sufficient attention was paid to the paving of the streets-had been cheered by the sight of English faces and English uniforms leaning over the parapet of a fort-had admired the carved fountains, the shady tanks by the side of fine temples, and the numerous bungalows with their wellwooded compounds, which are dotted along the road after leaving the native town-and had at last drawn up in front of the Mint, a beautiful building, now appropriated to the use of the troops passing throughwhen we had accomplished all this, we had seen as much of Benares as, for the time being, I felt up to, though not nearly as much as there is to see, or as I hope to see, in rambles some future day among its streets, sacred to every Hindoo superstition and tradition, and as old-if one may believe the Brahmins-ay, and older than the proverbial hills, or even than Time itself. Independently of its sacred character, which has long rendered it a place of much interest, this town was the scene of stirring events at the time of the outbreak. It was here that General Neil first earned his character for firmness and contempt for danger-a character his title to which he improved and strengthened on every subsequent occasion, up to that fatal evening when, fighting his perilous way through the bloody lanes of Lucknow, a bullet cut short his glorious career; and this at a time when England's supremacy in Benares was waning fast, and with it our feeble grasp of one of the few places remaining to us in this portion of the country, and when a moment's hesitation or indecision would have sacrificed all.

It is an exciting tale that one which tells of the disarming of the Sepoys at this place by a handful of English soldiers, who were received on their approach with a volley of rebel musketry, the first angry shots, perhaps, which had rung through these old sacred streets, and startled the dull ears of the sleek, fat, holy Brahmin bulls which dwelt therein for many a century. It is feverish work listening to how the balance in which their fate and almost that of our empire in the East hung, wavered, and fluctuated irresolutely from side to side. It is glorious at last to hear how Neil, rushing forward, pistolling or cutting down a traitor who was pointing his musket at his breast, set thereby an example which was so nobly followed, that the scales wavered no more, or trembled, but turned at once, and thus Benares was saved. I shall leave the reader who may be interested on the subject to find out from other sources the details and particulars of these stirring times, and to read the accounts abler pens than this have written of the deeds of the gallant Neil, and his performances at Benares and elsewhere. At the time I passed through it the tragedy of Retribution was being daily enacted in an open space, where, day after day, crowds collected to behold their traitor countrymen launched into eternity, and to see the arms, legs, and bodies of the murderers of women and children blown mangled and shapeless from the smoking muzzle of the avenging gun. Even the day before we arrived ten Sepoys had expiated their crimes on the gallows, and an officer of Royal Artillery quartered at this place had little occupation besides the occasional blowing away of those who had been condemned to this nature of death. A few hours' stay at Benares was all that we enjoyed, for that same afternoon saw us again on the road, while a couple of days brought us to the junction of the Ganges and Jumna, where are situated the town and fort of Allahabad, and where we halted for a few days, thus obtaining a temporary respite from the discomforts of the bullock-train.

V. D. M.

New-Book Notes by Monkshood.

PRESCOTT'S HISTORY OF PHILIP THE SECOND.*

IN the present volume of Mr. Prescott's attractive history, Philip him. self is not often seen upon the stage. It is only in the two concluding chapters that we catch more than a glimpse of his majesty, the previous eleven being occupied by the narrative of the Rebellion of the Moriscoes, and War with the Turks. With his usual completeness of arrangement, the historian makes his reader conversant with the chequered past of the Moors in Spain, before he details the exciting story of their fatal present. He takes us back to the beginning of the eighth century, when the Arabs, on warlike thoughts intent, as inspired thereto by the prophet of their aggressive faith, having traversed the southern shores of the Mediterranean, now reached the borders of those straits which separate Africa from Europe. Here we see them pausing for a moment, before carrying their banners into a strange and unknown quarter of the globe, and then descending, with accumulated strength, on the sunny fields of Andalusia, there to meet the whole Gothic array on the banks of the Guadalete, and, after that fatal battle in which King Roderick fell with the flower of his nobility, spreading themselves, like an army of locusts, over every part of the Peninsula. "Three years sufficed for the conquest of the country,except that small corner in the north, where a remnant of the Goths contrived to maintain a savage independence, and where the rudeness of the soil held out to the Saracens no temptation to follow them.

"It was much the same story that was repeated, more than three centuries later, by the Norman conqueror in England. The battle of Hastings was to that kingdom what the battle of the Guadalete was to Spain; though the Norman barons, as they rode over the prostrate land, dictated terms to the vanquished of a sterner character than those granted by the Saracens."

