quired to be proved by a witness present when it was given, or by a writing signed by the parties. But of it may be said what was observed by Serjeant Maynard in the time of the Commonwealth, "that the law lies very loose as to things that are naturally essential to marriages, as to pre-contracts and dissolving marriages."

It would be interesting to detail some of the cases as reported in law books in reference to the marriage law, but those who are desirous of mastering the subject cannot do better than peruse the reports we have before referred to, and especially an able resumé of the whole matter by Mr. Justice Willes in the case of Beamish v. Beamish, in the House of Lords' Reports. That was the case of a clergyman in holy orders going to the house of a person named Lewis in the city of Cork, and there performing a ceremony of marriage between himself and one Isabella Fitzgerald, by reading between them in the house the form of solemnization of matrimony in the Book of Common Prayer, and by declaring that he Samuel S. Beamish took Isabella Fitzgerald as his wedded wife, and Isabella Fitzgerald declaring she took him for her wedded husband, and by placing a ring on her finger and pronouncing the blessing in the appointed form. No person was present at the ceremony, but its performance was seen by a femalewho, however, did not hear what passed between them. The validity of this marriage was raised in an ejectment proceeding on a question of legitimacy; the Court of Queen's Bench in Ireland held it was a valid, though an irregular marriage, but the House of Lords decided that it was null and void. This decision flowed from The Queen v. Millis-for that case deciding that to constitute a valid marriage by the common law it must have been celebrated in the presence of a clergyman in holy orders, the fact that the bridegroom was himself a clergyman in holy orders, there being no other clergyman present, would not make it a valid marriage. Mr. Beamish might have somewhere met in his reading with this passage from a document of the 10th century, to be found in Ancient Laws, p. 335, chap. ii., and it might have been well if he had pondered it: "A priest's wife is nothing but a snare

of the Devil, and he who is ensnared thereby on to his end, he will be seized fast by the Devil, and he also must pass afterwards into the hands of fiends and totally perish."

All The Year Round.

OLD STORIES RE-TOLD.

THE MASSACRE OF THE MAMELUKES.

MOHAMMED ALI, born in Roumelia in 1769, and raised to the pashalick of Egypt in 1805, having in 1811 driven the Mamelukes, who were in rebellion against him, into Nubia, far beyond the first cataract, prevailed on five thousand of the more peaceable of those warlike horsemen to come to Cairo and settle there under his protection. On the Koran, and by the sacred heads of the two martyr brothers, Hassan and Hooseyn, the favorite saints of the ancient city, the great pasha had sworn to maintain Saim Bey and his chiefs in all the posts of honor or emolument of which they were possessed. The Mamelukes had wasted their strength and thinned their numbers by the fiery charges which they had hurled against the dogged bayonets of Mohammed Ali's Turks and Albanians, from the Pyramids of Dagshoor to the shores of Nile that look on Philæ, and began at last to weary of open conflict.

Wily Mohammed's professed intention was to unite all these turbulent men under the green standard of the Prophet, and march against the Wahabees, a reforming sect of Arabs that, ever since 1750, had been the plague and vexation of Egypt. For two years they had stopped the pilgrim caravan from Damascus, and had deprived the pashalick of all the honor and benefit derivable from the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. The new pasha, impatient of their insolence, vowed their destruction, although he had hitherto been compelled to temporize with them. The Egyptians generally were eager for the war, the Aranout soldiers clamorous, the Turks angrily anxious, Cairo impatient in any way to get rid of both Turks and Aranouts, whose quarrels and scuffles were the torment of the quieter citizens, the horror of the traders in the bazaars, the detestation of

the cook-shop keepers. The dim shaded streets of the city now echoed with the Albanian drum, the old mosques resounded with the clash of the war-cymbals. The great square of the Uzbeekeyh was crowded with troops; droves of camels were picketed in the plain below the cliff of the citadel and in the desert toward Suez. The half-naked dervishes shook their bamboo staffs, and howled their exhortations in all parts of the city to all true Moslems to march to the redemption of Mecca.

The leader of the expedition was not to be Ibrahim, the stepson of Mohammed Ali, who had just driven the Mamelukes into Nubia, but the pasha's favorite son, Tossoon Pasha, a chivalrous, clever lad, only seventeen, who was the idol of the wild soldiery. Tossoon, scarcely yet strong enough to bear a coat of mail under a desert sun, had been made governor of the citadel in 1805, a pasha of two tails in 1809, and, latterly, generalin-chief of the Mecca expedition. Finati, an Italian, who served in the Wahabee campaign, and has left an account of it on record, gives a glowing report of the young pasha, as kind, generous, affable, merciful, and humane. While the bayo nets are mustering at Heliopolis, and the camels, clustered with Albanians, are plodding from all parts of the country toward the city of white tents, newly sprung up under the palm groves around Cairo, we must peruse a back-page or two of Mohammed Ali's history, without which the relationships of this largeminded and subtle man cannot be clearly understood.

