were unanimously negatived, and the justice and fairness of the trial and sentence were thereby unanimously affirmed; only three desired the bill should pass, and even those gave no reason for that desire. The Lords, with indignation, rejected the bill, not without severe observations on the conduct of the Commons in passing such a bill, for which even Keppel, its nominal author, assigned, on his oath, nó object or reason.

Thus burst Walpole's bubble, which had no other effect than to maintain and spread a delusion, and to protract, as Walpole himself confesses, (p. 191.) the sufferings of the unhappy man. At this result Walpole's fury knows no bounds. He abuses, in the grossest manner, every peer who concurred in the rejection of the bill, and he accuses, almost directly, Norris, Keppel, and Moore, of having acted under corrupt views;—' for,' says he, Norris who faltered, (that is, did not answer the first question clearly,) was never again employed;'-a severe mark of censure:- Keppel was;'—a mark of favour: and Moore had immediately assigned to him the most profitable station during the war.'-p. 188. Thus it is the ten plain honest men, who never deviated, he contents himself with abusing in the lump as weak and timid;' the three who gave some kind of countenance to the bill, he immediately charges with corrupt motives. This is just of a piece with his conduct to Ravenscroft. Ravenscroft and Keppel he instigates to a certain silly measure, and when that fails, instead of blaming himself, he blames them, and charges both with dishonourable conduct.

It must be confessed that Keppel's conduct does appear to have been inconsistent; but there is no reason to believe that it was as bad as his instigator, Walpole, represents it; it seems probable that he was worked upon by Walpole, and that his humanity induced him to give countenance to a scheme which opened the certainty of some delay, and the chance therefore of some favourable turn in the admiral's favour.

We are obliged to omit the exposure of some other intrigues of Walpole on this subject, but one more direct calumny must not pass unnoticed.

'Many years after that tragedy was acted, I received a most authentic and shocking confirmation of the justice of my suspicions. October 21, 1783, being with her Royal Highness Princess Amelia at her villa at Gunnersbury, among many interesting anecdotes which I have set down in another place, she told me, that while Admiral Byng's affair was depending, the Duchess of Newcastle sent Lady Sophia Egerton to her, the Princess, to beg her to be for the execution of Admiral Byng. They thought, added the Princess, that unless he was put to death, Lord Anson could not be at the head of the Admiralty. Indeed, continued the Princess, I was already for it, the officers would

never have fought, if he had not been executed. I replied, that I thought his death most unjust, and the sentence a most absurd contradiction.

Lady Sophia Egerton was wife of a clergyman, afterwards Bishop of Durham. What a complication of horrors! women employed on a job for blood!'—vol. ii. p. 191. note.

Upon this Lord Holland very properly remarks—

'As the author calls this accidental conversation at Gunnersbury a most authentic confirmation of his suspicions," the Editor was not at liberty to omit any part of the story; though the reader will probably think with him, that more importance is ascribed to mere gossip than it deserves.'-vol. ii. p. 191. note.

But his Lordship does not sufficiently expose the folly of this slander. We need not insist on the improbability of the Duchess of Newcastle, who had no interest in Lord Anson, sending Lady Sophia Egerton to beg Princess Amelia to be for the execution of Admiral Byng, because—the reason is admirable—because, unless it was so, Lord Anson could not be at the head of the Admiralty again. And was Lady Sophia Egerton a woman to undertake such a bloody embassy? The modest obscurity of an English female seldom affords the means of defence against hoarded slander: yet in this case we fortunately can call evidence to character. Mrs. Montague, (Letters, vol. iv. p. 140.) playfully imagining certain types of her friends, says that it would be difficult to find any thing sufficiently excellent to represent Lady Sophia Egerton.' It would require,' she adds,' an Addison or a Vandyke to delineate her mind, her manners, or her person.' A lady so thought of by her intelligent contemporaries was not likely to employ herself in the brutal pursuit Walpole attributes to her. But we wish Walpole had told us how Byng's death was to bring Lord Anson to the head of the Admiralty. Lord Anson did certainly, and fortunately for England, return, on a subsequent and very unexpected change of administration, to the head of the Admiralty, but there is positive proof, out of Walpole's own mouth, that neither he nor his friends asked for or even desired that office for him. It is only twenty pages forward that Walpole says, in the negociations for the new ministry, Lord Hardwicke peremptorily insisted on the treasurership of the navy for Lord Anson.' So that here we have proof that, although Byng had been shot, Lord Anson was not a whit the nearer the head of the admiralty; and Walpole adds that it was Mr. Pitt's own motion which placed him there.

Adjusting their list, Pitt said, he missed a very respectable name there, which he hoped would be placed greatly-it was Lord Anson's; -and he was accordingly restored to the Admiralty.'-vol. ii. p. 225.

This is, we think, the finishing contradiction to Walpole's impositions in the case of Byng. We never recollect to have seen a fouler mass of intrigue, folly, slander and malice, than we have exposed on this occasion. We do not believe that any motive of humanity, any touch of tenderness, prompted Walpole in the whole affair. Poor Byng's welfare does not seem to have been his object, and a fair, open, manly, honourable assistance, was never his course; his object was to blacken and distress his own personal enemies, or those whom he thought so; and his means were all the dark underhand shuffling which we have seen, which protracted Byng's agony without advancing his cause, and which do as little credit to Walpole's talents as an intriguer, as to his principles as a man of honour.

Here our limits warn us to conclude-We have exhausted, perhaps, the patience of our readers, but not the subject; hundreds of similar instances of detraction and misrepresentation are in our notes, but one of his own quartos would scarcely suffice to a full detection and refutation of an author who discolours every page with his passions, prejudices and partialities: it is sufficient for us if the foregoing examination of some of the most important passages of the Memoirs, shall excite a salutary suspicion in the minds of Walpole's readers, and induce them to receive with extreme caution and doubt, the evidence of a witness who in so many weighty points has been, we may almost say convicted, of all the arts of calumny, misrepresentation and falsehood.

