At length they came, a word or two- Which none o'erheard but a bird or two- Slowly my darling raised her head; But the flower-cheeks blossomed a riper red, And the lashes were bright and a-tremble with tears, As two young souls in a long kiss met And then, from his nest hard by, And quivered into the sky, And sung-and sung. The noisiest babbler held his breath, And the wind and the trees stood still as death, To list to the rapture deep and strong Of that skylark's song. Ah me, that strain, that tranced strain! It shivered and died and shrilled again, In yearning and bliss and exquisite pain; It pierced my heart, it stung my brain, It waked the tears like summer rain, Her hand to the last held fond and fast, I heard the lark sing yesterday; From his grassy nest hard by, He sang once more that self-same air; He never will sing again, ah no! For the world grows old, grows old, my friend, And he thinks of those days of gold, my friend, And grieves, and grieves. From The Edinburgh Review. that of the Sublime Porte. Moreover, FINLAY'S HISTORY OF THE SERVITUDE there was over Napier a somewhat des OF GREECE.* potic lord high commissioner, Sir Thomas IN November 1823, two years after the Maitland, otherwise called King Tom, outbreak of the Greek rebellion and four who was very much disposed to insist that years before the battle of Navarino, the these proprieties should not be violated, island of Cephalonia, which was then and who was by no means certain not to under British protection, was the gather- make his authority felt even by Lord Bying-place for a motley company of Philhel-ron himself. So, as an offering to Nemelenes. There was Lord Byron, just arrived sis, the German officers and young Finlay 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 Göttengen as well as in Lord Byron's palazzo; and this young law-student, though his favorite 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 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. 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 a 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, endeavoring 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 I believed [he says] that its many advan tages 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 into the road that leads to a rapid increase of New World. I hoped to aid in putting Greece 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 endeavored to improve my property. I lost my money and my labor, but I learned how the system of tenths has produced a state of society, and habits of cultivation, against feel any disposition to farm tenths, and buy up which one man can do nothing. I did not 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. 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 connection 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 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 In the year 1850, Finlay's name was ill of them, though they do of each other." brought somewhat prominently before the At what time the same feeling of disen- world, the high-handed proceedings of chantment crept over Finlay himself it Lord Palmerston against Greece being would be difficult to say. He sometimes partly founded upon a long-standing claim writes as if he had shared it with Byron at of our historian against the government at the very outset of his own career; but Athens. A portion of this land had been when we look at the story of his life we enclosed by King Otho in his garden, and it feel that this can hardly have been so. was impossible to obtain redress for this inHaving sickened with fever, he left Greece justice in the Greek courts of law. At the in December 1824, passed the summer and same time, M. Pacifico, an English subwinter of 1825 in Scotland, and resumed ject, "whose name was curiously inapprohis training for the Scottish bar. An in-priate to the manner of his sole appearance vitation, however, from his friend Hast-in history," set up a claim for compensaings to go out with him to Greece in his tion for injuries done to his property by a steamer the "Kartereia" ("Persever-mob against which the police had failed to ance") decided him finally to relinquish protect him. Eventually, after the appearthe legal profession and to devote his ener-ance of some British ships of war in the gies to the great work of assisting in the Greek waters, the affair was settled by liberation of Greece. Surely he must have Mr. Finlay's receiving 1,2007. compensabeen still a Philhellene when he took this tion and M. Pacifico about 5,300l. The resolution, however the chagrins and dis- whole affair would have sunk into oblivion appointments of later life may have been but for the memorable "Pacifico debate " read into the history of his youth when he on the policy of Lord Palmerston, in which surveyed it after an interval of nearly forty Sir Robert Peel uttered his last words in years. Parliament. 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 recognized as an independent State, he resolved to settle in the country. 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 twenty-sixth of January, 1876, having just completed his seventy-sixth year. I am one the more To baffled millions who have gone before. I am declining into the vale of years, and there is now nothing left for me but to walk along calmly and quietly. Declining health less than activity, and I trifle away my hours as well as age have deprived me of energy not in my library. But already this melancholy verdict upon the fruit of his literary labors has been reversed in his favor by the scholars of Germany as well as of England. Till Finlay wrote, it might fairly be objected to the historical students, at any rate of our own country, that they showed a strange inequality of interest in the fortunes of the Hellenic people at different epochs of their existence. "Of all Greek history," it might be said, "previous to the battle of Charonea, you are determined to know, if possible, more than the Greeks themselves. To throw a fresh light on the ethnic affinities of the Dolopes or the Leleges, has been considered occupation enough for a lifetime. Whole treatises have been written on the order of 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 Ægean. 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 the Dionysiac festivals and the names of would rather have seen the number of the the Athenian months. The sixth-form latter greatly augmented. Few authors boy at a public school has known more require from their reader more constant about the Peace of Antalcidas than about reference to a good map than Finlay; and the Peace of Westphalia, about the expejust now a map illustrating the geograph-dition to Syracuse than about the Ameriical distribution of Ottomans, Slavonians, can War of Independence. And yet, like Greeks, and Albanians, in the country fair-weather friends, you have been conwhich 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 far too desponding. We quote a few more sentences from the autobiographical fragment from which we have already made some extracts: When I had wasted in farming as much money as I possessed, I turned my attention to study, and planned writing a true history of the Greek Revolution in such a way as to ex tent to drop the acquaintance of this marvellous Hellenic nation as soon as their fortunes declined. You knew, indeed, just so much of later Grecian history as enabled you to follow with your fickle applause the conquering fortunes of Rome, but then the knowledge of the average English student came to an end. The inner life, and most of the external vicissitudes also of the Greek race, from Sulla's sack of Athens to Byron's landing at Missolonghi, have been a sealed book to most of you." From this reproach Finlay's labors have rescued the scholarship of our country. Like a romantic wooer, he devotes himself hibit the condition of the people. I wished to Hellas precisely when she becomes He asks himself, as each of conquest sweeps over eastern Europe, "How fared it with |