all the time the Christians of the monastery sat round and said nothing, and all the time I thought of the outbreak which I had been told was preparing. And the lieutenant babbled on. In order that I might see for myself how reformed the country was, he proposed that I should go yet further afield. "Take as many of my Nizams as you wish and go to Gusinje," he said, “instead of returning the way you came." Now this was a very tempting offer, for Gusinje has the worst reputation of all the towns of North Albania, and few people from the West have succeeded in penetrating it. But the officer did not offer to accompany me, and I remembered the warnings of the night before. Moreover, to prevent my further explorations the Pasha at Ipek had detained my passport, and to be caught up-country, minus a passport, by a Turkish official might lead to very unpleasant consequences. But I badly wanted to go. I looked at my guide's face for the casting vote, and the haggard anxiety of it decided me at once. I politely declined the offer and he breathed again. Safe back in England I feel as though I had thrown away an opportunity, but, excepting

that young Turkish officer, every one, including even the gendarme who escorted me back to the frontier, assured me that it would have been an expedition from which I should never have returned. I have not sufficient experience of Nizams to offer an opinion.

The lieutenant very politely escorted me back to Ipek, this time with five mounted gensdarmes. He pointed out how well I was being taken care of, and begged that I would tell my people of the improved state of the country. I must therefore emphasize the fact that it was possible, protected by five armed men, to ride for three hours without being shot at, for this was the fact he so greatly admired.

Briefly, the "reforms," as far as "Old Servia" is concerned, consist of a large army of Nizams, of which the inhabitants are terrified, and for which they have to pay. This has, by force of arms, temporally ejected the Mahommedan Albanians. These soldiers, I was told, were unpaid and insufficiently fed. And even some of the Christians spoke of them with more or less pity on this account, much as they disliked and feared them. In Albania, so far as I could learn from the Albanians, nothing that is likely to lead to any future improvement has been effected. Without making war upon them the Turks cannot disarm the wild mountain tribes. Moreover, in the event of a war with Bulgaria, Turkey would require these same men as soldiers, and, as the bulk of the unruly ones are Mahommedans, would probably obtain them; but such is the strained situation that this is not quite certain. So valuable, indeed, have they always been as fighting men, that the Turkish Government has hitherto allowed them every licence in order to keep on good terms with them, and nothing but Austro-Russian pressure has brought about even a pretence at keeping order. The Albanians are a

fiercely independent people, and have hitherto tolerated Turkish "government" only bcause it is unable to govern them. They have formed, hitherto, the flower of the Turkish army in Europe, and in return for their services have been allowed to do as they please. I found many people who believed that in the event of a general war it was possible that the Albanians would elect to play a game of their own, and not to support a dying cause. Some, including Albanians, even spoke of "the Albanian king that is soon to be." I cannot say that I see any likelihood that this wild scheme will be carried out. Neverthe

less, I was surprised to find many Serbs in favor of it. They believed that all Albanian atrocities were instigated by the Turkish Government, and that, left to themselves, the Albanians would develop into a fine people. That they have many fine qualities is undoubtedly true. Whether they are capable of self government is quite another thing. To this I was always given the old reply, "things could not be worse then they are now."

As far as Old Servia and Albania are concerned the reform scheme is a mere farce; neither has it been more The Monthly Review.

"Europe," said a man to me, "knows nothing about us, cares nothing, understands nothing. If no one will help us we must help ourselves. The organization in Macedonia is complete. We have, and have had for years, agents in every town, in every village. We are fully armed. The people are ready to die for the cause. All is ready, and we shall begin."

This was in July, and they have begun. If the rest of the schemes that I got wind of are carried out with the same punctuality a good deal of "history" is hurrying up. I have seen too much of the Balkan people to offer any solution of their difficulties, for there is "a lion in every path." But I have found them honest, kindly, generous and hospitable, and I wish them well. M. Edith Durham.

At a social party of students in Trinity College, Dublin, towards the close of the eighteenth century-a revolutionary era in Ireland-Thomas Moore, a lad destined to be the Country's national poet, played on the piano the

martial strains of the ancient Gaelic air to which, years later, he wedded the song "Let Erin remember the days of old." "Oh that I were marching to that air at the head of 20,000 men for Ireland!" exclaimed one of the youths.

It was Robert Emmet, the dreamy enthusiast and patriot, whose romantic and tragic story is the saddest, yet the dearest, memory which Ireland cherishes from her unhappy past.

