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the British Cabinet, but of France with her high sense of military honour, and of Austria with her extreme caution and strong local interest in these questions, the essential conditions of peace would be obtained if Russia consents to relinquish her separate protectorate of the Principalities, to secure the navigation of the Danube, to revise the Convention of 1841 in the interest of the balance of power, and to concur with the other Christian States in obtaining from the Porte securities for the equal rights of all its subjects. The Three Powers allied by the treaty of the 2nd December, are agreed not only on these general propositions, but on the meaning to be affixed to them. They consider that Russia must no longer have the right which she possessed under the treaties of Akermann, Adrianople, and Balta Liman, to enter the Principalities, to change their government, and to deal with that portion of the Sultan's territories as if she enjoyed a joint, or rather a paramount, sovereignty there. They consider that the navigation of the Danube must be secured not by treaty only, as it is already, but by an independent authority at the mouth of that stream. They consider that Russian preponderance in the Black Sea, as established at Sebastopol, is incompatible with the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire, and consequently with the equilibrium of Europe. They consider that it is impossible to renew that part of the treaty of Kainarji upon which the Emperor of Russia based his claim to interfere between the Sultan and twelve millions of his Christian subjects, so as in fact to render himself the head of that vast population, and to become the dominant authority in the European provinces of Turkey. Such are the terms they require, and with less they cannot be satisfied. These concessions, moderate as they are, would suffice to extinguish the pretensions out of which the present war has arisen; and it may be a question whether it is expedient, with a view to a lasting peace, to render its conditions too onerous and humiliating to a great Power, which will then take the first opportunity of breaking through them. We cannot alter the nature of things; we cannot suddenly make Russia weak and Turkey strong; we cannot restore to the Moslem that empire of the sword which once ruled the Eastern world, or stop the irresistible advance of the Christian population; but we shall have taken those measures which prudence and policy imperatively require when we have deprived Russia of the weapons both of diplomacy and of war, by which she has attempted to annihilate the independence of the Ottoman Empire, and when we have shown her that the road to Byzantium is closed against her by the united will of Europe.

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1855. Note to the Article on Cardinal Mezzofanti.'

291

NOTE TO THE ARTICLE ON CARDINAL

MEZZOFANTI.'

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SINCE this Article was printed, we have received the Trans'actions of the Philological Society' (Nos. vii. viii. and ix. 1854), which contain an additional paper by Mr. Watts - a review of M. Manavit's Life of Mezzofanti' (pp. 133–150). Mr. Watt's estimate of the philological value of this work exactly coincides with our own. He enters, with a minuteness which our limits rendered impossible, into a critical examination of the two authorities the writer of the Giornale di Roma,' (whose list he prints, pp. 136-7.), and that of the Civiltà Cat'tolica'-on which M. Manavit relies; and demonstrating by many examples their vague and unscientific character, he shows that, in determining the actual extent of the Cardinal's attainments, their unsupported representation, not only cannot safely be accepted as decisive, but is at variance with the ascertained. and unquestioned facts of the case.

To the valuable collection of sketches of the Cardinal, by different travellers, contained in his former paper, Mr. Watts has added two new and interesting extracts, which we should very gladly have included in our notice. He writes throughout, as in his former essay, with a thorough love of the subject; and one of the objects of his paper, as of our own, is to guard 'the genuine fame of an illustrious man from the danger in 'which it is placed by the exaggerations of ill-informed and 'uncritical admiration."

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No. CCVI. will be published in April.

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THE

EDINBURGH REVIEW,

APRIL, 1855.

No. CCVI.

ART. I.1. Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life among the Lowly. By HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. London: 1852.

2. A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. By HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. London: 1853.

3. Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. By Mrs. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. London: 1854.

4. Speech of the Honourable Charles Sumner on his Motion to Repeal the Fugitive Slave Bill in the Senate of the United States. Aug. 26. 1852. Washington: 1852.

THE sale of Uncle Tom's Cabin' is the most marvellous literary phenomenon that the world has witnessed. It came out as a sort of feuilleton in the National Era,' a Washington paper. The death of Uncle Tom was the first portion published, indeed the first that was written. It appeared in the summer of 1851, and excited so much attention, that Mrs. Stowe added a beginning and middle to her end, by composing and printing from week to week the story as we now have it, until it was concluded in March, 1852. It was soon after reprinted at Boston in two volumes, -a form in which we have not seen it in England, although by the end of Nov. 1852, 150,000 copies had been sold in America. The first London edition was published in May, 1852, and was not large, for the European popularity of a picture of negro life was doubted. But in the following September, the London publishers furnished to one house 10,000 copies per day for about four weeks, and had to employ 1000 persons in preparing copies to supply the general demand.

VOL. CI. NO. CCVI.

Χ

We cannot follow it beyond 1852, but at that time more than a million of copies had been sold in England; probably ten times as many as have been sold of any other work, except the Bible and Prayer-book. In France Uncle Tom' still covers the shop windows of the Boulevards, and one publisher alone, Eustace Barba, has sent out five different editions in different forms. Before the end of 1852 it had been translated into Italian, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Flemish, German, Polish, and Magyar. There are two different Dutch translations, and twelve different German ones,-and the Italian translation enjoys the honour of the Pope's prohibition. It has been dramatised in twenty different forms, and acted in every capital in Europe, and in the free States of America.

Its moral influence, though it has not been as wonderful as its literary popularity, has been remarkable. In the form of a novel it is really a political pamphlet. It is an attack on the Fugitive Slave Law of America, and though it has not effected the repeal of that law, it has rendered its complete execution impossible. Those among our readers to whom the subject is not familiar may perhaps be interested by a short account of the origin, and the nature of that law.

Slavery is a status so repugnant to the principles of Christianity, that, though never formally abolished, it gradually died out, as with the diffusion of knowledge and the improvement of intelligence, the spirit of our religion was better understood, and its precepts were better obeyed. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, it was practically extinct in the civilised portions of Europe. Its revival is one of the crimes of religious intolerance. At that time orthodoxy was supposed to be essential to salvation. The Church of Rome condemned to eternal damnation, as indeed she does now, all whose faith on any point, however practically unimportant, however purely speculative, however unintelligible, differed from the creed which she thought fit to proclaim. The Reformers followed her example. Each sect believed those, whose opinions varied from its own, worthy of the severest punishment which can be inflicted in this world, and destined to perpetual suffering in the other. The strongest term of reproach and antipathy in the English language, the word in which abhorrence and contempt are concentrated, is miscreant. That is to say, a person whose religious belief differs from that of the speaker.

When such was the sentence which each sect passed on its fellow Christians, on men who agreed with them as to the precepts of Revelation, and differed from them only as to the essence of the Being from whom it was derived, or as to the

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