fect: and the supine court of Constantinople, buried in a thirty years' peace, (unexampled for duration in the Ottoman annals,) saw with indifference the communication with its vassal kingdom gradually intercepted: towns, villages, and military posts, rapidly sprung up; while settlers were invited from Germany, Switzerland, and even Scotland, to aid in the colonization of the rising province of New Servia, as this hitherto nameless district began to be called. In the efforts made by the Tartars to check the progress of the new colony, they received zealous assistance from the Zaporofskis, who claimed the territory as pasture-land for their herds, and were unwilling, like the red Indians of North America, to have their fortresses approached too nearly by the haunts of civilisation. The settlers, harassed by the inroads of their, wild neighbours, at length applied to Petersburg for protection: and some regiments of cavalry were located as military colonies in the most exposed quarters, where an irregular warfare was carried on to such an extent, that the Zaporofskis were on the point of being denounced as open rebels, when the promulgation of the new code brought their disaffection to a climax. They unanimously refused compliance: and when, in the following year (1768,) war at length broke out between Russia and the Porte, they not only withheld their appointed contingent, but many deserted to the Turks on their advance towards New Servia, in order to wreak their vengeance on those whom they considered as the usurpers of their soil. The Tartar Khan, KrimKherai, who was appointed generalissimo of the Ottoman forces, by a daring and unexpected manœuvre crossed the Dniestr on the ice in the depth of winter: and the wretched inhabitants of New Servia were exposed without defence to a torrent of desolation, which (if credit is to be

given to the narrative of De Tott) rivalled in merciless atrocity the deeds of the early followers of Zingis. But the death of Krim- Kherai, who was poisoned through the jealousy of the Grand-Vizir, speedily changed the fortune of the war: and when its triumphant conclusion, by the peace of Kutchuk-Kainardji in 1774, left the Russians at liberty to regulate the affairs of their own frontier, the contumacy and rebellion of the Zaporofskis were not long in meeting with due punishment. The setsha was surrounded by a cordon of troops, and its inhabitants, excepting a portion who escaped into Tartary, made prisoners: a few only were allowed to retain their lands on condition of submitting to the new ordinances, but the majority were either draughted into Russian regiments, or exiled to distant parts of the empire: the vacant lands being assigned to Russian proprietors, and colonized by peasants forcibly transplanted for the purpose, from Podolia and Volhynia: while the new town of Kherson became the emporium of Russian commerce in the Mediterranean, till superseded twenty years later by the erection of Odessa. With their expulsion from their ancient haunts the name of the Zaporofskis ceased to exist :† but a portion of the same race, under a new appellation, have continued to the present day. These derive their origin from the refugees who fled into the Krim on the destruction of the setsha, and who earned their pardon from the Russians, in the struggle which preceded the final annexation of that country to the Muscovite empire, by turning their arms against the nation which had sheltered them. This last act of treachery was rewarded by Potemkin with an establishment on the territory between the Don and the Kuban, which the Kuban Tartars had deserted on its seizure by Russia: and there, under the title of Tcherno

morski or Black-Sea Cossacks, their descendants still remain, carrying on an incessant border warfare with the Circassians. They elect their Ataman, subject to the governor of Ekatarinoslaf: they are allowed free fishery in the sea of Azoph, and the still more valued privilege of making and selling brandy free from duty. Their numbers are estimated at about 15,000 effective men; and, in conjunction with the Cossacks of the Terek (a branch of the Donski), they serve in the frontier cordon on the line between the Black and Caspian Seas.

