I REMEMBER, twenty or twenty-one years ago, when the madness of the Russian war was at its height, how an English paper gave out, in a boastful tone, that Russia had no ally but "the marauding Bishop of Montenegro." This kind of talk aptly represented the kind of feeling which Englishmen had then brought themselves to entertain towards a state which, small as it is, may claim to share with Poland, Hungary, and Venice, the glorious name of

"Europe's bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite." This kind of talk represented also the amount of knowledge which Englishmen then had of the state of South-Eastern Europe, an amount of knowledge which most of us sturdily refused to increase. It had become a kind of point of honor not to know anything about the quarter of the world in which we had so strangely taken it into our heads to appear as belligerents. NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXIII., No. 3

We had gone mad with the most amazing of passions, the love of Turks; and we thought it a matter of duty to see everything, past and present, through the spectacles of our beloved. That a Christian state should have presumed to preserve its independence against Mahometan invaders seemed, in the frenzy of the moment, a high crime and misdemeanor. It became a piece of patriotism to hurl some bad name or other at such daring of fenders. "Marauding" is an ugly name certainly, though perhaps it might be only human nature for one who is beset by marauders to maraud a little back again in self-defence. Then to talk about a "marauding Bishop" seemed a hit of the first order. Of all people in the world, Bishops ought not to be marauders; how great must be the iniquity of the people who not only go marauding, but go marauding under the leadership of a Bishop. English Bishops perhaps felt thankful that

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they were not as this unbishoplike Montenegrin. They would not go marauding even against a Russian; it was enough to stay at home, and preach and pray against him with the full cursing power of an Irish saint. The picture of the marauding Bishop, the one ally of Russia, was indeed a climax of art in its own way. The only thing to be said against it was that it was all art, and answered to nothing to be found in nature. When the Russian war broke out, Montenegro was no longer governed by a Bishop. It might have been questioned whether the marauding part of the picture could be justified at all; it was quite certain that the picture of the "marauding Bishop" was purely imaginary. But to patriotic Englishmen of that day such a trifling inaccuracy did not matter. We should have thought it strange if a Russian paper had spoken of England as governed by a Protector, or even by a King, marauding or otherwise. But about Montenegro or any other part of Eastern Christendom, it was safe for any man to say anything that he chose, provided only it took the form of abuse. We should have thought it an insult to ourselves and our illustrious confederates, if any one had said that England and France had no allies except the "marauding Mufti at Constantinople." In one sense the epithet would have been less applicable. No one can charge the Sultans of the present day with marauding, or doing anything else, in their own persons. But surely, at least when we are not at war with Russia, the efforts of the Turk to subdue an independent Christian state might be thought to come nearer to marauding than the efforts of the Christian state to maintain its freedom. But, as the Grand Turk is in some sort a sacred person, not a mere Sultan or Padishah, but the Caliph of the Prophet on earth, it would surely have been less inaccurate to give him a religious description of some kind than it was to bestow the title of Bishop on a potentate so purely secular as the Prince of Montenegro was in 1854.

I am tempted to ask whether most of us really know much more about these matters now. I have myself been asked, since the present war began, whether the Prince of Montenegro was a Christian, and whether the Montenegrins were on the side of the Turks or on that of the patriots. Certainly no great increase of

knowledge or right feeling on such matters can come from the last book about that part of the world which chance has thrown in my way. This calls itself "Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah," by James Creagh. The writer describes himself as "author of A Scamper to Sebastopol and Jerusalem in 1867;" and he professes to have been in Montenegro in the summer of 1875. We know pretty well what to look for from people who write "Scampers" to Sebastopol or any other place. If they are simply flippant, ignorant, and conceited, there is no special ground for complaint; they simply do after their kind. But the present Scamperer is something more; he is coarse, vulgar, and libellous. He professes to have been in Montenegro; but all that he can do is to give hard names to everything that he saw there. "Marauding Bishop" would be a very small flower of speech in his vocabulary. He thinks it clever to call the whole people of Montenegro "peasants," as if "peasant" were a name of reproach. We hear of "an old peasant dignified with the name of Archbishop;" we are told that "an armed peasant who, in his natural state, might be considered a very respectable person, is made extremely ridiculous when called the Minister of War, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs," &c., &c. These armed peasants happen to be cultivated gentlemen, speaking most of the languages of Europe in a way that might shame most of their English visitors. One of them, it seems, at least a Montenegrin gentleman of some kind, paid the Scamperer a visit which he allows to have been "friendly." This friendliness perhaps a little surprised a man who was so ignorant of the customs of hospitable Montenegro that, when he saw a visitor coming, he behaved in a way which is best told in his own words :

"Thinking suddenly of stories which I had heard about the daring and ferocity of these lawless Highlanders, I quietly, and without removing it from my pocket, cocked my pistol, and aiming at my visitor as well as I could, prepared to shoot him through the lining of dence of hostility." my coat-tail in the event of his giving any evi

After this, it is perhaps not very w derful that the Scamperer found out that, though no evidence of hostility was shown, yet the Montenegrin gentleman