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and the mountains behind, abrupt and lofty, render the view one of the most beautiful landscapes in the Mediterranean. I have seldom been so delighted with the external aspect of town; and the gra tification that I have received in the course of these two days, has tended to confirm the first impression.

This island formerly belonged to the Genoese, by whom the present fortresses were constructed, and its beautiful silk manufactures established. The houses are built in the Italian style, with lofty pyramidal roofs. The Turks having intermarried with the natives, the society is said to be more free in this island than in any other part of the Ottoman empire. Except in the particular of dress, and the streets where the shops are situated, every thing about Scio has the appearance of a town in Christendom. The women sit at the windows, go about with their children, and look at strangers, with the unaffected air of persons in the full enjoyment of liberty. The Turk is here different, indeed, from what he is at Tripolizza and Athens. There he is seen in his legitimate military character, but in Scio he is comparatively a citizen of the world. In his look and gestures, and in his mode of treating strangers, even of regarding the Greeks, he is affable and courteous.

The shops are well filled, many of them with those gorgeous stuffs, of woven gold and silver, which are but rarely seen even in London. The town of Scio is one of the principal manufacturing seats in the empire; and silks, which rival in beauty and elegance the richest of France and Italy, are produced in the Sciot looms.'The inhabitants of the city are estimated at twenty thousand souls. The population of the whole island is very great, not less, it is said, than a hundred and thirty-five thousand persons. - It must be recollected, that the prosperity of Scio has been scarcely affected by the Turks. The traces of its former possessors, the Genoese, are every where visible; and I should not be surprized, if, in some of the houses, paintings of the old Italian masters were discovered.'

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Mr. G. discovers a very proper courtesy towards the ladies of Scio, and ascribes their anxiety to invite strangers into their dwellings to a cause very different from the coarse insinuations which have been vulgarly thrown out. It arises, he says, from no other motive than a desire to find purchasers for their silks and embroidery; an empressement which, without going so far as Scio, we may find sufficiently visible among the unblemished fair whose province it is to attract buyers for lace on the opposite side of the English channel, we mean in Normandy and Flanders.

At Athens, and in other parts of Greece, Mr. G. found the beauty of the prospects to consist less in their magnitude than in their picturesque character: but the coast of Asia Minor presented to him many extensive and stupendous scenes. The permanency of Asiatic manners, and the constancy with which one kind of occupation is pursued from generation to generation, are thus curiously exemplified:

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• Smyrna,

Smyrna, April 27.-Having crossed the Castrus, a little way above Ephesus, by a bridge of several arches, we entered a beautiful, but almost entirely deserted valley. The clear river winds cheerfully through it; and the sides of the mountains are in some places broken into stupendous precipices, and in others scooped into fine holms and rural hollows, decorated with stately trees.

'After riding an hour or so, we fell in with a train of camels, cattle, men, women, and children. Forgetting, in the instant, that I was in Asia, I imagined it was a troop of country folk going, with their merchandise, to a fair; but, observing something uncommon in the dresses of the men, and that the women were not veiled, I enquired what they were; and was agreeably surprized to find them one of those wandering tribes, who, like Abraham and his household, roam over the vast unappropriated domains of Asia, and have no local habitation. During winter they come into the narrow valleys; and as the spring returns, they retire again towards the open country, passing the vicinity of the large towns about the end of Lent, at which time they dispose of their lambs and young cattle. This tribe or family consisted of about a hundred persons, men-servants and maidservants, with their little ones.. Upwards of three score of camels, with a more numerous train of cattle, sheep, and goats, asses loaded with poultry in baskets, and other patriarchal chattels and moveables. They rested on the banks of the river, but did not pitch any tents. As they travel slowly, the Paschal Feast will begin before they can reach the neighbourhood of Smyrna. I had not the least hope of falling in with any thing so primitive. The Mosaic descriptions have now acquired a degree of circumstantiality, in my mind, pleasantly perspicuous.'

We are obliged, in critical justice, to follow up these extracts with the observation that they are flattering specimens of the book; and that the reader, after having been favourably prepossessed with such passages as those above, would be surprized at the levity and puerility of many parts of the volume. Without swelling our article by citations of the latter description, we shall merely point out the sentences at the bottom of pp. 240. and 244, with the manner of telling the story in p. 246., as instances calculated to excite the mortification of the reader who looks for consistency and dignity from the writer. The dedication, also, to the Russian Prince Koslovsky is a fulsome performance; recapitulating, with an air of apparent modesty, the honorary titles conferred on the Prince, and adverting very significantly to his favourable impressions with regard to the author.

Mr. G. devotes to Athens several letters, of which we have taken little notice; the reports of other travellers, which correspond in all material points with his statements, being already before our readers. His visit to this celebrated city took place at the same time with that of Lord Byron and Mr. Hobhouse; REY. OCT. 1814.

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and, while he refers to the circumstantial account which the latter gentleman designed to publish, he pays (p. 196.) a high compliment to the well known delineations of a traveller of the last age:

In Stuart's Antiquities, ever thing about Athens is so well represented, that it is unnecessary for me to attempt to convey, by words, what is so effectually done already by visible representation: therefore, both for the antient and present state of the Lantern of Demosthenes, as well as of every other relic in the town, I cannot do better than refer you to Stuart.'

Finally, we shall quote some passages relative to the town and island of Myconi:

Myconi, May 20.-This is a neat place for its extent; and more like a Christian town of the same extent, than any that I have yet seen in the Levant. It is supposed to contain between four and five thousand inhabitants, and upwards of eight hundred inhabited houses. -Since the better days of Venice, Myconi has been a place of considerable trade; being, in some degree, the parent of Specia, Idra, and Ipsera.

