the recovery or the defence of their rights. He is, therefore, the habitual and the unshrinking defender of things as they are, and the vehement and unscrupulous enemy of all change; save, peradventure, some change that may add to the cost and the vexation already accumulated by the labours of his predecessors. Unhappily he is as powerful as he is strenuous in his resistance to improvement. He, and he only, is well armed with the knowledge of the subject in its details, so essential to successful attack or defence of existing abuses. He can deny and assert at pleasure,-can find mistakes in his assailant's arguments, and detect, or, if he find them not, can invent, errors in his statements of fact, can perplex the subject by involving it in unfathomable darkness and inextricable confusion,and confound his less learned adversary by the variety of his confident assertions, and the undaunted front with which he - brings them forward. In prosecuting this unequal warfare his address is equal to his boldness; and both arise from his just confidence in his ample resources. He begins with a dangerous frankness, by admitting that there appear to be evils, and that the complaints made wear an external aspect of justice. undertakes to demonstrate their gross exaggeration.'-Edinburgh Review, No. CII, pp. 483-4. But he There is a passage in the same article respecting Mr. Bentham, which demands a word or two. We give it as it stands. 2 By the disuse of such local tribunals, and by a thousand artifices and abuses which have crept into the administration of the system, the English have at length arrived at their present state, nearly the worst in which any country can stand. They have all the defects, and inaccuracies, and irreconcileable incongruities of a jurisprudence formed for a perfectly different people and country, partially and clumsily adapted to the altered state of things; and they have, moreover, all the mischief which could be inflicted upon them by the arts and industry of those whose interests could only be consulted by dropping almost all that the original constitution of the system had of good and natural, and by adding much of evil peculiar to our own times and country. The people suffer and the craft gains by the evils of both the old and the new order of things, without the advantages natural to either. "To enumerate, even generally and superficially, the results of this, as they are every day experienced by the people, would be to perform, inadequately and feebly, a task upon which the learning and the genius of Mr. Bentham have been exhausted. To his masterhand we owe a picture, which, for depth of colouring and vigour of design, has no match; it is the greatest service ever rendered to the country which he adorns, by any of her political philosophers; and its contemplation has produced, as sooner or later it was certain to produce, the resolute determination of the ablest statesmen to clean out the Augean stable, whose recesses he has laid open, and upon whose accumulated nuisances his powerful hand has directed the river to roll.-Edinburgh Review, No. CII, pp. 481-2. We can understand the desire to soften, or to weaken the attacks of the great jurisconsult on this pet production of the learned gentleman, especially after the challenge given by Mr. Bentham to Mr. Brougham, to a public written discussion of the merits of their respective bills. Whatever influence that desire may have had on Mr. Bentham's course,ours has neither been arrested nor turned aside. And we must add, that; to read what has just been read, who would not think, after so much as Bentham had said of the evil, that he had added nothing as to the remedy. But, silence is not annihilation. In the pages of Mr. Bentham the genuine remedy speaks for itself, and we have endeavoured to transfer it to our own, and have done this by bringing forward in simultaneous and parallel view the genuine and the counterfeit. A word at parting to Matchless Constitution. That matchless fiction so long grounded upon-so quietly and generally grounded upon-as if it were a reality; grounded upon in argument; grounded upon in practice; this source of all the burthens with which we are afflicted, and under which we groan, so continually referred to and trumpeted forth as if it were the sole source of all the benefits we are permitted to enjoy, we are yet tolerated in the possession of. Matchless Constitution! Ample indeed are the justifications which the fiction affords to the doers of wrong-but where is the protection it lends to the sufferers from wrong? Its mighty instrumentality for the infliction of evil is obvious-why can it not be resorted to as a source of remedy? To a call made for money by sham representatives would not a proper answer be given by sham payment? by draughts upon the pump at Aldgate? Votes extorted by compulsion, and expressive of insincerity, how long shall they continue to exercise all the influence of genuine and honest opinion? How much longer will the people be content to act in the character of dupes? to be duped out of their money, their respect, and their obedience? Is there any price that would be too high to pay for liberation from such thraldom? The absolutism of one would it not be a less devastating tyranny than the absolutism of a hundred thousand? Not to speak of the government of France,the government of Denmark, would it not be an advantageous substitute to the Matchless Constitution of England? A monarch may have fits of generosity, of kindness, of sympathy at any time, an aristo cracy never; satiated with money may a monarch be at any time; an aristocracy never. It was our purpose, on this occasion, to have glanced over Mr. Brougham's Parliamentary History-and to have shown how little worthy that history has rendered this remarkable man of the confidence and good opinion of the community. We cannot now afford space for detail, yet we dare not quit the subject without recording, that Mr. Brougham has met every project for a thorough parliamentary reform with the most active hostility, When Sir Francis Burdett brought in his bill to make the House of Commons in reality, what it pretends to be, Mr. Brougham took the business of the Tories and the Corruptionists off their hands, and headed the opposition to the claims of the people. Odious, of course, to the Tories is every mode of representation which is any thing better than an imposition. To Whigs still more so. The fate of the motion was to be anticipated. Tories, Whigs, Lawyers, Established Priesthood-parties these, to the perpetual alliance, the Holy Alliance, offensive and defensive, against the people. The Charity Commission, again, is a job meriting a specific exposure. Fine fees for lawyers-superb salaries for the creatures of ministers-rich patronage for ministers themselves! The expenses-the evils of the commission are manifold-of good it is wholly barren. In salaries it has cost the country: already 166,5801. 