It is known that the liability to serve in the army, and the heavy tax on Christians for exemption, have created a disposition to avoid appearing in the lists of population. It is not surprising, therefore, that another estimate, which proceeds from an educated Christian of Janina, assigns to the country a much larger number of males. It seems also probably to contain some outlying districts. But the proportions of Christian and non-Christian inhabitants are not greatly varied. The Christians given for Epirus are 260,000; the Mussulmans 54,000; with less than 4,000 Jews. But again, while Janina and its neighbourhood are said to supply 92,000 Christians, they only reckon 5,000 Mohammedans, with 3,000 Jews. The evidence as to language is not less remarkable. In the entire district of Epirus, indeed (which is not in question), 193,000 are said to speak Greek, against 57,000 divided between Albanian and Vlach. But in Janina and its neighbourhood the Greek-speaking population is set down at 94,000, with only 5,500 of other tongues. It may, indeed, be said that figures of this kind can hardly rest upon careful enumeration, and may owe something to partiality. Let us look, then, for other evidence. The highest accessible authority upon the subject is that of persons who have travelled, or, beyond all others, who have long resided in, and studied, Epirus with the rest of Albania, before these subjects passed into the region of controversy at all. Such are Leake (1836), Ami Boué (1840), Tozer (1869), and Hobhouse (1809). Of these I will only quote the last. 12 The Christians of Janina, though inhabiting a part of Albania, and governed by Albanian masters, call themselves Greeks. They neither wear the Albanian dress, nor speak the Albanian language; and they partake also in every particular of the manners and customs of the Greek of the Morea, Roumelia, and other Christian parts of Turkey.' A yet higher authority, and indeed the highest of all, is Dr. Hahn, who resided for very many years at Janina as Austrian Consul, and whose Albanesische Studien (Jena, 1858) are still, I believe, the standard work on that little known country. The difficulty is to select from his pages without running to great length. He states that the people along the coast speak both languages (Albanian and Greek), but in Janina, Arta, and Preveza 'even the Mohammedan part of the population speak the Greek as mother tongue' (p. 14). And he had cause to know it; for a portion of his work was to produce an Albanian Grammar and Dictionary; and he records the obstacle that he found in 'the difficulty of finding occasion to practical exercise in a town so purely Greek as Janina. But we can quite understand how some semblance of an antiHellenic feeling could be procured from this place, when we learn from him (p. 36) that the family language of the foremost aristocratic Mohammedan houses of Janina is the Albanian, but they do not number more than about a dozen.' 12 Journey through Albania, p. 70. London: 1813. This is no question of Albania at all. Divided among themselves, without any sign of historical unity, the Albanians are a race distinct from Hellenes, although, as has been shown in the Kingdom, quite capable of assimilating with them. It is a Greek population with which we are called upon to deal; and no amount of bullying or wheedling by the Turkish authorities on the spot can make it otherwise. L. M.-I.-22. Such then appears to be the case of Janina; where, a couple of years ago, when there was a fear of Slavonic intrigues, the official Ottoman Journal (Feb. 2, 1877) declared that 'Epirus never forgets that she is the primitive Greece, the first station of Hellenism, where the Greek religion and the Greek letters' (of this last we were not quite aware) 'had their birth.' Unless all this case can be effectually overset, the Porte cannot reasonably hope to succeed in keeping Janina under her rule. She would act wisely to endeavour to part with it on the best terms she can make; and the only terms she can make with show of reason or hope of success are probably terms of money, which have soothed her susceptibilities in the case of Bulgaria, and which may yet be found to operate with a gentle reconciling force in other portions of the great Eastern problem. But the question, for us and for the moment, stands thus. If there is to be a serious diplomatic controversy about Janina and its district, which side are we to take? It is good to know that Greece has found a champion, although it is mortifying to be also made painfully aware that we have thus far allowed the championship to slip away from our own hands. The conduct of France at the period of the Greek Emancipation did indeed entitle her to contest it with us in a friendly and honourable rivalry. But her partial recession from questions of European interest since the German war made it peculiarly our duty, at Constantinople and