an accused man. The jury could not agree upon his identity, and only found him guilty of conspiracy against the safety of the State. The difficulty was, beneath what name to condemn him; but he was condemned to twelve years' imprisonment. He escaped, however, and found his way to Switzerland. The Revolution of 1848 gave another and hopeful turn to his affairs; but it is only sufficient here that we notice how thus, from first to last, he appears before us, in connection with the chief circumstance of the fate of Louis XVII., as altogether the greatest and most interesting historic doubt of our times.

From St. James's Gazette.
THE DESPISED SPARROW.

I should like to have that professor with me for an hour any of these fine mornings, watching Master and Miss Sparrow banging about the housetops in excess of animal spirits. And not necessarily on a fine morning either; for these merry little creatures are almost as blithe and talkative in rain or wind as when the sun is shining. The two go off with a rush; but they have not gone many yards when down they flop to have a chat with other flutterers; and when they do that they are lost. I have come to the conclusion that, though the sparrow has in some ways run to intellect, he has no memory, and when he stops to gossip always forgets which way he was going. His life is so precarious that, I suppose, he finds one place as good as another; and even a professor at a window would not seriously incommode him.

There is a very pretty pluck about the sparrow who, indeed, pays his way in insects, killing two of these for every grain he steals; and a loyal little heart beats beneath his dingy suit of brown. For though gay colors would be out of place on a professional thief, the shabby coat is at the root of much of our contempt; and we would like it better if we saw it less. The robin could go die in the snow with his red breast in a shroud of white, the mavis could cease to lilt among the hedgerows, and the blackbirds vanish from the strawberry beds, without our feeling the loss at least, I think so; but the sparrow is part of our town life, a messenger from the country to remind us that there are still green fields. And is there not something pathetic in this, that the despised sparrow is an exile from his native land, the country-side; that to him is the right to flutter round corn-stalks; and that he will grow old, and be found stiff some day on his little back, without having once tickled a running stream with his velvet wing?

IN these mornings the beaux and belles of the sparrow tribe are converting my neighbors' housetops into a promenade for lovers. Early morning, when they can still hear themselves speaking, is their opportunity; though it must be admitted that they are amorous in a painfully flighty way, and think nothing of carrying on with two at once. The tiles, the gutters, the chimney-stacks are vocal with scam pering sparrows looking each other up and going off for a wash and brush-up before breakfast; but sleepy London knows nothing of the noisy aviary above its head. So the sparrow is doomed in America! Professor Ridgway at their head, our exasperated cousins are to rise in force and drive the impudent invader from their shores. All I can say is, let them try. Adverse resolutions in ornithological societies may kill professors, but the sparrows, now that they have got a footing, will go on adding to their number forever and ever. As for gunpowder, poison, cats, and traps, they flourish on them. In New York they have passed a resoThat other vagabond, the street Arab, lution that all regard for the sparrow is never sees the poor sparrow without lift-"sentimental" unless, indeed, it be ing a stone, yet the sparrows could eclipse such liking as the cat displayed when it the lights of London if they gathered in a ran off with Jane Scroupe's pet bird. The covey. When the farmer fires his blun- Ornithological Society of New York may derbuss at one, the result is only to startle never have heard of her; for a recent into life half a hundred more. A bogie in paper on sparrows in an English magazine the potato-field may send the crows in did not mention" Phyllyp Sparowe," and alarm to new pastures, but the sparrow yet in all our literature it is the only poem builds his nest out of it. Learned profess about a bird that might make little chilors, with their theories of extermination, dren cry. Old John Skelton wrote it: talk as if the Bohemian of birds were coarsest, most vituperative of our satirsome darling of society, and had not had ists, he had still a softer heart than a to thieve for an honest living since the modern professor. Nowadays no one days when professors were not. reads the maiden's wail:

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From The Westminster Review. THE OTTOMAN TURKS IN EUROPE.

vert to the wonderful vitality which, like so many of the lower organisms, it has in spite of all displayed. To this end we shall use the more concrete facts of history as the joints and framework necessary for the consistency and clearness of our subject.

FOR the past four hundred years, some of the fairest portions of the south-east of Europe have been subject to a race alien alike in origin, character, and religion to the other European States. With this fact, on its practical side, we are to a cer- The migrations of races have usually tain extent familiarized by the continual followed the course of the sun, and the recurrence of the so-called Eastern ques- historian must cast his eye eastward to tion. We have heard much and often of discover the original domicile even of the the weakness, the corruption, and the de- civilized nations of western Europe as cay of the Turkish Empire. Its ever-im- well as of those nomad hordes which have pending yet ever-delayed disappearance from time to time devastated its southhas been constantly before the eyes of the eastern provinces, or penetrated to the European world. It has provided a never- bleak shores of the northern sea. High failing material for diplomatic arrange- Asia has not inaptly been termed "the ments and rearrangements, which have, mother of nations," but with almost equal however, left the problem still unsolved; appropriateness it might be called the ferit has again and again proved a disturb tile parent of Western revolutions. From ance to the peace of Europe, now by its its widely extended table-lands there have apparent weakness, and the consequent issued, from prehistoric ages, successive aggressions of powerful neighbors; now irruptions of barbarous and nomadic by its reckless misgovernment and the tribes impelled from their seats by moveresulting insurrections of its subject prov-ments of new national life to the eastinces. Indeed, the present position of ward, and in their turn passing on the Turkey has engrossed so much of our shock, now with less, now with more mo. practical consideration, that we have per- mentum, to the west, and causing there haps ceased to wonder at the strangeness some of the most remarkable crises and of the phenomena which Turkish history revolutions of history. presents. We do not always realize that regions, the seats, in former ages, of Greek enterprise and civilization, and the centre for centuries of the eastern division of the Roman Empire, are held now by a race which, six hundred years ago was a nomad horde still ranging the table-lands of Asia. Nor on the other hand, perhaps, do we always bear in mind how immense a contrast between its former energy and force and its present paralysis and degradation the history of this race suggests. We shall attempt, therefore, in the following pages, not to trace the history of the Ottoman Turks forward step by step with minuteness, but, if possible, to point out some of the causes which have made that history so unique and remarkable; to explain the wonderful rapidity of their earlier successes and their recognition as an integral power of Europe; to show the inherent sources of weakness; to deter mine the causes which ultimately led to decrepitude and decay; and finally to ad

After the Indo-European or Aryan race had made its passage from central Asia towards the west, depositing on its way the seeds of future civilizations, there seems to have been a pause, perhaps of centuries, in the migratory transits described above. When they recommenced, they represented the movements of a different and a less civilized race - the Turanian- and of this the most numerous as well as the most historically impor. tant division were the Turks. To this race, in all probability, belonged, though space forbids us to enter into the question here, the succession of invading tribes which, under the names of Huns, Avars, Bulgarians, Khazars, Patzinaks, and Uzi, penetrated into Europe north of the Black Sea, passed over the steppes of southern Russia, and broke in successive waves upon the northern frontiers of the Eastern Empire.

Fierce, sometimes irresistible, however, as these invasions were, the barbarous