tower at Paros is so striking an example. When we remember that each petty lord considered it necessary to be well lodged, the extent of these ravages may be easily imagined.

Towards the close of the fifteenth century the condition of the islanders had become intolerable, and matters came to a climax under the rule of Giovanni III. That despotic Duke incurred the displeasure not only of the Sultan, but also of his own subjects. The former complained that he had fallen into arrears with his tribute for the Dukes had long had to purchase independence by the payment of bakshish-and that he harboured corsairs, who plundered the Asian coast. The latter grumbled at the heavy taxes which the Duke pocketed without doing anything for the protection of his people. The Archbishop of Naxos made himself the mouthpiece of popular discontent, and wrote to Venice, in the name of the people of Naxos and Paros, offering to acknowledge the suzerainty of the Republic. Venice replied, authorising him to point out to the Duke and to Sommaripa, the lord of Paros, the utter hopelessness of their present position, and to offer them an assured income for the rest of their lives if they would cede their islands to a Venetian commissioner. But the negotiations failed; the Naxiots, driven to despair, took the law into their own hands, and in 1494 murdered their Duke. The Archbishop then proceeded to Venice, and persuaded the Senate to take over the Duchy, at least till the late Duke's son, Francesco, came of age. During the next six years Venetian Commissioners administered the islands, which were, however, loyally handed over to Francesco III. at the end of that time. Under his sway peace continued to prevail, but as a sign of the insecurity of the Ægean we may instance his capture by Turkish pirates while on a hunting party. The long reign of his son, Giovanni IV., witnessed the loss of many of the Ægean islands. That great sovereign, Suleyman the Magnificent, now sat upon the Turkish throne, and his celebrated admiral, Khaireddîn Barbarossa, spread fire and sword through many a Christian village. In 1537 the classic island of Ægina, still under Venetian domination, was visited by this terrible scourge, who massacred all the adult male population, and took away 6,000 women and children as slaves. So complete was the destruction of the Æginetans that, when a French admiral touched at the island soon afterwards, he found it devoid of inhabitants. There, as usual, an Albanian immigration replenished, at least to some extent, the devastated sites, but Ægina was long in recovering some small measure of its former prosperity. Thence Barbarossa sailed to Naxos, whence he carried off an immense

booty, compelling the Duke to purchase his further independenceif such it could be called-by a tribute of 5,000 ducats, and submitting him to the ignominy of seeing the furniture of his own palace sent on board the Admiral's flagship under his very eyes. The horrible scenes of those days would seem to have impressed themselves deeply upon the mind of the wretched Duke, who gave vent to his feelings in a bitter letter of complaint to the Pope and other Christian princes. This curious document urged them to "apply their ears and lift up their eyes, and attend with their minds while their own interests were still safe," and reminded them of the evils caused by discord in the councils of Christendom. The Duke emphasised his admirable truisms, which might have been addressed to the Concert of Europe at any time during the last thirty years, by a well-worn tag from Sallust-Sallustius Crispus, "the author of our race." But neither his platitudes nor his allusion to his distinguished ancestry, which he might have had some difficulty in proving, availed him. The Turks went on in their career of conquest. Paros was annexed, Andros was forced to pay tribute, the Venetians lost Skiathos and Skopelos, and by the shameful treaty of 1540 for feited the prestige which they had so long wielded in the Levant.

The Duchy of Naxos had long existed by the grace of the Venetian Republic, and, now that Venice had been crippled, its days were numbered. The capture of Chios in 1566 was the signal for its dissolution. As soon as the news arrived in Naxos and Andros that the Turks had put an end to the rule of the joint-stock company of the Giustiniani in that fertile island, the Greeks of the Duchy complained to the Sultan of the exactions to which they were subjected by their Frank lords. There was some justification for their grievances, for Jacopo IV., the last of the Frank Dukes, was a notorious debauchee; and the conduct of the Catholic clergy, by the admission of a Jesuit historian, had become a public scandal. But the main motive of the petitioners seems to have been that intense hatred of Catholicism which characterised the Orthodox Greeks during the whole period of the Frank rule in the Levant, and which, as we still see in Bosnia, has not yet wholly disappeared. Jacopo was fully aware of the delicacy of his position, and he resolved to convince the Turkish Government, as force was out of the question, by the only other argument which it understands. He collected a large sum of money, and went to Constantinople to reply to his accusers. But he found the ground already undermined by the artifices of the Ecumenical Patriarch, who had warmly espoused the cause of the Orthodox Naxiots, and was in the confidence of the Turkish

