and resumed his training for the Scottish bar. An invitation, however, from his friend Hastings to go out with him to Greece in his steamer the Kartereia' (Perseverance') decided him finally to relinquish the legal profession and to devote his energies to the great work of assisting in the liberation of Greece. Surely he must have been still a Philhellene when he took this resolution, however the chagrins and disappointments of later life may have been read into the history of his youth when he surveyed it after an interval of nearly forty years.

As to Finlay's share in the dangers and glories of Captain Hastings's expedition to Greece he is modestly silent. When it was ended, and when Greece was recognised as an independent state, he resolved to settle in the country.

'I believed,' he says, that its many advantages would enable the Greeks to show the world that an unlimited command of uncultivated soil in the Old World is just as much an element of national prosperity as in the New World. I hoped to aid in putting Greece into the road that leads to a rapid increase of production, population, and material improvement. I purchased a landed estate in Attica when the Turks were allowed to sell their property, and when at last (after a long period of hope deferred) order seemed to be established under King Otho, I engaged in farming, and endeavoured to improve my property. I lost my money and my labour, but I learned how the system of tenths has produced a state of society, and habits of cultivation, against which one man can do nothing. I did not feel any disposition to farm tenths, and buy up agricultural produce by advances to the peasantry, which are the only means of carrying on farming operations with profit at any distance from the sea.'

In the year 1850, Finlay's name was brought somewhat prominently before the world, the high-handed proceedings of Lord Palmerston against Greece being partly founded upon a long-standing claim of our historian against the government at Athens. A portion of this land had been enclosed by King

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Otho in his garden, and it was impossible to obtain redress for this injustice in the Greek courts of law. At the same time, M. Pacifico, an English subject, whose name was curiously in'appropriate to the manner of his sole appearance in history,' set up a claim for compensation for injuries done to his property by a mob against which the police had failed to protect him. Eventually, after the appearance of some British ships of war in the Greek waters, the affair was settled by Mr. Finlay's receiving 1,2007. compensation and M. Pacifico about 5,3007. The whole affair would have sunk into oblivion but for the memorable Pacifico debate' on the policy of Lord Palmerston, in which Sir Robert Peel uttered his last words in Parliament. From 1843 to 1861 Finlay was engaged in publishing the successive volumes of his History of the Greeks under Foreign Domination, and of the Greek Revolution.' From 1864 to 1870 he was the correspondent of the Times' at Athens, and at various periods, from 1842 onwards, he contributed articles to Blackwood's Magazine,' the Saturday Review,' and other periodicals. He does not appear to have visited England later than 1854. He died at Athens on the 26th of January, 1876, having just completed his seventysixth year.

The whole series of his historical works, which had been revised by him in 1863, and subsequently continued in manuscript to 1864, has now been republished by the delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford. The task of editing them has been entrusted to the Rev. H. F. Tozer, author of Researches ' in the Highlands of Turkey,' and one of the very few men competent to correct even Finlay's statements with reference to the ethnography of the district between the Adriatic and the Egean. The editor's work has been thoroughly well done, and the whole book is one of which English scholarship may be justly proud. We regret that the few illustrations and yet fewer maps which appeared in the original work have been entirely withdrawn from this edition. We would rather have seen the number of the latter greatly augmented. Few authors require from their reader more constant reference to a good map than Finlay; and just now a map illustrating the geographical distribution of Ottomans, Slavonians, Greeks, and Albanians, in the country which it is the fashion to call the 'Balkan Peninsula,' would have been as useful as the celebrated map annexed by General Ignatieff to the Treaty of San Stefano.

Finlay's own estimate of the future success of his works was