neighbourhood, and are described by Barrett and Seyer; foundations also of buildings have been laid open at Sea Mills, and other vestiges of antiquity turned up at this spot. Some portions of the remains are said to be older than the Roman period, and are, therefore, to be ascribed to the Britons. Mr. Seyer thinks it probable that the Romans availed themselves of the erections of the aboriginal inhabitants, and "used the old British stations, with which the country abounded, and, therefore, that the camps at Blaise-hill, at Clifton, and Leigh-downs, at Knowle, Berry-hill, Cadbury, &c., all, or some of them, were used (by the Romans) as the outposts of Abona, particularly in the summer." At all these places traces of that people, in their coins and other mementos of their occupation, have been discovered, but which it is beyond my province further to notice here. All that I propose myself the pleasure of doing in these papers, is to trace the antiquity of Bristol to the remotest period of its existence, without being tedious. This done, our course from the point at which we take leave of the Romans will gradually become more interesting, and it is hoped that the brief examination of the statements of other writers, which occur in these pages, and the attempts at correction which have been made, will be of service to the future historian of a city which has not yet had that measure of justice dealt out to it which it deserves. [TO BE CONTINUED.] Poetry. THE BENIGNITY OF NATURE. FORTH on this deep and dazzling summer noon, I come to Nature, that she may attune Discordant thoughts, and feelings all unstrung. My heart until it bleeds, but bleeds unseen; My hopes unto the winds, but Nature's smile Doth of its fears my spirit all beguile; And sings an inward song, in unison with hers. T. C. PRINCE. Guropean Politics. Ir the question were proposed in general terms to any disinterested and intelligent man; by whom should the form of government of any given nation be chosen, he would unquestionably answer, that it should be dictated and organised by themselves, and refer to the instance of every nation enjoying a representative legislature and executive, as a practical illustration of the principle; but, it happens, unfortunately, that very few nations enjoy representative institutions; that, of these, some have scarcely more than the name; and that, of the larger number which live under institutions, in the formation and operation of which they have no voice, and for which they merely pay, many exist only by sufferance, hanging on the ostensible protection of powerful and oppressive allies, until it may be convenient to crush them altogether, and in reality subject to the selfish and capricious will of an autocrat or an oligarchy. The condition of a nation so situated is precisely analogous to that of an individual whose property is in the tenacious gripe of the Court of Chancery; for, that true liberty and independence, of which politicians write and talk, and for which patriots sacrifice life and its enjoyments, can belong to those only who, like the Swiss and the Circassians, have the pride and the resolution to fight for and upon their native soil, and to win a legacy of peace and glory for their descendants. These reflections have been suggested by the present prominence of the long-suspended question of the settlement of the Danubian Principalities, now about to receive what diplomatists call a solution. These provinces, it is scarcely necessary to remark, are of some considerable importance in the East of Europe; not only in right of their position, but of the associations of their past history. They form a territory of more than two-thirds of the extent of Hungary, lying between Poland, Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bulgaria—rather an inconvenient position, it is true, for a nation aspiring to independence—and communicating with the Black Sea by so much of the Danube as flows between those two last-named provinces. The natives are the descendants of those old warlike Dacians who resisted the Roman arms for nearly two centuries, as the Circassians are now defying those of Russia, and were eventually annexed to the Roman Empire by Trajan. The race boasts also, like the adjacent States, a considerable infusion of the old Roman blood, and has been saved by these reminiscences from the barbarism which centuries of warfare induced upon other border lands between Europe and Asia. Since the invasion of Mahomed II., four centuries ago, they have acknowledged at least a formal allegiance to the Sultan, modified by the prescriptive interference in spiritual matters of Russia, who has lost no opportunity of fomenting and exasperating the irreconcileable and immemorial antipathies of race and religion, and of European and Oriental ideas. Except in their religious sympathies, however, the differences of race and language have always prevented that friendly understanding which Russia appeared anxious to cultivate; and it was thought at one time not improbable that a popular insurrection might have been organized against her army of occupation. What the final solution of this question will be, drawing our inferences from parallel situations in past history, we can have little difficulty in anticipating. Whether united or divided-but the more readily and easily if divided -they inevitably become nominally or virtually subject to Russia: their case, so far as it has progressed, bears too close a resemblance to those of Bessarabia, the Crimea, and Greece, to admit a doubt that the consummation will be equally alike. If they be erected into a kingdom under any of the small fry of German princes, the work is accomplished at once; if not, and if they should be so unfortunate as to obtain any other form of merely nominal independence, the fate of Poland supplies a precedent too plausible and successful not to be revived in dealing with their eventual destination. The right of interference, under which the several dismemberments of Poland were effected, although designed originally to be the right of the weak against the strong, has been in that and other instances reversed into the right of the strong against the weak. It was plausibly alleged, for instance, in 1772, that the internal dissensions and maladministration of Poland rendered her dangerous to the