rious to notice the incessant representations of the Commons against the usurpation of the court and its chancellors, the invasion of the common law and the rights of juries, and the predictions of future evils. The deplorable nuisance of the court, during the reign of Charles I., is narrated in Chapter VII. from indis putable authorities and historical evidence, and the innumerable evils resulting from the political functions of the chancellor, are distinctly and boldly exhibited. Indeed the subsequent proceedings of the Commonwealth men, to break up and re-construct the court, are fully justified in the enormity of the then existing evils of the jurisdiction, which the country loudly demanded should be terminated. The history of the Court of Chancery during the Commonwealth and Protectorate, forms the most original and valuable historical portion of the volume. It is an impartial and laborious collation of the journals of the two Houses of Parliament, and of innumerable contemporary tracts and legal works, from whence a new and singular light is cast on the proceedings of those calumniated and misrepresent ed times.

The remedial portion of the work is of course, though not historically, substantially, the most important. A

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complete analysis is given of the various jurisdictions of the English Court of Chancery. The importance and practicability of numerous forms tending to remove the causes of litigation, or in other words, lessening the subjects of litigation, is first pointed out, viz.; the state of laws of real property, of the techni cal forms of conveyancing, the laws regarding trusts, corporations, and charities; the bankrupt laws and jurisdiction, and various alterations and amendments of the general law and judicial system of the country. For this great and necessary object, a real Commission is proposed for the deliberate and honest consideration of every department of reform. A subdivision of the labour of the court, and of the jurisdictions, is proposed and particularized; and though last, not least, the substitution of viva voce for written evidence, (not however with the accompani ment of a jury,) and which Mr. Parkes considers an amendment greatly overlooked, but all important. We cannot extract any portion of this part of the work, but must conclude with recommending it to the consideration of all those interested in the grave and paramount question on which so much light is thrown by Mr. Parkes's elaborate and valuable work.

FROM RECENT

TH HERE cannot possibly be placed on record a more striking example of the literal and circumstantial fulfilment of a prophecy, than the instance of the denunciations directed against the Seven apocalyptic Churches. The later events in the history of the world, the predictions of which profess to be contained in the writings of inspiration, are all cloaked in mystery, or couched in language which is impressive from its very obscurity. Here there is no circuitous style of allegory, and no 13 ATHENEUM, VOL. 9, 2d series.

dark forebodings dealt forth through the involutions of mysticism; the words of the prophet are plain, cons cise, and equally palpable in their enunciation and fulfilment. The ac complishment of some was deferred but a brief period from the moment of their declaration, whilst the more slow, but equally certain progress of the others is at length completed.

1. As the chief strong-hold of Christianity in the East, and that centre from whence its rays were most brilliantly disseminated, till

"all they who dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks,"* Ephesus is first addressed by the Evangelist: his charge against her is a declension in religious fervour,t and his threat in consequence, a total extinction of her ecclesiastical brightness. After a protracted struggle with the sword of Rome and the sophism of the Gnostics, Ephesus at last gave way. The incipient indifference, censured by the warning voice of the Prophet, increased to a total forgetfulness, till at length the threatenings of the apocalypse were fulfilled, and Ephesus sunk with the general overthrow of the Greek empire, in the fourteenth

century.

A more thorough change can scarcely be conceived, than that which has actually occurred at Ephesus. Once the seat of active commerce, the very sea has shrunk from its solitary shores; its streets, once populous with the devotees of Diana, are now ploughed over by the Ottoman serf, or browsed by the sheep of the peasant. Its mouldering arches and dilapidated walls merely whisper the tale of its glory; and it requires the acumen of the geographer, and the active scrutiny of the exploring traveller, to form a probable conjecture as to the very site of the "First Wonder of the World." Nothing remains unaltered save the "eternal hills," and the mazy Cayster, the stream of which rolls on still changeless and the same.

No vestige of Christianity is preserved except the ruins at Ayasalook, whither many of the inhabitants of Ephesus retired, at the time of its destruction, from their desolated and irreparable city. After this period, Ayasalook suffered numerous vicissitudes during the wars of Timourlane and Solyman; but as its importance gradually died away with the departure of commerce and

*Acts xix. 10.

other causes, it at length fell to Time, the resistless conqueror of all, and now retains but a faint inscription on the page of history, and a mutilated skeleton of its edifices entombed in a sepulchre heaped around them by their own decay. It consists of about thirty or forty wretched houses, chiefly built of mud and broken marbles or fragments from the wrecks of Ephesus. Around it in every direction spread extensive ruins of former edifices, prostrate columns and desolated walls, whilst its castle in mouldering pride crowns the summit of a neighbouring hill; and these, to gether with the vestiges of a church dedicated to St. John, and the remaining arches of its splendid aqueduct, bespeak the former extent and importance of the widowed city.