The history of both the branches of the Cossacks on the Dneipr may now be considered at a close, one of them being reduced to insignificance, and the other melted into the general mass of the Russian population; but, before we recur to the changes effected in the condition of the Don-Cossacks, it is necessary briefly to advert to the famous rebellion of Pugatchef; an event which, though removed by its magnitude and importance beyond the scope of merely Cossack history, demands some notice in this place, from both the leader and his original, partisans having been of the Cossack nation. In our introductory remarks, allusion was made to the prevalence among the Cossacks of the roskolnik or schismatical tenets, and the persecution to which these sectaries had frequently been subjected by the Russian sovereigns. As early as the reign of Peter I., a large body of them had migrated into the Tartar territorities rather than shave their beards, to the preservation of which they attached peculiar importance; from their patron saint, St Ignatius, they were known among the Tartars as Inat Cossacks, under which name they are mentioned by De Tott in 1768, as forming part of Krim-Kherai's army. A similar attempt in 1771, to deprive of these cherished appendages, and subject to regular military discipline, the Cossacks of the Yaik (a wild race deriving their origin from those of the Don, and professing almost universally the roskolnik heresy), led to a sedition in their capital of Yaikskoi, in which both their own Ataman and the Russian commissioner lost their lives, in

endeavouring to restore order; but the advance of a Russian corps speedily induced the appearance of submission, and the town was retaken from the insurgents.

The germs of disaffection, however, remained; and when, two years later, the daring adventurer Yemedyan Pugatchef, a Don-Cossack by birth and a roskolnik by religion, made his appearance near Yaikskoi, and assumed the name of the deceased Czar Peter III., the Cossacks of the Yaik became his first, as they continued to the last his firmest, supporters and followers. The extraordinary career of this impostor, who was at one time master of the whole country between the Ural and the Volga-his repeated victories over Russian generals, and his final betrayal and execution at Moscowremind the reader of the exploits of Stanko Razin, whom Pugatchef resembled also in the success with which he allured the serfs to his standard, by promising the abolition of slavery, and by the cruelties which he exercised on all the nobles who fell into his hands. But the details of the war, which cost in its progress and suppression the lives of 300,000 persons, belong rather to the general history of Russia than of the Cossacks, whom it only affected by its origin among a remote and obscure branch of their body. On the extinction of the revolt, the Cossacks of Yaik suffered severe punishment: and, in order to mark their treason by a perpetual stigma, Catharine abolished the name of Yaik by an imperial edict, and substituted that of Cossacks of the Ural, by which they have been since known.

The final abolition of the privileges of the Ukraine, must have prepared the Don-Cossacks for a similar invasion of their own rights; but their formidable and still unbroken numbers made the experiment too hazardous to be risked, at a juncture when all the forces of the empire were required for the execution of the ambitious projects of Catharine: and the capricious favour of Potemkin, who saw and appreciated their value as irregular troops, was a farther safeguard to their remaining immunities. Important

changes were, however, made in their internal organization: their troops, which had hitherto appeared in the field in separate stanitzas, each headed by its own chief, were formed into regular regiments of the guard and the line, under officers appointed and commissioned by the crown: a fixed period of military service was rendered obliga. tory on each Cossack as the tenure of his lands and fisheries: and the authority of the Ataman was circumscribed by the establishment at Tcherkask of a Russian chancery under a procuratorgeneral, to which was transferred the control of the allotment of lands, and the revision of judicial sentences. But while the spirit of their government was thus silently undergoing a transformation, nothing was neglected which could foster and inflame their military spirit, and convert them from the turbulent allies into the zealous and obedient soldiers of Russia.Honours and rewards were liberally showered on their leaders; and Souvaroff, to whose ferocious courage and contempt for modern tactical science in war, their undisciplined bravery was peculiarly congenial, treated them with eminent distinction, and employed them as his chosen troops on all occasions of peril. In the sieges of Oczakow and Ismail, columns of dismounted Cossacks were combined with the regular battalions in the assault; but their want of discipline made them inefficient when acting in concert with the other troops: and the total destruction at Ismail of a corps of 5000 Cossacks, whom their headlong valour had carried into a situation whence it was impossible to rescue them, prevented the experiment ever being repeated. But as light cavalry in the field, or in protecting the flanks and outposts of an army, the Cossacks continued to be unrivalled; and their eminent services in this capacity, through the various campaigns of the French revolutionary wars, spread the renown of their powers throughout Europe. Their peculiar mode of fighting, though not materially differing from that of Oriental cavalry in general, has been described by Scott in language so vivid and picturesque, that we cannot refrain from quoting it in this place:-" Instead of acting in a line, a body of Cossacks about to charge disperse at the word of command, very much in the manner

