advise shorter applications and more details of the incidents mentioned by Josephus and others. There are other circumstances which I could not help noting down, and in which we differ, though I certainly do not consider them as faults in your work; I mean those circumstances in which you think more favourably of Titus than I do, and in which it is not only fair to differ, but you have most commentators and historians on your side. But I must protest against the argument in favour of his virtues, derived from the important commission which he had from God to fulfil. The King of Assyria had a similar commission; yet how the prophets exult in his fall, declaiming against his proud looks, and raising up hell to meet him. God, in fact, often makes use of the wicked to work His gracious purposes, blindly, and in their own despite; and all those tyrants of the earth, from Tiglath Pelesar to Buonaparte, have been first used as God's staf to chastize the nations, and then the staff has been thrown away. "I have said all the evil of your book which I could; I must now, in justice, say something in its favour. It is pious, rational, and pleasingly written; when you have been warmed with your subject you have shown very considerable powers of description; and when it shall have received your further corrections, I have no doubt of its being both a useful and popular volume. "I remain, dear Sir, "Your's most truly, "REGINALD HEBER." To R. W. Hay, Esq. Moreton Nov. 20th, 1813. 66 I was unwilling to answer your letter till I had been able to ascertain whether Heber possessed the book you mention, but can now say that unluckily we neither of us have it. I have not seen the book since I was at Petersburgh. The following circumstances, if I remember rightly, he mentions. The Finnish language is oriental, and radically the same with the Hungarian, though differing more from it than English does from German. The Finns, Laplanders, and possibly the Greenlanders and Esquimaux are all of Mongolian race. The Finns are the earliest ON THE LANGUAGES OF THE NORTH OF EUROPE. 383 inhabitants with whom we are acquainted in the north of Russia; and are, perhaps, the red-haired nation living in wooden cities, mentioned by Herodotus as lying to the north of his Sarmatians. How they got the red hair, so different from their oriental ancestors, and from the black hair of the Laplanders, Greenlanders, and Samoieds, is not easy to say; probably by intermarriage with the Gothic tribes. In the days of Alfred, (see Ohthere's description of his voyage made by that monarch's orders round the North Cape, published by Daines Barrington,) the Finns had a great city at Perm, with a female idol, all gilt, whom they worshipped; and they carried on an extensive trade with the Caspian, the people of Igur or Bukharia, and India, by means of the two rivers Volga and Petchora. Two Indians came to Alfred's court by this channel; and it was the general way by which the lighter commodities of India, or at least of Samarcand, came to the north of Europe; exactly as we met the Bukharian venders of shawls and herons' plumes in Petersburgh. Karamsin, of Moscow, told me that the Finnish city of Perm was in alliance afterwards with the Hanse towns, and sent three hundred men to the aid of Novogorod against Ivan Vasilovitch; and Dr. Guthrie said that the Aurea Venus of Perm was mentioned by the Russian chronicles under the name of Soliotta Baba, the golden old woman.' I wish this scanty information may be of any use to you, as I fear the book of Professor Porltan is not to be met with in England. I have myself been sedulously hunting old Polish and Hungarian Chronicles to find out the origin of the Cossaks. * Did not we meet Skioldebrand one day at Vennerquist's, a stout tall officer, full of empfindung? "Our friend Gifford is a little unreasonable on busy men like you and me, who cannot be expected to give up so much time to articles for the Quarterly, as those who have less to do. Bindeed is a case which may be urged against us; but he has acquired all his ideas, and has only to write them down; at our age we are obliged to read to enable us to write. "Ever your's truly, To John Thornton, Esq. "MY DEAR FRIEND, Moreton, February 1814. "You have been but too truly informed respecting Col. Hill's death, which, from its suddenness, as well as the greatness of the loss, not only to his own family, but to the neighbourhood, in which he had many friends, and, I believe in my conscience, not a single enemy, has produced a greater and more general shock than any event of the kind which has fallen under my knowledge. I began a letter to announce the circumstance to you the day after it took place, and was so completely overset that I broke off in the middle. A wife, whose whole happiness was wrapt up in him; children at an age when a father's advice and authority are most necessary; an aged father, whose other sons having been wonderfully preserved in situations of more apparent danger, was little prepared to resign the one who remained at home, all make it a cup of deeper worldly sorrow than is usually allotted for any family to drink. His death was extremely sudden, since, though he had some time before had a tedious liver complaint, he was considered as quite recovered; and the inflammation in his bowels, which carried him off, was only first perceived a week before his death, and was supposed to be overcome, till within two days of the catastrophe, mortification was detected. He himself was one of the first sensible of his approaching end, and prepared for it, his friends assure me, with a Christian resignation and coolness, which few possess when thus suddenly called on. He retained his faculties to the last moment, which he employed in comforting his wife and father. * The funeral was private, but it was distinguished by very uncommon marks of grief, not only in the friends of the deceased, who were there, but, among the tenants and the common people who were spectators. I saw, myself, several of the last shedding tears; a very unusual thing in persons to whom death beds and funerals are so familiar." * HISTORY OF THE COSSACKS. 385 To R. J. Wilmot, Esq. Moreton, Feb 10, 1814. "I am much disappointed at your being prevented from coming here, as I have several things respecting which I want your advice and criticism. I shall, therefore, if I can with any degree of convenience, follow you to town during the spring as a bachelor; probably immediately after Easter. I have been for these three weeks busy at work on a volume of Cossak history, being the issue of my abortive endeavours to furnish an article for the Quarterly on that subject. I found that I had too many materials for an article, and, therefore, determined to have a book to myself. This I should like very much to show you; nay, it is necessary that I should show it to you before it makes its appearance, so that you may make up your mind to be plagued with it.” VOL. I.-49 СНАРТER XIII. Dissenters Letter to a Roman Catholic--Allied Sovereigns at Paris--Review of Madame de Stael's "De l'Allemagne❞—— Letter from Madame de Stael—“ Lara”—Mr. Reginald Heber's return to Hodnet- His mode of life-Anecdote-Correspondence with Mr. Rowland Hill-Preaches the Bampton Lectures-Letter from lord Grenville-Controversy with Mr. Nolan-Remarks on Corn Bill" Champion”—Distresses of the country-Eastern poetry. 1814-1816. MR. REGINALD HEBER had the good fortune to find but few dissenters in his parish. There was one Wesleyan chapel, but the number who frequented it was small, and during the sixteen years of his ministry they did not increase. A short time before his removal to Moreton, a Roman Catholic married the daughter of one of his most respectable parishioners. He had often wished for an opportunity of endeavouring to convert this man, and when he heard that some superstitious ceremonies had been observed in his wife's apartment during her confinement, and that he had caused his new-born child to be baptized by a Roman Catholic clergyman, he wrote him the following letter. "MY DEAR Neighbour, February 10, 1814. During the few months of your residence in my parish, it has often been my wish to address you on the subject of religion; but the want of a proper opportunity, and my own unavoidable absence from Hodnet, on account of my health, during a great part of the time, have prevented my taking a step which, even now, perhaps, may seem unusual, and such as to demand an apology. Your absence from church and the baptism of your child by a clergyman of the church of Rome, were circumstances which, from my former knowledge of your family, could cause, of course, no surprise; and you know, I trust, enough of |