The present inhabitants of Ayasalook are chiefly Turks and a few miserable Greeks, who have long forgotten the language of their nation, but retain the name of its religion, and earn a wretched subsistence by tilling the unhealthy plains beneath. The castle, erected about the year 1340, is now in total ruin, its tottering buttresses encompassing merely a mass of overthrown buildings and heaps of decayed walls, embedded in high rank weeds, where the cameleon and the green metallic lizard lie basking in the sun, and where the snake and the jackal find a secure and seldom disturbed retreat. Its summit commands a superb and extensive view of the plains of the Cayster, the site of Ephesus, the windings of the river, and the distant hills of Galessus and Pactyas. It is impossible to conceive a more depressing or melancholy prospect; on every side the speaking monuments of decay, a mouldering arch, a tottering column, or a ruined temple. Solitude seems to reign triumphant; the wretched inhabitants of the vil lage are seldom to be seen, save in

Rev.

early morning, or in the cool of the evening, when they sally from their muddy habitations to labour in the plain, which would be impossible during the burning meridian heat. Neither motion nor sound is discernible, save the cry of the sea-bird on the shore, or the tinkling of a sheepbell amid the ruins: all, all is silence and decay. Ayasalook possessed no object to interest us: a large building at some distance from the town, formerly a Christian church dedicated to St. John, and latterly a Turkish mosque, is now a heap of rubbish and grass-grown walls; its halls deserted, its doors and windows torn out, rank weeds springing in its aisles, while in its courts a few lofty trees add by their mournful waving to the solemnity of its desertion. Some large columns of granite are still left standing, and are said to have once belonged to the temple of Diana. In the walls are inserted certain inscribed marbles taken from a former building, which are now hasting to that destruction, from which they had before been snatched; and the inteterior, after having served Diana, Christ, and Mahomet, is now abandoned to the owl and the jackal. A marble sarcophagus, almost shapeless from the effects of time, stands in the town, near the door of the coffeehouse; its inscription and ornaments are obliterated, and from once enshrining the dust of some warrior, or chieftain, it is now degraded into a watering-place for cattle. Ephesus is no more, and such is its modern successor. Thus all the wealth of Croesus, the genius of Ctesiphon, the munificence of Alexander, and the glory of Lysimachus, (to each of whom Ephesus was indebted,) have no other representative than the mouldering castle and mud-walled cottages of Ayasalook!

2. To Smyrna the message of St. John conveys at once a striking in

*

stance of the theory I am illustrating, and a powerful lesson to those who would support the shrine of Omnipotence by the arm of impotency, and fancy they can soothe the erring soul by the balm of persecution, and correct its delusions by the persuasions of intolerance. To this church is foretold the approach of tribulation, and poverty, and suffering, and imprisonment; whilst the consequence of their endurance is to add permanency to their faith, and to reward their triumphs with the crown of immortality. Since the first establishment of Christianity at Smyrna, since the murder of Polycarp, down to the massacre of the Grecian Patriarch, and the persecutions of to-day, the history of Smyrna presents but one continued tale of bloodshed and religious barbarity; the sabre of the Ottoman promptly succeeding to the glaive of the Roman, in firm, but bootless attempts, to overthrow the faith of " the Nazarene ;" but centuries of oppression have rolled over her in vain, and at this moment, with a Christian population of fourteen thousand inhabitants, Smyrna still exists, not only as the chief hold of Christianity in the East, but the head quarters from whence the successors of the Apostles, in imitation of their exertions, are daily replanting in Asia those seeds of Christianity which they were the first to disseminate, but which have long since perished during the winter of oppression and barbarism.

This fact is the more remarkable, since Smyrna is the only community to which persecution has been foretold, though to others a political existence has been promised. It would seem, however, that in their case, ease and tranquillity had produced apathy and decay; whilst, like the humble plant which rises most luxuriantly towards heaven the more closely it is pressed and trodden on,

let of Tartar Keuy has sprung up within the last twenty years at about three miles distance from the wreck of Sardis, the remnants of its Christian population having retired hither to seek protection for themselves, and a refuge for the unmolested exercise of their persecuted faith, from which they had been unceasingly prohibited by the tyranny of Kara Osman, or Karasman Oglou: the little community now consists of about one hundred members, who maintain for themselves a priest, and contrive to keep in repair the unadorned walls of their primitive church.Such literal instances are seldom to be paralleled.

6. Philadelphia is the only one of the Seven Churches on whom unqualified praise has been bestowed, and to whom a permanent endurance is foretold. Both its physical and political situation would seem to conspire in counteracting the fulfilment of the prediction; earthquakes and subterraneous convulsions on the one hand, and wars and ruinous invasions on the other; but it still endures, despite of both, and its community, though not the most numerous, is by far the purest in Asia. Her situation has many charms to interest her visitor; her widely-scattered buildings, spreading over an eminence at the base of Mount Tmolus, are thrown into the most picturesque points of view, to which her minarets and cy

presses give the usual characteristics of Orientalism; whilst the remnants of Christian temples, rising amidst the waving olive-groves which surround the modern representative of the sixth seminary of Christianity, and her associations with time, history and prophecy, confer on her an interest beyond the power of modern incident or adornment to bestow.

7. To Laodicea the most summary of the denunciations is directedthat of total subversion.† It has been awfully accomplished; it now stands rejected of God and deserted by man, its glory a ruin, its name a reproach! No wretched outcast dwells in the midst of it; it has long been abandoned to the owl and to the fox. Not one perfect or very striking object meets the eye; all is alike desolate and decayed. The hill appears one tumulus of ruins, from which the masses of faded buildings that present themselves seem bursting above the surrounding soil. Alternately under the dominion of the Romans and the Turks, and ravaged by the successive wars and invasions of the generals of the Lower Empire, and the sultans who succeeded them, the history of Laodicea is a mere alternation of vicissitudes; earthquakes and internal commotion have conspired to aid the ravages of man, and centuries have perhaps elapsed since its total abandonment.‡

GIA IANNINA was one of the most comely damsels in Calabria, and had many a wealthy suitor. To none, however, did she seem inclined to lend a willing ear. Some, of a

more timid nature, admired the maiden, and would fain have wooed her, but were kept aloof by the haughty glance of her light blue eye; a glance that was rendered more re