covering the retreat of their own army, their velocity, activity, and courage, render pursuit by the enemy's cavalry peculiarly dangerous; and in pursuing a flying enemy their qualities are still more redoubtable. In the campaign of 1806-7, the Cossacks took the field in great numbers under their celebrated Ataman Platof, who, himself a Cossack, knew their peculiar capacity for warfare, and raised their fame to a pitch which it had not attained in former European wars."

The military history of the Cossacks may here be closed; but the political changes which were effected during this period in their constitution, demand attention as containing the seeds of the present disaffection. The appointment of Platof to the dignity of Ataman in 1796, by the sole power of the crown, had abolished the ancient right of election; but the popularity of the new chief reconciled the Cossacks to the change; and the powers of the Ataman, which, according to Heber, had extended even to causing men to be summarily bound hand and foot and thrown into the Don, were restricted henceforward to military matters. Paul, whose wish was to obliterate, as far as lay in his power, all that his mother had done, at first declared his intention of restoring the ancient privileges of the Don-Cossacks in their pristine vigour; but his fickle and wayward temper prevented the realization of any of his promises; and an imperial edict, which assimilated the commissions of the Cossack officers to those in the Russian army, and conferred nobility on the children of those who had the military rank of colonel, excited great discontent, and was exclaimed against as introducing a new aristocracy, to the subversion of the old democratic institutions of the nation. The military spirit of a government, where formerly all were equal, or had only a temporary but absolute power when elected officers, was obviously violated by the creation of this privileged class, the numbers of which continually increased: and the partiality

shown to them in the allotment of lands, and appointment to commissions, (which were conferred even on children in the cradle,) widened the breach between the new nobles and the common Cossacks, and excited jealousy against the former, as the partisans and creatures of the Russians. On the death of Platof, the dignity of Ataman ceased to exist as a local title, and was reserved by the crown till the present emperor conferred it on his son, the heir-apparent: the routine duties of the office were, in the mean time, per formed by an officer styled nakazniiataman, or vice-ataman, whose residence was fixed at Tcherkask; but the limited power possessed by this functionary, and the insignificance into which the staroshines, and other local authorities, had by this time sunk, left the real administration in the hands of the procurator-general at Tcherkask, and the council of war at Petersburg, and deprived the Cossacks of the channels through which their complaints had hitherto reached the ear of the sovereign. The continued alienation of lands from the common territory in favour of the new nobles, and even of Russians, was viewed with discontent and suspicion by the commonalty, who anticipated the introduction of compulsory labour as the inevitable consequence of these appropriations: and an attempt, shortly after the accession of the present Emperor, to introduce the payment of customs on some of the articles which they had hitherto received duty-free, was met by such violent reclamations, that it was found necessary to abandon the project before the commencement of the last Turkish war. The severe and harassing warfare against the Circassians, and the neglect to withdraw several Cossack regiments from this unpopular service at the end of their stipulated period of duty, excited murmurs and discontent, which the imprudent ukases of 1837, and the attempt to coerce the disaffected corps by severity, have inflamed into the present spirit of resistance; and though the rigid surveillance which has been exercised, to prevent the transactions in the interior of Russia from being divulged beyond the frontier, has rendered the accounts which have hither

to transpired vague and imperfect, their uniform tenor sufficiently proves, that the love of freedom which in by. gone days animated the Cossacks against the Tartars, is not yet extinct, and that any attempt to narrow still further the already restricted circle of their liberties, must produce a convulsion which would seriously affect the stability of Russian sway in her southeastern acquisitions.