elsewhere, to assume the office. Nor can the fact be concealed that we had every possible facility for the performance of this duty. No country can vie with us, unless it be our own fault, in winning the confidence and affection of the Greeks: for there is no other State in regard to which there does not exist some bar to a complete harmony. Russia agrees with the Greeks as members of the orthodox Church, but excites their jealousy by her Slavonic sympathies, within the circle of which even religion has now been drawn. France has no special Slavonic sympathies; but her religion, on account of its aggressive operations, is everywhere in conflict with the religion of Greece, and gliding, as it is so apt to glide, into Eastern policy, introduces an element of misgiving which checks the thorough consolidation of goodwill. England alone is absolutely detached from any influence which can mar the completeness of her concord with the Hellenic races. She shared with France and Russia the good work of liberation: and the unhappy affair of Pacifico was surely well redeemed by the cession of the Ionian Islands. She is naturally marked out, not for an exclusive, but for a special friendliness with Greece. But there is no demand in this case for a special friendliness, in order to supply the motive of right action. The ungracious assent, which we so unhappily substituted at the Congress for our zealous advocacy, at any rate stands recorded against us. That we should lend to Greece a free and resolute concurrence, at least at this final stage, in obtaining for her the boon destined for her by European compact, is what justice, policy, and even decency, alike require. May 24, 1879, W. E. GLADSTONE, in Nineteenth Century. FROISSART'S LOVE STORY. Come with me to a certain quiet corner that I know in a great librag; a corner where we shall find no one, except a few specialists, who will glare at us. It is the pretty way of specialists to glare upon intruders. One of these is proving to his own satisfaction that there never were any Courts of Love at all, which is as much as to prove that there never were any Olympian games at all. Another, a German this, is collecting Old French ballads, which he will publish with variorum readings like a Greek chorus. Then he will go about declaring with pride that the Germans alone understand early French literature, just as the Germans alone understand Shakespeare. A third, a sprightly young Frenchman, is collecting anecdotes, which he will make into a volume, and call it a 'Research.' Let us sit down among them, quietly, without disturbing any one, and read the story of Froissart's single love passage, told by himself, in the poetry of which he was so proud. I admit that Froissart is better known as a chronicler, but some deference should surely be paid to a man's own opinions, especially about himself. And on the occasions when Froissart had to be entered in account-books as a recipient of princely gifts, he called himself a poet dittor. As for the right to the title, in the first place any one may call himself a poet; and in the second, Froissart wrote an enormous quantity of verse, just as good as that of any rival dittor. It is not his fault, nor was it his expectation, that the world should refuse to read him any more. Some day, the world may even find itself too busy to read the 'Ring and the Book.' Froissart, in his own estimation, then, was, before all, a great poet, who sometimes wrote chronicles. His verses mostly remain in manuscript. From the selection which has been published in Buchon's edition, I have gathered the history which follows. I have always thought that the singers who piped during this period of poetic decadence have been harshly treated. Critics display an acerbity towards them, which seems to betray temper. Yet these gentle poets are an unoffending folk; they do not pretend. They are content to follow in the old grooves, and to sing, to the old tunes, songs which are as like anto each other as the individual members in a flock of Chinamen. Great poetry, indeed, can only be expected in times of great strife, peril, and upheaval, as in the sixteenth and seventeenth, and end of the eighteenth centuries. It does not always come even then. But in the fourteenth century, though things medieval were passing swiftly to universal change, every institution seemed fixed and unalterable as the courses of the planets. As was the daily life, so was the song. Listen: you hear the sweet and simple tune, and you are presently tired of it. Listen a little longer: you become accustomed to the monotony, and you find yourself, like your ancestors, expecting the same tune, and anxious only to find out what variation, if any, will be put in words and thoughts. And there is another thing; it is pleasant to discover in these old poets the same canons of honour, truth, and loyalty, which are the code of the modern gentleman. These