authorities. Jacopo had no sooner landed than he was clapped into prison, where he languished for five months, while the renegade, Piali Pasha, quietly occupied Naxos and its dependencies and drove the Sommaripa out of Andros. But the Greeks of the Duchy soon discovered that they had made an indifferent bargain. One of the most important banking houses of the period was that of the Nasi, which had business in France, the Low Countries, and Italy, and lent money to kings and princes. The manager of the Antwerp branch was an astute Portuguese Jew, who at one time called himself João Miguez and posed as a Christian, and then reverted to Judaism and styled himself Joseph Nasi. A marriage with a wealthy cousin made him richer than before; he migrated to the Turkish dominions, where Jews were very popular with the Sultans, and became a prime favourite of Selim II. This was the man on whom that sovereign now bestowed the Duchy ; and thus, by a prosaic freak of fortune, the lovely island of classical myth and mediæval romance became the property of a Jewish banker. Nasi, as a Jew, knew that he would be loathed by the Greeks, so he never visited his delectable Duchy, but appointed a Spaniard named Coronello to act as his agent, and to screw as much money as possible out of the inhabitants. In this he was very successful.

As soon as Jacopo IV. was released he set out for the west to procure the aid of the Pope and Venice for the recovery of his dominions, even pledging himself in that event to do homage to the Republic for them. But, in spite of the great victory of Lepanto, the Turks remained in undisturbed possession of the Duchy. On the accession of Murâd III. Jacopo had hopes of obtaining its restoration through the good offices of the new Sultan's mother, a native of Paros, belonging to the distinguished Venetian family of Baffo. But though she promised her aid, and he went to plead his cause in person at Constantinople, the Sultan was inexorable. The last of the Dukes died in the Turkish capital in 1576, and was buried in the Latin church there. Three years later Joseph Nasi died also, whereupon the Duchy was placed under the direct administration of the Porte.

But though Naxos and all the important islands had been annexed by the Turks, there still remained a few fragments of the Latin rule in the Levant. The six islands of Siphnos, Thermia, Kimolos, Polykandros, Gyaros, and Sikinos were retained by the Gozzadini family on payment of a tribute until 1617, while Venice still preserved Mykonos and Tenos as stations in the Levant for a 'Hopf, in op. cit. vol. 86, p. 172.

whole century more. Everywhere else in the Ægean the crescent floated from the battlements of the castles and palaces where for three and a half centuries the Latin nobles had practised the arts of

war.

The occupation of the Greek islands by the Latins was unnatural, and, like most unnatural things, it was destined not to endure. But this strange meeting of two deeply interesting races in the classic seats of Greek lyric poetry can scarcely fail to strike the imagination. And to-day, when Italy is once more showing a desire to play a rôle in the near East, when Italians are officering the Cretan police, and the statesmen of Rome are looking wistfully across the Adriatic, it is curious to go back to the times when Venetian and Lombard families held sway among the islands of the Ægean, and the Latin galleys, flying the pennons of those petty princes, glided in and out of the harbours of that classic sea. Even in her middle age Greece had her romance, and no fitter place could have been chosen for it than 'the wave-beat shore of Naxos."

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU.

THE

HE gentle art of spreading scandal, though by no means lost among us, was practised more gracefully under the early Georges than it is perhaps at the present date. The town became acquainted with my lord's indiscretion or the latest catastrophe at her grace's house through the medium, not of bald prose only, but of most polished verse. Among a host of industrious ballad-mongers, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, most charming and dangerous of ex-ambassadresses, turned the neatest lines reflecting upon the follies of her friends; and the couplets in which Mr. Pope related this or that damaging story have been the wonder of each succeeding generation of readers to our own day.

In an ironical mood Fate decreed that these two brilliant wits, who had wounded many a contemporary by tongue or pen, should at length turn upon each other the weapons they had employed elsewhere with such deadly effect. Each avenged upon an adversary the sufferings of many victims. How the "dunces" of Grub Street rejoiced when the lady of quality sneered at the humble birth of the merchant's son ! And the grandes dames of Lady Mary's acquaintance, though of course they condemned as scandalous Mr. Pope's insinuations, did they not feel a little malicious joy at the confusion the poet had brought upon their sharp-tongued friend? Mere men and women, alas ! do not display on an occasion of this kind the magnanimity of the angelic world. Moreover, he seldom commands the sympathy of the bystanders who is hoist with his own petard.

The cause of this unseemly quarrel remains still a mystery. A difference of opinion in politics-a little raillery on the lady's part at a high-falutin' poem-a pair of sheets lent and returned unwashedall these have been variously put forth as fons et origo mali. On better authority is the story that Lady Mary laughed immoderately at an inopportune declaration, and that the poet was thereafter her implacable foe. But whatever it was that aroused Pope's enmity, his was a connoisseur's revenge. In this case there was no need to draw an elaborately finished portrait of the Atticus or Sporus type.