The man who with a strong hand had wrested the Nile and its borders from the hands of the beys, was a native of Cavalea, a small town of Roumelia, a district of Albania, the Epirus of the Greeks, and the birth-place of Pyrrhus. Losing his father in early life, he was adopted by the governor of Cavalea, who protected him, and trained him to arms. His sagacity, vigilance, and daring soon led to his being appointed, in a subordinate way, as a collector of taxes-no sinecure in a mountainous country, covered with woods of cedar, oak, and chesnut, good for ambuscades, and where every peasant is a hunter, a warrior, and a hater of taxes. The young soldier had no scruples. He had to collect the taxes,

and he did it quietly if he could; if not, roughly.

As it is not uncommon among the Turks to unite the duties of a soldier with the pursuits of a merchant, Mohammed became a dealer in tobacco-a business which he appears to have followed with considerable success, till the invasion of Egypt by the French called him to fulfil a higher destiny. The contingent of three hundred men raised by the township of Cavalea was placed under his command. Ali was now decorated with the higher title of Bin-Bashi, and recognized as a captain of regular troops.

His conduct under the standard soon attracted the attention of Kussouf, the governor of Cairo, who appointed the young Epirote to the command of a division of the army, under Youssof Bey. The pay of the Albanian troops was in arrears, which caused their disaffection, and Mohammed refused obedience to the governor unless this wrong was redressed. The governor sent orders that he should appear before him that night; but Ali, not unacquainted with the object and usual termination of such private interviews, returned for answer that he would show himself only in broad daylight, and in the midst of his soldiers. Perceiving the danger with which he was threatened, Kussouf then admitted into Cairo the Albanian guards under Taher Pasha, hoping that the intrigues of the one chief would counteract those of the other. But in this expectation he was grievously disappointed; for the mountaineers, in whatever points they might differ, now became unanimous in the one point of demanding their pay, and in all the measures which were suggested for compelling Kussouf to advance it. They attacked the palace, reduced the citadel, drove Kussouf and his household from the city, and finally the vice-regal power was deposited in the hands of the Pasha Taher."

The tyrannical measures of this new ruler, however, brought his reign to a close at the end of twenty-two days, and the actual government of the country reverted to the hands of the Mamelukes, under the aged Ibrahim, Osmann, Bardissy, and Mohammed Ali. The Porte, indeed, sent a Pasha of high rank to assume the direction of affairs at Cairo; but the beys having once more the upper

hand, seized the viceroy soon after landing, and put him to death. The undisputed ascendency of the Mamelukes might, in the end, have proved fatal to Mohammed Ali, who did not belong to that body. For this reason he contrived to embroil Bardissy, who has been called the Hotspur of the beys, with some of his associates, and finally, attacking him with his own hand, drove him from the capital, and reinstated the exiled pasha, whom he intended to use merely as a tool for his own purposes. The Grand Signior, suspecting his ambitious views, issued orders, in the year 1804, that the Albanians should retire into their own country, intending, it may be presumed, to garrison the Egyptian fortresses with troops less disposed to insubordination. Mohammed, however, was proclaimed pasha by the shouting soldiers. The Porte was weak in Egypt; the Mamelukes had the power of the old prætorian guards-they could raise, and they could depose. It was "a far cry" to Constantinople. A strong hand had seized the sceptre at last, and turned it into a battle-mace to brain his opponents. Goldsmith once said that Burke winded into an argument like a serpent; like that subtle reptile, Mohammed had twisted toward the throne, alternately crouching and threatening. It was his at last-all that fair land: the vast river reaching from far in Africa to the Mediterranean; its rocks, its deserts, its towns, its broad green acres of millet and sugar-cane, its pyramids and temples.

Kourschid Pasha was endeavoring to rouse the Mamelukes against his rival, when the capitan pasha suddenly arrived at Alexandria, and sent Kourschid orders to instantly give up the citadel to Mohammed and return himself to headquarters. The Mamelukes were, however, determined to strike another blow at the Albanian. The new pasha wished nothing better. He turned the city into one vast pitfall, and lay crouching behind the rock-walls of the citadel. Every flat roof, every fountain-court, was an ambuscade. Mohammed suggested to the sheiks, on whom he had the greatest reliance, to encourage the beys in their meditated assault, and even to promise them assistance should they resolve to enter the city. The Mamelukes, reposing implicit faith in their pretended friends,

seized the first opportunity of bursting in at one of the gates which had been opened for the purpose of admitting some countrymen with their camels. Dividing their number into two parties, they advanced along the streets sounding their martial instruments, and anticipating a complete triumph. But they soon discovered their mistake; for, being attacked by the inhabitants on all sides, driven from post to post, and slaughtered without mercy, they sustained so severe a loss as from that moment to cease to be formidable. At the mosque gates, at the fountain foot, in the bazaars, in the squares, everywhere the Mamelukes were struck down, shot, or had the life cut or beaten out of them. All the prisoners were massacred, and eighty-three shaven heads sent to festoon the gory walls of the imperial seraglio on the shores of the Bosphorus.