trouvères, knights or clerks, have nothing at all to learn from us. They show themselves, in their rippling and monotonous verse, as jealous for what we call in our priggish modern cant the "Higher Culture," as any writer or preacher or poet among ourselves. There is nowhere a more perfect gentleman, as disclosed in his own unaffected verse, than Charles of Orleans, or Eustache Deschamps, or Froissart himself. They are trying to revive once more the old forms of verse. The ballad, the triolet, the virelay, the rondeau, and the rest have appeared again. Just now, though already there are signs that the first freshness of surprise is gone, the movement possesses the charm of novelty. The revival is quaint; in the hands of Swinburne, and of Mr. John Payne, the translator of Villon, the old-fashioned rhymes become delightful; in all other hands, so far as I have seen, they are laboured, self-conscious, and constrained. It can hardly be expected that they will take a permanent place among the naturalised forms of English verse. Even when Swinburne uses them, it is the dexterity of the poet which pleases us, not the beauty of the verse. The paucity of our rhymes and our own rules of rhyme render it very unlikely that the ballad or the villanelle will ever become more than a plaything, or a vehicle for vers de société. One can hardly understand Shelley pouring out his thoughts in rondeaux, or Wordsworth preferring a balade to a sonnet. Froissart tells the story of his love in the Trettie de l'Espinette Amoureuse, a composition of some four thousand lines, interspersed with balades, virelays, and rondeaux. The tale is told after the manner of the time, with prolix preambles, reflections, introductions, and digressions: we must not, however, interrupt the narrator, and if we only give him full scope, we shall presently reap our reward in finding what manner of youth was Froissart in the days when he had as yet no thoughts of going a-chronicling. He begins with a few reflections on love. Young men, he says, earnestly yearn for the time to arrive when they too shall be able to pay their tribute to Love, although they know nothing of the troubles and perils which surround the Court of that sovereign. "Such was I when I was young. At twelve years of age my chief pleasure was in seeing dances and carols, in listening to minstrels and the words which bring delight. At school I followed the little maidens about, just to give them an apple, or a pear, or a ring; great prowess it seemed to win their favour. And I said to myself that when the time should come for me to love, like all the rest, par amours, no one ought to blame me. For, indeed, in many places it is written that with love and arms come all joy and all honour. "And know, that never did I lean The thoughts in which true pleasures thrive." He goes on to explain that a man, considering how short a space he has to live, should employ his time in the most profitable manner possible, viz. the cultivation of love. Then he begins with the beginning, and describes his education, his childhood, and the games he played. I wish he had been as explicit in the description of his school-life as he is in that of his games. Here, indeed, he is almost as detailed as Rabelais himself, who gives a list of two hundred. Froissart's list contains about sixty. "Ah! happy time," he cries, when "Whether to speak or hold my peace Alike was joy without surcease; When on a simple posy neat, Fit offering for a damsel sweet, More store I placed than at this day I set by tale or virelay Worth twenty marks of silver white: Amid these simple joys he grew up, went to school and was flogged, fought other boys, and went home with his clothes torn, for which he was mis à raison-but this was labour lost, "because I never did it the less for that "-conceived a great fondness for reading romances and treatises of love; and began to try his hand at writing verses. One regrets that he was not impelled to set down more details of this time, and to give the world a picture of that medieval bourgeois life at Valenciennes to which he belonged by birth. But that was not in the way of a courtly poet. Writers of fabliaux, it is true, might condescend to such details. Arrived at adolescence-in another poem we have the further particulars of his passage from school to the profession of poet-he has a vision. The season, according to fourteenth-century requirements, was May; the time, early morning; the place, a garden. The birds were singing as if in emulation, "Never before saw I so fair a morn.' The firmament was yet glittering with stars, though Lucifer was already driving them away. All this is quite in accordance with polite usage; what follows, although not absolutely new, is yet unexpected. The youth sitting under a flowering thorn looked up into a sky clearer and more pure than silver or azure. He was seized with a rapture of spirit, and |