We may here remark, in passing, that Mr. Prescott has a pleasant habit of thus illustrating his recital by allusions to historical parallels, or, as the case may happen, historical contrasts. A little further on, for example, he describes the intercourse between these Moslem conquerors and the subject natives in Spain, as having been "certainly far greater than that between our New England ancestors and the Indian race which they found in possession of the soil,-that ill-fated race," as he too truly calls it, which seems to have shrunk from the touch of civilisation, and to have passed away before it like the leaves of the forest before the breath of winter. On the other hand, he supposes the union in question to have been not so intimate as that which existed between the old Spaniards and the semi-civilised tribes that occupied the plateau of Mexico, whose descendants, he adds, are at this day to be seen there, filling the highest places, both social and political, and whose especial boast it is to have sprung from the countrymen of Montezuma. În a similar way he speaks

*History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain. By William H. Prescott. Vol. III. London: Routledge and Co. 1859.

of the war carried on by Ferdinand and Isabella against the Moors of Granada, as one "which rivalled that of Troy in its duration, and surpassed it in the romantic character of its incidents;"-and of the chronic war, so to speak, maintained age after age by Christian against infidel-generation after generation passing their lives in one long, uninterrupted crusade-as having something of the "same effect on the character of the nation that the wars for the recovery of Palestine had on the Crusaders of the Middle Ages"—namely, that every man learned to regard himself as in an especial manner the soldier of Heaven-for ever fighting the great battle of the Faith. So again the fall of the favourite, Cardinal Espinosa, is called "an event as signal and unexpected by the world, and as tragical to the subject of it, as the fall of Wolsey." And the massacre in the prison of the Chancery of Granada "nowhere finds a more fitting parallel than in the murders perpetrated on a still larger scale, during the French Revolution, in the famous massacres of September" with this difference, that whereas the Parisian miscreants were the tools of a sanguinary faction, that was regarded with horror by every friend of humanity in the country-in Granada, on the contrary, it was the government itself, or at least those of highest authority in it, who were responsible for the deed.*

Of course the historian's sympathies are with the Moriscoes in the systematic oppression that crushed them in the latter days. Upon the impolicy as well as the injustice of that oppression he descants with glowing emphasis. He traces the degrees by which the Spaniards became more and more arrogant, in proportion as the Arabs, shorn of their ancient opulence and power, descended in the scale; and shows how the latent fire of intolerance was fanned into a blaze by the breath of the fanatical clergy, who naturally possessed unbounded influence in a country where religious considerations entered so largely into the motives of actionwhile, to crown the whole, the date of the fall of Granada (1492) coincided with that of the establishment of the Inquisition, "as if the hideous monster had waited the time when an inexhaustible supply of victims might be afforded for its insatiable maw." Ximenes set most Christian Spain an example in the art of conversion. Proselytism made easy was the apparent fruit of his endeavours. Turn Christian, or turn out-of house, home, country: choose ye. The Moors chose the former alternative-that horn of the dilemma appearing to them the less of two evils, for there are such things as conversions not even skin-deep, the Ethiopian being, in fact, incapable of changing his skin, and the leopard his spotson compulsion. Charles the Fifth had not been ten years upon the throne, when the entire Moorish population were "brought within the pale of

* Possibly Mr. Prescott's wholesome appetite for allusion leads him occasionally to become far-fetching in his fare. For example, in his description of the allied fleet making for the gulf of Lepanto, and, as it swept down the Ionian Sea, passing many a spot famous in ancient story, none of these, he suggests, would be so likely to excite an interest at this time as Actium, "on whose waters was fought the greatest naval battle of antiquity. But the mariner, probably," it is added-and the probably is a most safe conjecture-" gave little thought to the past, as he dwelt on the conflict that awaited him at Lepanto." The mariner, honest man, had, in vulgar parlance, other fish to fry, that foggy morning, than any that were kept in (Ionian) hot water by the Roman tragedy of All for Love, or the World Well Lost, some fifteen hundred years before.

Christianity," and were henceforth to be called Moriscoes, old things (it was hoped) having passed away, and all things become new. But all things are not apt to become new, and remain so, even in cases the most miraculous of wholesale conversions. Morisco is but Moor corrupt. Call him what you will, after baptism, it is still the article of his faith that there is but one God, and Mahomet is his prophet; and he thinks it best, as a ward of the Inquisition, and mere stepson of Christendom, to put his trust in that one God, and keep his powder dry. He will want it soon, and plenty of it.

