We will conclude by adding two little pieces, composed on the banks of Loch Achray. The one is an attempt to embody, more Scotico, the scene which we had witnessed in our evening ride along the margin of Vennachar.

O, came ye by Loch Vennachar,

O, came ye by Loch Vennachar,

When the gloaming-star's gleam

Threw a faint broken stream

O'er the thousand-wav'd bosom of Loch Vennachar?

O, came ye by Loch Vennachar,
O, came ye by Loch Vennachar?

Did ye see, on its side,

A lassie, the pride

Of a poor herdsman's heart, and of Loch Vennachar ?”

"I came by the dim Vennachar,

I came by the dim Vennachar;

The hills they were brown,

And the meadows were mown,

And the cows herded dark by the dim Vennachar.

I came by the dim Vennachar,

I came by the dim Vennachar;

But tell me some sign,

To know which was thine,

Of the lassies I met by the dim Vennachar."

"And came ye by Loch Vennachar?
And came ve by Loch Vennachar?

Then know by this sign

The lassie that's mine

She's alone in her beauty by Loch Vennachar!"

The other trifle will explain itself;-and with it we bid our readers a pilgrim's farewell.

Green, green wave the birches these wild passes o'er,
And the calm sheet of lake trembles bright to the shore;
But dimm'd is each feature

Of beautiful nature

To him that's alone by the sweet Loch Achray.

The lark may sing down to his heather-hid nest,
And the waterfowl sport on the silver Lake's breast;
But every dear blessing,

That they are possessing,

Reminds of the Absent from sweet Loch Achray.

These waters and mountains are lovely, I own;
But dimm'd is the beauty I brood on alone:
Oh, reft were the pleasures

Of Nature's best treasures,

If none but the Lonely sought sweet Loch Achray!

Were the feet that I love on the heather with mine,
Oh, then were the time for the blue Lake to shine!
And every wild flow'ret,
With Love smiling o'er it,

Would call down new blessings on sweet Loch Achray!

J. J.

ART. II.ON THE MIGRATION OF NATIONS, THE CRUSADES, AND THE MIDDLE AGES.-From the German of SCHILLER.

THE System of social combination, which had its origin in the northern parts of Europe and Asia, and was established with a new race of people on the ruins of the Western Empire, has now had nearly seven hundred years in which to test itself on this wider theatre and under new relations; to unfold itself in all its nature and varieties; and to run through all its different forms and changes. The successors of the Vandals, Suevi, Alani, Goths, Heruli, Lombards, Franks, Burgundians, &c., have become at last the inhabitants of the soil which their predecessors trod with sword in hand; and the spirit of wandering and spoliation which first led them into this new Fatherland, awoke again in the eleventh century, in another shape and under other motives. Europe now hurls back on the South-West of Asia, the hordes and devastation which, seven hundred years before, she had received and suffered under, from the North of that Continent, but with very different fortune, for many as were the streams of blood it had cost the barbarians to establish a permanent dominion in Europe, as many does it now cost their Christian descendants to conquer a few towns and fortresses in Syria, which two hundred years afterwards they are to lose for ever.

The folly and madness which produced the scheme of the Crusades, and the violence which accompanied its execution, cannot well offer to an eye, whose vision is limited to the present, any temptation to dwell long upon them. But if we consider these events in connection with the centuries which preceded and with those which followed them, they appear too natural in their origin to excite our astonishment, and too beneficent in their consequences not to resolve our disgust into a totally different feeling. If we look at its causes, this expedition of the Christians to the Holy Land is so unartificial, and even so necessary a product of its age, that an entirely uneducated person, before whom the historical premises of this event were fully laid down, must of himself at once discern the result. If we look at its effects, we recognise in it the first considerable step which Superstition herself took towards amending the evils which for centuries she had inflicted on the human race, and there is perhaps no historical problem which time has more clearly solved than this;-none, upon which the

Genius who spins the thread of the world's history, has so satisfactorily justified himself to the reason of man.