ART. X.-Journal of a Visit to some Parts of Ethiopia. By George Waddington, Esq. Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Rev. Barnard Hanbury, of Jesus College, A.M. F.R.S. London. 1822.

FROM the days of Herodotus to our own, every poet, histo

rian, geographer, and traveller who has seen or sung the farfamed Nile, has assured us that its current was from South to North. It remained for two learned graduates of the University of Cambridge, Mathematicians, no doubt, to invert this longestablished order of things, and to discover that the course of this river was diametrically opposite to all recorded authority, and the direction of its stream from North to South. Mr. Waddington, it is true, detects this little lapse after he has printed about four and twenty pages; instead of correcting the mistake, however, he seems to consider it of no importance, observing coolly, 'in going up the river, I use the course of the Nile, to mean the direction that we pursued on its banks;' that is to say, 'when I write north I mean south; and though I am going against the stream of the

04

Nile,

Nile, I write as if I was going with it.' Very good! Quand je dis oui,' says the French philosopher in the play, c'est à dire non. This inversion of the points of the compass, in travelling along the banks of a river so well known as the Nile, though it may occasion some little perplexity in the intellects of Mr. Waddington's readers, is not likely, we admit, to lead to any serious geogra phical inaccuracy, and in this instance may not be of much importance; but what confusion would be created, and what discussion might it not give rise to, if Dr. Oudney, for example, in proceeding from Bornou to Timbuctoo along the Niger, should describe its course to lie in the direction of his line of march! In such a case, it would probably be contended either that Park had deceived the world, or that the river between Bornou and Timbuctoo was not the Niger, but some other streaṁ. The blunder, however, is not without its use. Committed by persons of such learning and accuracy as we have a right to consider Messrs. Waddington and Hanbury, it confirms us in an opinion we have long entertained, (and which we expressed in discussing the course of the Niger,' No. XLV. p. 236.) that Edrisi, and the other Arab writers, were in the constant habit of confounding the direction of the line of the river with its current, and describing it as seen from the place of the observer without any regard to the latter. Thus an Arab would say, and so would Mr. Waddington, in going up the Nile, that the Bahr el Abiad ran to the southwest, though its course is to the north-east, both of them meaning thereby that the line of its bed branched off in the former direction; and thus the north-west river of Browne, when he was placed in Darfoor, was actually running to the south-east, and was, we think unquestionably, either the Niger or a branch falling into it. To this source of error may also be ascribed the inverted course given to the Niger by Leo Africanus, who, though he saw it with his own eyes at Kabra, yet, going against the stream, reported its direction to be that in which he went, namely, to the westward; and we may add that, to this looseness and inaccuracy of language, are probably owing most of the confused and contradictory accounts which have been given of this mysterious stream.

Having settled this point with our travellers, we shall now give a concise exposition of the state of affairs in Ethiopia, at the time of their excursion up the Nile, as explanatory of the deplorable condition of the adjacent countries, and, as we think, of the disappointment which they met with in not being permitted to pursue their journey as far as they wished.

Mahommed Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, has never for a moment lost sight of that remnant of the corps of Mamelouks which escaped the treacherous massacre of their companions at Cairo,

and

and a similar, and if possible, a more perfidious butchery at Esne; and who finally, to the number of about 400, established them selves in the kingdom of Dongola, then divided among several chiefs of the tribe of Sheygya Arabs. We are told by Burckhardt, that, on their arrival, they were received by Mahmoud el Adelanab, head of the tribe, with the wonted hospitality of his nation; and that, as they then declared their intention was to settle in Sennaar, he made them considerable presents in horses, camels, slaves, and provisions. The fugitives however (as if to justify the conduct of Ali Pasha) had scarcely been a month at Argo, the largest island formed by the Nile in its whole course, when, upon some slight pretext, they murdered their benefactor, with several of his attendants, and spreading themselves over the country, plundered the Sheygya, and seized upon the revenues. One of the chiefs of this tribe joined the Mamelouks against his own countrymen, while his brother repaired to Egypt to seek for aid against the invaders.

Though little or no molestation had been given by the Mamelouks to the lower parts of Nubia, and still less to Egypt, Mahommed Ali, well knowing their restless character, determined to send an army, under pretence of assisting the Sheygya against them, but, as the result has proved, for the real purpose of destroying both, in which it would seem he has pretty nearly succeeded. Mr. Waddington tells us that the ambition of Ali is to possess all the banks and islands of the Nile, and to be master of all who drink its waters, from Abyssinia to the Mediterranean; but that apprehending an interference on the part of the British government, if he should carry his arms into that Christian country, he had limited his views to the conquest of the kingdoms of Dongola, Dar Sheygya, Berber, Shendy, and Sennaar. He therefore dispatched his son Ismael Pasha, a youth of about twentytwo years of age, with an army of 10,000 men, (of whom about 4000 only were regulars,) and twelve pieces of cannon: the troops consisted chiefly of mercenaries, hired by the month, and composed of Bedouins, Albanians, Moggrebyns, and Asiatic Turks. Ismael is described as a fine young man, of great personal courage, and much generosity, but self-willed and obstinate, as a young prince,' so Mr. Waddington says, ought to be;' but he labours under a disease in the roof of his mouth, which considerably affects his speech.

The army advanced, without the slightest opposition, to Dongola, which the Mamelouks immediately evacuated, and retired to Shendy; the next step therefore of the Pasha was to lead it against the very people to whose assistance it was pretended he had come thus far. We must borrow from Burckhardt a short-de

scription