The Turks now began again their usual mean and cowardly policy. They had used Mohammed against the Mamelukes, now they would support the beys against Mohammed. They sent a capitan pasha to Alexandria with instructions to assist Elfy, well known by his residence in England, in his endeavors to assume the vice regal mantle, and thereby to depress the rising power of Mohammed. This envoy, upon his arrival, sent a capidji bashi to Cairo, summoning Ali to appear immediately at that port, where his master was ready to bestow upon him the government of Salonica.

The old bird was not caught with chaff. He was not to be lured by the shaking of a colored ribbon. Mohammed knew that behind the firman for the pashalick of Salonica a bowstring was twisted. He told his friends he should be a fool and coward indeed, after winning the pasha's turban with only five hundred men, to surrender now when he had fifteen hundred resolute men by his side.

"Cairo is to be publicly sold!" he exclaimed. "Whoever will give most blows of the sabre will win it and remain its master."

His demeanor toward the pasha was, at the same time, submissive and dutiful; he artfully regretted that the mutinous state of the army would not permit him to obey the summons of his highness, and to have the ineffable pleasure of

the Mameluke chief and all his adherents capable of bearing arms to the citadel on the following Friday, to make final arrangements for the part the Mamelukes were to take in the ensuing campaign against the Arab schismatics. On his return from this gracious audience, Saim communicated the news to his chieftains, and showed with what art he had concealed their plots, and how completely the crafty Albanian usurper had fallen into their snare.

One old graybeard alone was restless and dissatisfied. Old men, it was thought, often mistake their present suspicions for their past wisdom. He cried out at once:

"We are betrayed!" But the rest laughed at him. bent his brows, and said:

Saim

"So much the worse if it be so; if there be danger, we shall not want courage to meet it."

Saim then called together his captains, lieutenants, sergeants, and standardbearers, and ordered them to accompany him to the lion's den, up on the citadel, in the forenoon of the next Friday.

In the mean time, all Cairo was like hive at swarming-time. The seller of limes stayed his quaint cry of "God make them easy to sell!" to chat to the crier of "Odors of Paradise flowers of the Henna." The man with the black swollen goat's-skin of water on his back discoursed on all the unwonted bustle with the seller of sherbet; the itinerant pipe-cleaner with the dancing dervish; the red-eyed lupin-vendor with the blind beggar at the fountain corner; the old men who watch the slippers at the doors of the mosque with the cameldrivers from Samanoud; the sycamorefig man wrangled over it with the donkey-boys; the date merchant, crosslegged on the open counter of his store, argued it with the opium and perfumeseller opposite, who had just risen from his evening prayer; even the caller to prayer, just descended, at sunset, from his balcony high up in the minaret, stopped the rose seller who was passing in the midst of his cry, "The rose was a thorn-from the sweat of the prophet it blossomed," to talk over the news of the great Friday's levee in the citadel.

Everywhere, from Shoobra to Boolak,

from the fresh green fields under the shadow of the pyramids to the great sacred sycamore-tree at Heliopolis, the talk was about the Mamelukes and the Wahabees. Even the naked shadoofworkers, lifting the yellow Nile water in their creaking wheels strung with red pitchers, were talking politics, and praising either Mohammed or Saim Bey. There was, indeed, no dim, damp, narrow, winding defile of a lane where people were not thinking or talking of the Friday; no latticed window with a water-jug to cool in it where women of the harem were not prattling about the march of the Mamelukes.

Before dawn on the eventful Friday the drums were rolling and beating all through the city, in the green Uzbeekeyh, and on through the bazaars, summoning the pasha's troops to a grand parade. The notice was sudden, and there was a rumor amongst the soldiers that Tossoon Pasha was that day to be invested with the pelisse of commanderin-chief. There was therefore a great seizing of muskets and cartouch-boxes, a great belting on of swords, and adjustment of scarfs and sashes. The companies hurried from their quarters to form in the squares and open places, and were instantly marched off to the citadel and placed with extreme care in their respective stations. The binbashis went down the ranks and strictly charged each man not to quit his post, on any pretext, not even for a moment. Their muskets were examined, and then carefully loaded.

The Mameluke procession of four hundred and seventy horsemen soon came winding across the millet-fields and lupin-grounds between the pyramids and the Nile-along the raised earthen causeways between the cornfields and the clover-fields. Their banners of yellow and crimson fluttered brightly in the morning air. The sun shone on the gold tissue that banded their turbans, on their striped white silk robes, on the golden flowers that studded their uniforms and half covered their close-linked coats of mail. The sunbeams of March, in Egypt clear and burning, glittered on the embossed gold and silver of their pistol-butts, the handles of their handgars, the hilts of their Damascus yataghans. Their