Emmet was born on March 4, 1778, in St. Stephen's Green, still the most fashionable residential quarter of Dublin, his father being one of the State physicians to the Viceregal Court. The family was originally English. They came from Kent, in the wake of Cromwell's army for the suppression of the Catholic rebellion in 1641, and in the subsequent confiscation of the properties of the defeated Irish Chiefs they received a substantial grant of land in Tipperary. To call a man a "Cromwellian" is even to-day one of the supremest terms of aversion and contempt in the mouths of the peasantry. Yet from a Cromwellian brood came Robert Emmet, their adored political martyr. The boy entered Trinity College in October 1793, at the age of fifteen. He was gentle, serious, earnest, "wholly free," as his fellow-student Thomas Moore says, "from the frailties of youth," fond of scientific studies, and noted in the Debating SoIciety of the college for a gift of genuine oratory. His person was small and lean and wiry. The face, pallid and slightly pock-pitted, was strong, but without physical beauty. Under a brow broad and high, the eyes, gray in color, were heavy-lidded, small and searching; the nose prominent, straight, and thin, ended combatively in a sharp point; and the under lip of the mouth protruded somewhat truculently, like a challenge of defiance. The predominant expression was intense gravity, grim earnestness, supreme self-confidence. It was the face of a fanatic. The failure of the rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1798, the execution or banishment of all its leaders, the cowed and prostrate condition of

the country after the rigorously repressive measures of the Irish Government, did not deter this extraordinary youth from planning, two years after the Union of Ireland and Great Britain in 1801, another attempt to establish an Irish Republic. The Irish Executive knew nothing definite of the preparations for this fresh insurrection until it burst about their astonished ears on July 23, 1803. Then there was no lack of information. Then the whole scheme was unfolded to them by some of the terror-stricken conspirators on whom the law succeeded in laying its heavy hand. The Lord-Lieutenant was the Earl of Hardwicke, who was appointed to the office by Addington in March 1801, and continued to hold it under Pitt until February 1806. His chief Secretary was William Wickham, and his Under-Secretary was Alexander Marsden. In the Hardwicke correspondence there is a most interesting official paper on the Emmet insurrection, prepared by the Chief Secretary in December 1803. "Account of the Insurrection in Dublin on the 23rd July, 1803, and the circumstances by which it was preceded"-so runs its title "prepared from the evidence in the late State Trials, from the secret examination of several accomplices, and from various secret documents, particularly from intercepted letters and other papers found in the possession of several of the conspirators." From this document, and from the "secret and confidential" correspondence between the Viceroy and the Cabinet in London, we are enabled to follow the development of the plot. It is an exciting tale of adventure and romance, a tale of the deepest human interest.

*

Young Emmet was expelled from Trinity College in 1798 for his connection with the revolutionary movement. He was therefore debarred

from joining any of the professions. In 1802 he entered the tanning business, but the death of his father turned him irrevocably from the prosaic if peaceful ways of industry to the romantic, if hazardous, career of a revolutionist. Under the will of his father he received in April 1803 a sum of 3,000l., and with this amount at his back the boy dreamer and fanatic proposed to wrest Ireland from the grasp of the strongest and most wealthy power in the world. But he had no misgiving as to the success of his scheme. Was it not-for one thingabsolutely new and original? He was not so foolish as to follow the example of the United Irishmen, by attempting to establish a well-organized revolutionary society, with clubs in every part of the country, and counting its numbers by the hundred thousand. That scheme had proved abortive because of the scope it allowed to traitors who reported every move in the game to the Government. His plan was, first, to spend his fortune on the manufacture and collection of munitions of war in the metropolis, taking but a dozen tried and trusty friends into his confidence; then, when all his preparations were completed, to summon a thousand desperate men to his aid from the disaffected in and around Dublin, arm them from his stores, and, surprising the unsuspecting and consequently unprepared Irish Executive, plant the flag of revolution on the battlements of Dublin Castle. This much accomplished-and to the romantic, guileless youth it was but a little thing-Ireland, at the sound of his trumpet, would shake off her fetters, arise a free and independent Republic, and hail him her first President. Emmet accordingly confided his scheme only to a few subordinate leaders of the rebellion in 1798, in Kildare and Wicklow, two counties adjoining Dublin, as well as in the metrop