The most considerable, and the most celebrated production of Myconi is its red wine, of which about five hundred pipes are made annually. The quality resembles that of claret; but the inhabitants have a way of making different kinds; and, as the clarety is the most expensive to them, they will rather cheat you than give it genuine. When the grapes are culled and pressed, while yet fresh from the vineyard, the claret-flavour of the wine is obtained in its greatest perfection. By drying the grapes in the sun, the other sorts, and which stand the most watering, are produced. When the grapes are too much dried, the wine becomes sweet, and, to my palate, very odious.

By their original capitulation with the Turks, the inhabitants of Myconi enjoy the right of choosing their own magistrates, and of otherwise regulating the internal economy of the island.-Their com mercial usages are similar to those of Idra, of which I mean to give an account more at large. But the Myconists are not comparable to the Idriots in enterprize and activity, nor have they the same reputation for honest dealing.'

• The Greek literary genius is certainly not so much degenerated as we are taught to believe. I have seen here a translation of Goldsmith's History of Greece, a System of Philosophy, translated from the French, and several poetical publications, of which a Candiot pastoral is so much admired, that like the Gentle Shepherd in Scotland, it is in the hands of the common people. The number of original Romaic works, particularly in poetry, published at Vienna and in Italy, is, I am told, very considerable. Constantine Mano, who resides in Walachia, is said by the Greeks, with their characteristic hyperboles, to rival Homer in spirit and genius. He has however composed hexameters, on heroic subjects, with great splendour of fancy

See our Number for August last.

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and energy of expression. The odes of Core are well known. There is in this island a poor old man, a schoolmaster, who has a considerable stock of verses on hand, for which he would be glad to find a purchaser.'

A small map of the scene of Mr. Galt's peregrinations is inserted.

ART. IX. Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century: comprizing Biographical Memoirs of William Bowyer, Printer, F.S.A. and many of his learned Friends: an incidental View of the Progress and Advancement of Literature in this Kingdom during the last Century; and Biographical Anecdotes of a considerable Number of eminent Writers and ingenious Artists. By John Nichols, F.S.A. Vol. VIII. 8vo. 11. 7s. Boards. Nichols, Son, and Bentley. 1814.

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N our seventy-second volume, p. 270-286. we sauntered with patient though desultory steps over the ground occupied by this indefatigably useful writer. Frequently we stopped to applaud the uniform industry and marginal encroachment of his cultivation, the tangled variety of his assemblage of plants, and the occasional specimens of an eminently rare or exotic vegetation. To this additional but still not concluding volume, a similar attention is due.

Grateful as we feel to Mr. Nichols for the assiduous micrology of his research, the meritorious fidelity of his detail, and the crouded comprehension of his notice, we still think that he would better have consulted his lasting celebrity, by confining his enterprize to the Annals of the Bowyer-press. He now possesses all the attainable knowlege concerning the works which have thence emanated, and the persons connected with it. His bibliographical notices and criticisms, and his biographical anecdotes and documents, exhaust the literary history of the satellite-authors, who had that printer for their planet; and they were shining men, and worth mapping as a separate constellation. By cutting short the book at a point up to which it might have been rendered complete, an exemplary work of art would have been produced, having unity of design, wholeness of shape, and propriety of execution. In its pristine form, it was almost sufficiently well made and interesting to be quoted throughout Europe as a model of individual typographical history.

By prolonging the narrative, however, beyond its natural termination, and running it on into subsequent periods of superintendence over the same printing-office, another reign begins. A man with new circumvolving orbs gradually becomes

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the center of gravity. The antient groupes of luminaries no longer move in concert, but go off at a tangent, and disperse, like the incoherent stars of a bursting sky-rocket. By degrees, it is perceived that the old attractions are superseded; that a more numerous but inferior class of enlighteners of the world have mounted the zenith, a galaxy of littleness, a nebule for whose radiance the telescope must vouch. To calm independence, has suceeeded an admiring loyalty; to liberal scrip ture-criticism, a cautious orthodoxy; to classical literature, a domestic archæology; and to excursions in Natolia, the topography of church-yards. Thus a loss of importance in the schemes and figures delineated unluckily comes to coincide with a period, at which the narrative itself necessarily grows meagre and incomplete from the recency of the facts to be noticed. A falling off in the latter part of the progress, a disappointing enfeeblement of interest, and a decay of attraction, overspread the book, independently of any relaxation of zeal or talent in the author. Without the least abatement of assiduity on his part, we yet detect a diminution of curious compilation; and, with a larger company of the distinguished, we have fewer of eminence to whom we are introduced.

Happily, Mr. Nichols is at his ease in any company: he has all the urbanity of a candidate; he has a smile and a shake by the. hand, and a civil question about every one of the family, to bestow on the entire class of middling people who choose to intrude into the assembly-rooms of literature. Without contempt for the rabble of mediocrity, how should they not acknowlege. him for their worthy representative?

With the typographic annals of the year 1774 this volume begins but neither that nor the ensuing year ushers into notice any remarkable book or author. The year 1776 affords occasion for excursions concerning the antiquaries Willet and Strange: but 1777 announces nothing considerable. Under 1778, occurs a list of publications by the orientalist and mathematician, the Reverend S. Henley, in which we can venture to indicate the omission of an "Essay toward a new Edition of Tibullus," printed in 1792.

Great events in literary history adorn the annals of 1779: a. speech of Burke, Johnson's Lives of the Poets, and a Supplement to Swift's Works issue from the press at once. Other supplements may yet be made to the works of Swift; for he wrote many things under borrowed names. His polite conversations, for instance, were published in 1738 with the name of Simon Wagstaffe in the title-page; and there is some reason to suppose that the name of Wagstaffe has on other, occasions been the pseudonymous designation of Swift. The

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