The vulnerability of Russia on the side of the Black Sea, in the event of her engaging in war with a maritime power, has been long felt by herself, and can now be no longer concealed from the eyes of Europe. When Alexander spoke of the Dardanelles as "the key of my house," he used the phrase in the full consciousness of the danger to his empire which must follow the passage, by a hostile power, of that important barrier; and in our hands especially, if the energies of England were wielded by men of a different stamp from those who now direct them, the knowledge of Russian weakness in this quarter might be converted into a better security than we now possess for the pacific policy of the Czar, from the ease with which a revolt might be excited and maintained among the tribes which cover his southern frontier from the Dniepr to Ghilan, all more or less oppressed and discontented, some but recently subdued, and some still maintaining, against fearful odds, the struggle for freedom. Little cohesion, beyond that which results from a uniform system of military occupation, exists among the various races which have been brought within the geographical boun daries of the Russian empire since the time of Peter the Great: and, in regarding the present protracted war in Circassia simply as the gallant but isolated resistance of a warlike nation against the power of Russia, the European public has erroneously estimated the importance of the contest. It is not the prowess of a single people which Russia has encountered on the heights of the Caucasus, but the accumulated hatred of the wrecks of tribes and nations once independent, which have turned to bay in the fastnesses of this ancient barrier against northern irruption. Many thousands

:

of the Tartars, Kabardions, and Lesghis, driven from their ancient seats by the advance of Russian conquest, have sought a last refuge in the inaccessible mountains of Circassia, and become amalgamated with the Circassian people: the last descendants of Zingis, the race of the dethroned Kherais of the Krim, are at their head and aid is secretly afforded to their co-religionists by the neighbouring Moslem tribes in the Russian dominions, to an extent which the severe punishment consequent on detection has been unable to check. The success of the Caucasian mountaineers, and the present disaffection of the Cossacks, may be hailed as the first signs of reflux in the tide of aggression which Russia has for more than a century been steadily carrying forward: and, when we remember the eagerness with which the Cossacks of Poltava and the Ukraine, on the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, held themselves in readiness to welcome the French as deliverers, we may estimate the probable effect which might be produced if Great Britain, following the example set by her professed ally in the late case of Herat, should retaliate by sending her Mediterranean fleet into the Black Sea, and thus demonstrating to the tribes on its shores that the power of the "Padishah of the Sea" (as the Circassians term the British sovereign) is less exaggerated, and less kept in check by Russia, than the Russians have constantly endeavoured to represent it.t

The country occupied by the Don

Cossacks extends about 350 versts in length on both sides of the Don, and about 300 in extreme width, containing 3611 geographic square miles: it contains 119 stanitzas, varying from 50 to 300 houses; each stanitza is still surrounded by a rampart and ditch, but the khutor or stable is outside. The male population is supposed to be about half a million, of whom 200,000 are able to bear arms, and have each consequently an allotment of lands and fisheries; the officers have double and treble shares. Every Cossack is liable to be called upon to serve three years in any part of the world, mounted, equipped, and armed at his own expense, but receiving pay when on actual service. After three years' service he is liable to service only in the frontier cordon, the police, &c. after twenty years he serves in the home police only, and after twenty-five years he is free entirely. The Cossacks are mostly in easy circumstances, and are exempt from most taxes, particularly the salt and capitation taxes; most of them possess three or four horses, and many have studs of upwards of 1000: their country, with the Ukraine and the neighbouring cavalry colonies, supplies nearly all Russia with horses. Bremner says, that "with the exception of the cavalry of the guard stationed at Petersburg, and the longnecked pets of some Cossack policemen, scarcely a single mounted soldier is seen by the traveller till he reach the southern districts. There are 45,000 cavalry in Little Russia alone."‡

• Bremner's Russia, ii. 405.

Bremner's Russia, ii. 381.