powers lying on her frontier; for self-defence merely and without any purpose of self-aggrandisement or territorial acquisition, they were compelled reluctantly to interfere; and, as a measure of precaution, took possession severally of the territories adjoining their own dominions; but, it would appear that, notwithstanding that impressive warning, the Poles were still incorrigible: dangerous as they were in 1772, their neighbourhood had become still more uncomfortable in 1793; and having forfeited in the first instance about half their territory, they were now deprived of three-fourths of the remainder as they continued, however, to grow only more refractory and more dangerous to the existence of the three great powers, it needed but one other disin terested measure of pacification, to extinguish altogether the name and nationality-for they have not yet blotted out the memory-of Poland. To Whatever may be done with those unlucky provinces, which appear at present to belong to nobody, if it be not to Austria-as no claim of the natives is recognized-there can be no doubt that they are for ever, all diplomatic assurances notwithstanding, virtually severed from the Turkish Empire, ever since the day when Austria summoned Russia to evacuate them, and took possession of them herself, either to set free the Russian army of occupation, or to await the contingencies of the war, and hold a gage in hand, without incurring the loss of a man or a thaler. what purpose, then, it may be asked, was Sebastopol taken? Was not the object secured for which so many tens of thousands of heroic lives were sacrificed, and so many tens of millions added to our national debt? By no means: for what the sword does, diplomacy has the power to undo. It might, indeed, have been easily secured, had that blow been promptly and sternly followed up; but it has happened before now, more than once; that the objects for which England made large and long-felt sacrifices of human life and treasure, and which were conquered by those sacrifices, were complimented away in wordy protocols and lost in the misty intricacies of treaties and conventions. And for this there will be no remedy nor redress-not more than Poland and Hungary and Italy have been able to obtain. But, is this state of things to continue? Are smaller and weaker nations to be for ever drawn in as if by the arms of some gigantic cuttlefish, and incorporated with the larger and stronger? Must national habits and memories be for ever proscribed? Will it ever be a crime sharply watched and sorely punished, to breathe a sigh for national existence? All these and such questions must, apparently, be answered in the affirmative, at least with reference to a long time to come. There are, of course, some sanguine spirits here and there, to whom this view of the question may appear coloured by a timid despondence-to whom Europe may seem just now like one imprisoned in that obsolete instrument of torture, mildly designated "little ease," in which he can neither sit, nor stand, nor recline; or rather, to be undulating and heaving ominously and restlessly to the first deep growl of a coming earthquake; but―to follow up the metaphor --if the earthquake were to make itself a vent, it would merely exhaust the agencies of the explosion, and leave the incumbent strata, with a rent or two perhaps, but, generally speaking, as level and continuous as before. Any revolution of a democratic tendency that may be attempted in the present state of Europe, would most inevitably be crushed, and the last The most pro state of the insurgents would be worse than the first. mising chance that any such movement ever had in Europe, was the first French Revolution: it had all the justification of intolerable wrongs and fairly exhausted patience and it would in all reasonable calculation have succeeded then, but for the sanguinary and intolerant fanaticism with which it assailed all monarchal institutions and the sudden inconsistency with which its principles were abandoned; and generations may pass away before such another opportunity comes round. At present, the circumstances which render any attempt at a democratic revolution hopeless, are the existence and mutual dependence of three classes who have a vital interest in maintaining, together with the power to maintain, the old political relations of society. There is, in the first place, a numerous combination of sovereigns, animated by an esprit du corps stronger than that which unites any other equally comprehensive class their exclusive system of intermarriage has long since made them all one family, with just two exceptions; their conventional position-a sort of partial deification-deprives them of all human companionship, except among themselves; that position they have been taught to regard as an inheritance, as if the first and most successful monarchs were not men to whom, as leaders of armies and administrators of justice, a willing obedience was accorded in exchange for their services to the community; and they are still more closely drawn together by a great common danger—a danger which cannot approach any one throne, without throwing its shadow more or less darkly upon all the rest-the growing spirit of democracy. In the second place, each of these thrones is a centre round which is collected an oligarchy of hereditary nobles, personally interested in its stability as the source of their honours and titles and well-paid sinecures, and upholding it by all the imposing pageantries of ceremony and all the intricate and interminable jargon of diplomacy. In addition to these, there is the resistless physical and mechanical force which those two classes have at their entire and absolute disposal-the power of fleets and armies, against which the desultory assaults of indisciplined multitudes would be no more than so many acts of suicidal insanity; and this military class also-this immense aggregate of human machines-has an interest in perpetrating the system of which it is a part, and to which its several members are indebted for the dangerous and demoralising license which they enjoy. This multitudinous weapon, it is true, princes do occasionally employ against each other, when public spirit and the strong instinct of national jealousy are awakened, and dreams of military glory haunt the imaginations of a |