From the unnatural and enervating peace into which Ancient Rome had sunk all the nations upon whom she had forced her dominion, from the effeminate slavery under which the most active powers of a numerous generation of men were stifled, we see the human race wander through the lawless, stormy freedom of the middle ages, to rest at last in the happy medium between both extremes, and beneficently to unite Freedom with Order, Peace with Activity, and Variety with harmonious Agreement. There can scarcely be any question, whether the condition of happiness which we now enjoy, or whose approach we at least recognise with certainty, is to be regarded as an advantage gained over the most flourishing position in which the human race has been found at any former period,-and whether we have bettered ourselves in comparison with the best times of Rome and Greece. Greece and Rome could at the best produce excellent Greeks, excellent Romans; the nation, even in its highest epochs, never rose to the production of excellent Men. To the Athenian, all the world beyond Greece was a barbarian desert, and we know that this belief formed no inconsiderable addition to his happiness. The Romans were punished by their own arm, because throughout the whole vast theatre of their dominion they had left nothing remaining but Roman citizens and Roman slaves. None of our States have distributed the privileges of a Roman Citizenship, but in place of it, we have a possession which no Roman, did Romans yet remain, could understand, and we hold it from a power which takes away from none what it gives to another, and what it once gives never recalls-we possess Human Freedom :-a right that (how different from the citizen-rights of Rome!) augments in value as the numbers increase of those who partake it with us, that, dependent on no changing form of political constitution, on no State-revolutions, rests on the firm foundations of Reason and Justice.

The advantage is thus obvious,—and the question is simply this:-Was there no nearer way to the accomplishment of this object? Could not this salutary change have been derived from the Roman State in a less violent manner, and was it necessary that the human race should traverse those melancholy periods from the fourth to the sixteenth centuries?

Reason cannot endure a world of anarchy. Striving continually towards harmony, she will rather run into the danger of maintaining order at the expense of happiness, than want conformity altogether.

VOL. IV. No. 16.-New Series.

L

Was the Migration of Nations, and the Middle Ages that followed upon it, a necessary condition of our better times?

Asia can afford us some assistance on this subject. Why did no Grecian free States spring up behind the march of Alexander? Why do we see China, condemned to a mournful enduring existence, become old in endless childhood? Because Alexander conquered humanely;-because the small band of his Greeks disappeared among the millions of the great monarch;-because the hordes of Mantchou were imperceptibly lost in the immensity of China. They only subdued men, the laws and manners, the religion and the State, remained victorious. For despotically ruled States there is no salvation but in dissolution. Tenderhearted conquerors only introduce a mushroom race to nourish the sick body, and can do nothing but perpetuate its disease. If the poisoned land is not to infect the healthy vanquisher-if the German in Gaul is not to degenerate into a Roman, as the Greek at Babylon became degraded to a Persian,—the form must be broken in pieces which might become dangerous to his imitative spirit, and on the new theatre which he now treads, he must be in every respect the strongest power.

The Scythian wilderness is opened up, and pours forth a rude race upon the West. Their path is marked with blood. Cities sink behind them into ashes; the works of man's hand, and the fruits of the earth, are, with equal fury, trodden under foot; pestilence and famine follow, to complete what fire and sword have left unfinished;—but life is only destroyed, that a better life may spring up in its room. We will not reckon against them the corpses which they heap together, nor the cities they lay in ashes. These will arise more beautiful under the hands of freedom, and a better stock of men will live within them. All the Arts of beauty and of splendour, of luxury and of refinement, perish; precious monuments designed for eternity sink to the dust; and lawless freedom madly ventures to disturb the fine mechanism of spiritual order;-but even in this wild tumult the hand of Order is at work; and whatever is allotted to future generations from among the treasures of the past, will be preserved without observation from the destructive fury of the present. A desert gloom now extends itself over these burning ruins, and the miserable fainting remnant of their inhabitants presents to a new conqueror as little resistance as temptation.

The stage is thus cleared, and it is now occupied by a new race, trained up in the forests of the North, during centuries of quiet unconsciousness, to become a re-invigorating colony to the exhausted West. Their laws, their customs, are coarse and barbarous, but in their rude way they honour that human nature,