MONUMENTAL INSCRIPTION.

527

admitted as able seamen, haranguing from a stool, and distributing hand-bills recommending universal suffrage. They were, I believe, punished, and have since deserted, so they will, perhaps, next try the army. If they had not been detected, they would have had time for a good long course of lectures during a voyage to India.

"I am very anxious to hear how Wilmot speaks in the house; he appears to rate himself very modestly, but I am inclined to hope he will eventually do extremely well.

"Poor M has found the Solicitor-general even a severer critic than the Quarterly."

In the Obituary for 1819, the following monumental inscription appeared, which was written by Mr. Reginald Heber :

To the Memory
of the

HONOURABLE FREDERIC SYLVESTER NORTH DOUGLAS,

only son of

Sylvester Baron Glenbervie

and of

Katherine Anne, daughter of Frederic Baron North, Knight of the Garter, First Lord of the Treasury, and afterwards Earl of Guilford,

in whom

a short but useful and brilliant career

was eminently adorned

by splendid talents and amiable manners,
by mental accomplishments,

by scientific attainments,

and by the highest polish of elegant literature;
was honourably distinguished

by the able, upright, and assiduous discharge
of parliamentary duties,

by an active, zealous, and enlightened philanthropy,
and by the exercise of many public and private virtues;
and was suddenly and awfully terminated,
to the inexpressible grief

of his surviving relatives, and of the inhabitants
of the town which he represented,

among every description of whom

he had conciliated

the most grateful and affectionate respect

by his earnest and unremitting solicitude

to promote the diffusion of Christian knowledge and piety, to improve the condition and increase the comforts of the poor, and to advance the general interests of the neighbourhood.

He was born Feb. 8, 1791, was elected member of parliament for the borough of Banbury, November, 1812, and again elected for the same place in the following parliament; was married July 19, 1819, to Harriet, eldest daughter of William Wrightson, of Cusworth, in the county of York, Esquire, and died the 21st day of the October following.

END OF VOL. 1.

VOL. I.-67

APPENDIX.

TO THE FIRST VOLUME.

APPENDIX.

HISTORY OF THE COSSAKS.

THE following history, on which Mr. Reginald Heber was for a considerable time engaged, though circumstances prevented its completion, is inserted as an appendix to the present volume, its subject being incidentally connected with his tour in the Crimea, and allusions to it being also frequently made in the preceding pages. The memoir and correspondence will be renewed in the second volume.

I. THE spacious regions which form the southern portion of the Russian empire, and which the ancients comprised under the general names of European and Asiatic Scythia, exhibit, in an extent of many thousand square leagues, so few varieties either of soil or landscape, that he who has traversed even a small part of this vast green wilderness, may form no inaccurate notion of the whole. The traveller who approaches from the north already perceives, in the neighbourhood of Charkof and Pultava, that the number and amplitude of the Muscovite forests have dwindled into a few scanty groves and coppices; and when he has passed the Donetz at Izium, and crossed a lofty range of calcareous downs, (which, if the Riphæan mountains were not altogether fabulous, must be supposed to have received that title from the vanity of their ancient inhabitants,*) the prospect is gradually changed into a bleak,

* "Riphæan mountains." The only hills worth notice between Moscow and the Crimea, are those which form the northern boundary of the steppe of Tartary. They are, indeed, very unworthy of the name of mountain, and by no means answer to the description by Eustathius in his Notes on Dionysius. (p. 45.) ότε εν τοις Ριφαίοις ορεσιν αυδέποτε χιων επιλείπει. There are, however, no other hills in the direction mentioned by Ptolemy; nor can I agree with Mr. Pinkerton, who, with his usual hardihood, assures us that "the ancients often confounded mountains and forests under the same denomination." (Geography, vol. i.) In what language the same word serves for two such different things, he will, perhaps, in another edition, have the goodness to inform us. Forests are, indeed, in Scythia, little more abundant than mountains; and it would be necessary to advance a considerable way towards Moscow before he would meet with any very extensive one. Of the Riphæan mountains, however, Herodotus makes no mention; and Strabo (lib. vii.) treats as fabulous, if not the mountains themselves, at least the manners of their inhabitants. After all, there are few languages in which the relative size of eminences is accurately distinguished, or in which the same name would not be used either for Richmond hill, or Snowdon.