When Philip succeeded to the throne, the larger part of the Moorish population was spread over the mountain range of the Alpujarras, where, in scattered hamlets, they kept alive as best they could the traditions of their fathers, and that spirit of independence without some remnant of which life was not worth the living. For a year or two the king had too engrossing a call from foreign affairs to allow of his devoting much attention to Morisco rats, and mice, and such small deer of the sierras in the south. By-and-by, however, ordinances were published which tended to discourage and irritate the alien race. These "impolitic edicts" were but precursors of a revolutionary measure-a grand inquisitor's masterpiecewhich forbade the use of Arabic, the continuance of family names, of Oriental costume, of feminine veils in public, of private religious ceremonies, of national songs and dances at home festivities, and of the warm baths which every cleanly Morisco accounted a necessary, not mere luxury, of every-day life. Stern penalties were attached to the non-observance of this index prohibitorum. Imprisonment and exile were to overtake the transgressor of a law which, says Mr. Prescott, "for cruelty and absurdity, has scarcely a parallel in history." For it would be difficult, as he observes, to imagine any greater outrage offered to a people than the provision compelling women to lay aside their veils-associated as these were in every Eastern mind with the obligation of modesty; or that in regard to opening the doors of the houses, and exposing those within to the insolent gaze of every passer; or that in relation to the baths-so indispensable to cleanliness and comfort, especially in the warm climate of the South.

"But the masterpiece of absurdity, undoubtedly, is the stipulation in regard to the Arabic language, as if by any human art a whole population, in the space of three years [at the end of which period this provision was to be enforced], could be made to substitute a foreign tongue for its own; and that, too, under circumstances of peculiar difficulty, partly arising from the total want of affinity between the Semitic and the European languages, and partly from the insulated position of the Moriscoes, who, in the cities, had separate quarters assigned to them, in the same manner as the Jews, which cut them off from intimate intercourse with the Christians." Indeed, with Mr. Prescott we may well doubt, from the character of this provision, whether the government had so much at heart the conversion of the Moslem, as the desire to entangle them in such violations of the law as should afford a plausible pretext for driving them from the country altogether ;—which "shrewd suspicion" is confirmed by the significant reply of Otadin, professor of theology at Alcalá, who, when consulted by Philip on the expediency of the edict, gave his hearty approbation of it, by quoting the appalling Spanish

proverb, "The fewer enemies the better." It was reserved for the imbecile Philip the Third to crown the disasters of his reign by the expulsion of the Moriscoes. Yet no one can doubt that it was a consummation earnestly desired by the great body of the Spaniards, who looked with longing eyes to the fair territory which they possessed, and who regarded them with the feelings of distrust and aversion with which men regard those on whom they have inflicted injuries too great to be forgiven. "With these evil passions rankling in their bosoms, the Spaniards were gradually prepared for the consummation of their long train of persecutions by that last act, reserved for the reign of the imbecile Philip the Third, the expulsion of the Moriscoes from the Peninsula,-an act which deprived Spain of the most industrious and ingenious portion of her population, and which must be regarded as one of the principal causes of the subsequent decline of the monarchy."+

It is a relief in the true sense of relief by contrast-to meet here and there with some public man to whom this intolerant policy of the Inquisition school was objectionable, whether as misdoing or mistake. Some few from policy or higher principle were opposed to the ordinances. Even Alva found fault with them, as likely to do the state disservice. Don Juan Henriquez, a grandee whose large estates were in the heart of Granada, deserves honourable mention as one who "felt a strong sympathy for the unfortunate natives," and undertook to lay their remonstrance before the throne. Him Philip referred to the worst enemy of the Moriscoes, Espinosa, whose ungracious answer, disheartening as it was, did not deter the mediator from pleading in other quarters, and pushing the cause of his clients wherever an opening could be made. Ruy Gomez, again, the time-tried favourite of the king, though discreditably compliant with his master's humours, and keenly alive to his own interests, 66 was humane and liberal in his temper, and inclined to peace." His influence is therefore described as having been good on the whole-persons of a generous nature ranging themselves under him as their leader. But the most eminent of the tolerant statesmen of the day was Mendoza, Marquis of Mondejar, captain-general of the forces, who was decidedly opposed to the obnoxious ordinance, more perhaps from motives of expediency than from any better impulse, yet with a strength of conviction which emboldened him to protest with the best member that he had. But Espinosa was too strong for Mendoza; the grand inquisitor would have, and had, the last word against the commander-in-chief, and put an end to all controversy by bidding him go about his business-which business (a black one) was, to carry out his majesty's ordinance, and to put down (what inevitably ensued) a Morisco rebellion.

In the opposite scale-too heavy to be counterbalanced by any number of mild remonstrants-were an inexorable Espinosa; his subservient attaché, Deza, afterwards cardinal, whose "plausible manners covered an inflexible will;" Guerrero, the meddlesome, bigoted archbishop of Granada; the Marquis of Los Velez, who was all for fire and slaughter; and, it must be added, Don John of Austria himself, whose dealings with the rebels were ruthless and relentless as the very grandest of grand † Ibid. 241.

* Prescott, III. p. 24.