olis itself. These were to have the men ready to respond to his call when he passed the word that the day had come to rise. But in the immediate work of manufacturing arms and gunpowder his trusted confederates were not more than eight workmen in the humblest walks in life. The two principals were Michael Quigley, a bricklayer, and Nicholas Stafford, a cottonspinner. Two depots were taken in the most crowded centre of Dublin-one in Francis Street, and the other in Marshalsea Lane, off Thomas Street. It is stated in Wickham's narrative that such was the secrecy with which Emmet conducted these initial operations of his plot that not even his chief fellow-conspirators knew exactly the situation of the depots. Emmet himself so completely disappeared from his social circle at the beginning of April -on receiving the money left him in his father's will-that the secret agents of the Executive were unable to discover what had become of him, or to determine whether he was in Dublin, or in the provinces organizing, or had left Ireland altogether. He took a lonely country house in Butterfield Lane, Rathfarnham, just outside the city. Here he lived in absolute seclusion as "Robert Ellis" with a faithful girl servant, named Anne Devlin, and here he was visited at night by his principal agents. He does not seem even to have ever inspected his depots in Francis Street and Marshalsea Lane. Of the eight workmen employed in the manufacture of the warlike stores, only Quigley and Stafford were aware that he was at the head of the movement, and knew where he was to be found. To them he gave the necessary money for the purchase of materials, and for the payment of five shillings a day to the mechanics employed in the depots. From them he received regular reports as to the progress of the work.

But on the morning of Saturday, July 16, a most untoward accident happened. An explosion occurred in the Francis Street depot. One of the workmen was killed. But, worse calamity, the attention of the authorities was called to the place, and the stores of pikes, blunderbusses, rockets, and gunpowder were seized. Emmet, in consequence, made the Marshalsea Lane depot his habitation in order that he might personally supervise the further progress of operations. He also decided to hasten the day of the insurrection, and accordingly appointed the evening of the following Saturday, July 23. Saturday was market-day in Dublin, when it was the custom of crowds of the surrounding agricultural population to come in to sell their produce; and besides, the streets on that evening were usually thronged with artisans and laborers, so that the assembly of the rebels at various points of the city, for the simultaneous attack on the Castle and the military barracks, was likely to pass unnoticed. Therefore, on Friday, July 22, Emmet sent commands to his confederates in Dublin, Kildare, and Wicklow, to be ready with their men at allotted posts within the city at 9 o'clock on Saturday evening, when arms would be distributed to them and instructions issued as to their respective operations in the capture of Dublin.

About eleven o'clock on Saturday morning ten of the leaders of the disaffected in Kildare arrived in Dublin. "They are all known to the Government," says Chief Secretary Wickham, in his report, written in December; "and most of them are now in custody." Emmet met them at the White Bull Inn, Thomas Street, with which his depot in Marshalsea Lane was connected by a back passage. The Kildare men were all substantial farmers.

Their natural impulsiveness and irresponsibility as Irishmen were somewhat toned down by the phlegm and caution which Mother Earth imparts to those who come into close relations with her. They had heard of Emmet, of course, but they had never seen him before, and these graybeards-many of them were not impressed by the extreme youth of the revolutionary chief nor by his supercilious and domineering manner. The rumor had gone abroad that the Dublin leaders of the conspiracy had refused to act. The countrymen accordingly insisted upon being introduced to their city confederates. They were not going to trust their lives and liberties, they said, to a raw enthusiastic boy. But Emmet preemptorily refused to produce them; first because it was only too true that the Dublin leaders-mainly shopkeepershad proved unreliable; and, secondly and mainly, because, as things were now appearing desperate, he chivalrously desired to hide as far as possible the identity of the men implicated in the plot.

The Kildare farmers then demanded to be shown the depot of arms. To this Emmet agreed. He conducted two of the band to the neighboring arsenal in Marshalsea. Lane. He pointed out to them the piles of pikes(sharp and deadly weapons they had proved to be in the hands of the infuriated peasantry during the rebellion of '98)—their hafts hinged in the centre, so that they might be doubled up and secretly carried beneath a greatcoat. He showed them also an immense store of musket ball-cartridges. So far so good. But in the way of firearms there were only eighteen blunderbusses, and only four muskets which had been brought in by two army deserters. The only sword in the place was one which Emmet had procured for himself. Some extraordinarily primitive weapons were exhibited.