10s. 34d. Its annual average of expense is 14,000 It has set in action, three and forty law-suits, on which 1,5507.17s, has been already expended, and had on the 22nd of May 1829, placed at the disposal of the Chancellor 7,8861. 6s. 6d. The distinctions between blame and negligence-between dishonesty and inattention-the application of the secondary principle, which Mr. Bentham calls the "non-disappointment principle," and which ought to come into operation, wherever not controlled by the primary principle," the greatest happiness," seem to have been wholly lost sight of. It has been argued that if such a commission cannot correct past, it will at all events prevent future abuses; which is just to say, that the experience of impunity for past breaches of trust is the true security against future breaches. And what was the instrument. of redress proposed? What but the Court of Chancery-was Mr. Brougham ignorant of that which every lawyer knows? The Court of Chancery, forsooth, for prompt, and cheap, and effectual redress ! The commission has been sitting for these twelve years; and what has been effected, except the gentle transfer of an enormous sum from the pockets of " the most thinking people," to ART. XIII.-The Mussulman. By R. R. Madden, Author of Travels in Turkey, Egypt, Nubia and Palestine. Colburn and Bentley. London. 1830. 3 vols. 2. Narrative of a Tour through some parts of the Turkish Empire. By John Fuller, Esq. London. John Murray. 1830. 8vo. 3. The Armenians. By C. Macfarlane, Author of Travels in Turkey. Saunders and Otley. 3 vols. post 8vo. 4. Voyages en Orient, enterpris par ordre du Gouvernement Français, de l'année 1821 à l'année 1829. Par V. Fontanier, ancien élève de l'Ecole Normale, membre de la Société de Geographie. (Turquie d'Asie). Paris. 1829. Τ IT is singular to witness the unanimity of all these authors on the subject of the Turks. Four very different individuals, proceeding in different routes, at times not entirely coincident, of various views and professions, all agree, nearly to a shade, in their estimate of the Turkish character-in their opinion of its government; in short, in their contempt and disgust for the Mussulman, both in his public and private condition. Mr. Madden travelled extensively as a physician, and he is a person of information and intelligence. Mr. Fuller is one of those numerous Englishmen who, under the influence of the wandering spirit, for which our countrymen are famous, could not rest quietly in his bed without having penetrated the Golden Horn, and made an attempt upon the second Cataracts of the Nile. Possessing good sense, leisure, curiosity, and the spirit of enterprise, joined with the high moral qualities which usually distinguish the more enlightened classes of Englishmen, his report may be relied upon for its fidelity, and will amuse by its great variety. We are ignorant of Mr. Macfarlane's object in visiting Turkey, unless it was book-making if he did really go to Constantinople to make a book, in truth he succeeded in making a large one, and the article is not a bad one. "The Armenians," which we have placed at the head of this Article, is far inferior to his travels, simply because, though a person of observation, and a good reporter, he is utterly deficient in all the qualities of the imagination which go to form a novelist. Mr. Fontanier is a young man, who, like most of those brought up the excellent establishment of which he proclaims himself to have been a pupil, has been educated for a traveller; that is to say, he has been made conversant with all those branches of knowledge on which the happiness of society ultimately turns, and which, in comparing different nations, it is necessary to estimate. We perceive no deficiency in his classical informa in tion, but his information does not end there, like the finished scholars of our great institutions: he is a geologist and a geographer; he is acquainted with the history of modern Europe, understands the nature of laws and government; he is a political economist and a calculator; and, in addition, understands his own language thoroughly, and can write in the style of a man who has studied its vernacular composition. We are not sure that his Latin style is Ciceronian, and he never alludes to his practice in capping verses: probably copies of Virgilian verse were not peremptorily required of the students of the Ecole Normale. When he commenced his voyages he was a very young man, and his appointments from the ministry that employed him never exceeded £200 per annum. If the business of education were decently done in England, how many of the graduates of our Universities, capable of spending three times that sum, and who have rushed into foreign countries with laudable eagerness, have there been, who might have employed their time with similar advantage to themselves and their countrymen. Mr. Madden has put his notions of Asiatic manners and Turkish character in the form of a romance, and when the fidelity of the artist can be depended upon, the method is not a bad one. Mr. Fuller and Mr. Fontanier record real anecdotes. Mr. Madden has generalized his experience, and endowed it upon imaginary persons. Both plans have their advantages. We prefer the truth, and like to take upon ourselves the task of generalization; but when we find both done to our hands, and both in full accordance with each other, we cannot complain at the absence of trouble. For readers in general the novel is the readier and more impressive scheme of producing the desired result. We will give a sketch from this picture of Turkish manners; and if our space allowed us we would give a commentary upon it from the more matter-of-fact writers before us, who very remarkably confirm the justice of Mr. Madden's representations of Turkish sentiments and ways of living and acting. Suleyman, the Aga of Bournarbashi, was the legal oppressor of a district embracing in its confines the plain of Troy. Among the rayahs who were the more ordinary subjects of his injustice, were a Greek and his wife, named Michelaki and Eminin; they were Greeks of the Fanaal, whom some change of fortune had thrown from wealth and luxury to poverty and privation. His wife was beautiful, and the Aga was a connoisseur. The fleet was constantly wanting sailors, and the order to draft off Michelaki was quickly conceived and executed, for the Greek would take no warning, he trusted to the protection of |