religions, were not meant to be applicable to Christians, but more properly and solely to Heathens. This he proves by quoting many passages. He consequently points to the distinction which was always drawn among the Jews between the word Akum, the worshipper of stars, or a Heathen, and the name Beni Noach, sons of Noah, which was regularly applied to those nations that used to observe the seven divine commandments of Noah's sons, and which, according to the tradition, were the following:-1. Prohibition of idolatry; 2. Of blasphemy; 3. Of murder; 4. Of incest: 5. Of plunder; 6. Introduction of tribunals of justice; 7. Prohibition of cutting out flesh from a living beast for food. Suitable to the injunctions contained in the ancient Jewish books, the sons of Noah, or all nations by which the above seven precepts were observed, shall be respected as neighbours, and as deserving their sincere love.

This established, the author argues that Christians should be held even higher than the Beni Noach, they having accepted the whole of the Mosaic Decalogue and the Scriptures. To meet the objection which might be made from the circumstance of the Christians recognising the divinity of Christ and worshipping him in the Trinity, other testimonies are adduced by him, purporting to show that those nations which were debarred from the benefit of receiving, like the Israelites, on the Mount Sinai, the Decalogue and the Mosaic law, could nevertheless, provided they worshipped the true God, incur without guilt the shytouf-that is, the union or conjunction of other beings with Deity. After trying in this manner to prove Christians to be the neighbours of the Jews, he from that very conclusion derives the various duties which they have to observe towards them, and especially those in which they have hitherto been most neglectful. The catalogue of the hitherto allowable sins which he lays to their charge, and which they are henceforth to abstain from committing against their Christian neighbours, will rather fall heavy upon their unaccustomed shoulders. They are to refrain from stealing, and defrauding Christians; they shall not despise them on account of their faith, and shall render them justice; they shall regularly pay taxes, and not sinuggle, which (to please the Emperor of Russia, as the old Jews accuse the author) is declared a sin; they shall not coin nor pass false money; they shall not commit treason, but live peaceably under the governments which afford them protection, and promote everything good in the country where they sojourn; they shall keep their oath inviolate, and the oath taken to the Christian to be as good as that to the Jew. These and the like deductions are made, not by mere argumentation, which would fail to carry any weight with the Jews, but in support of them passages are accumulated from the books of the most learned and respected Rabbis of his religion, which shows that among them there existed at all times men who, far from participating in the prejudices of their nation, were most eager in condemning them as destructive of both their physical well-being and of their morals. In one of the chapters, to eradicate the aversion all Jews have to agricultural occupations, he adduces passages both from the Scriptures and the traditions of several of their Rabbis who gained their livelihood from agriculture and tending their flocks. Finally, he gives an interesting account of the Shabsavians and the Frankists, two heretical Jewish sects of the seventeenth century. The latter was numerous in Poland, and counted the wealthiest and most enlightened Jews among its members. Let us hope that a book so laboriously compiled, and with such noble motives in view, will not remain without producing beneficial results. With the fanatical and ignorant portion of the Jews, the author is considered as an innovator, and as such even abhorred. The old Talmudists are most rancorous against him, and do all in their power to oppose the spread of his book.

THE

NEW QUARTERLY REVIEW,

OR

Home, Foreign, and Colonial

JOURNAL.

ART. I.-1. Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara in the years 1843-1845, to ascertain the Fate of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly. By the Rev. Joseph Wolff, D.D. 2 vols. Second Edition. London. Parker. 1845.

2. The Bokhara Victims. By Captain Grover, Unattached, F.R.S. 8vo. Second Edition. London. 1845.

3. Edinburgh Review, July, 1845.

4. Lord Aberdeen and the Ameer of Bokhara, in Reply to the Edinburgh Review. By Captain Grover, F.R.S. London.

1845.

WHEN by any fortuitous circumstances the peculiarities of a private individual come under the lash of a reviewer, the latter personage enjoys an immense advantage over his adversary, since he can inflict his blows without the slightest fear of correspondent retaliation. This bush warfare, this guerilla shooting has been practised to an immense extent by both the Quarterly and Edinburgh. Keats is an awful evidence of the effect of this unseen fire in the first instance; and it was intended by our Scotch brethren to cover Lord Byron from the same masked battery; but, to use his own language, he broke them on the wheel they meant for him. Scotch reviewers have ever since been kept within something like a general law of courtesy and order; but in the case before us, they have again ventured on these outbreaks, and again will find a foe in their very intrenchments, that will soon settle matters with them in a similar style-nay, silence their very last shot by volley after volley.

The article before us has been ascribed to Sir John M'Neill. We cannot think so meanly of that gentleman, as to believe that he would lend himself to so base a purpose, as the attempt to degrade the honest and straight-forward efforts of a British officer to save his friend and brother officer from the direst of thraldom, imprisonment, starvation and death.

An attempt is made to give a colouring to the article for an avowed purpose manifest through the whole tenor of it, as though

VOL. VI.-NO. II.

U*

it were the composition of one of the Stoddart family. With the only members and connections of that family, that are capable of composing an elaborate article, we enjoy the honour of an intimate acquaintance; excepting from this bright phalanx, composed of some of the highest names in our Alma Mater, the Pseudo-Clergyman, the Plymouth Brother, the rude insulter of Captain Grover, the Rev. G. H. Stoddart. Of his wondrous recent affection to his brother, which escaped the Stoddart and Conolly Committee entirely, to which fund he never subscribed a shilling; of his prodigious veneration for Lord Aberdeen, which it would be considered unfair, we suppose, to ascribe to the pensions of his family; of the extraordinary conduct of some members of that family, we shall, ere we close this article, furnish our readers with abundance of means of judging for themselves. As we are in possession of sources of information very much beyond what either Sir John M'Neill, or the Edinburgh, or even her Majesty's government possess on this matter, we deem it not irrelevant to the object in question even to review a reviewer, the more especially as the author of the article before us comes forward as the ostensible champion of government in this matter, which we substantiate by directing our readers to pay attention to those mysterious passages which announce access to Colonel Stoddart's papers, and further, the minute acquaintance with all the correspondence which had taken place on the Stoddart and Conolly matter, and which Captain Grover declares was not shown to him. We can scarce think that government would act thus meanly, or allow themselves to be thus poorly championed, since we well know that even the necessary information which he required was not furnished to Dr. Wolff, nor was he allowed to publish what was his own, viz. the letter of Lord Ellenborough, which was given to him by the Ameer of Bokhara, and which no jus gentium or jus politicum can enable government to retain. The letter also of Sir Richmond Shakespeare, detained by Colonel Sheil, was taken possession of in the same summary manner by government. It would be the very maximum of unfairness to deny Dr. Wolff the means of authenticating facts on the plea of state necessity, and then to wave this when any blind partisan takes up the cudgels for the crown. Captain Grover looks on the article as an emanation from the Foreign Office; it has this aspect we own, but we will not for the above reasons allow ourselves for one moment to entertain such a supposition. For ourselves, we are the avowed friends and supporters of the Peel cabinet, and if any confidences were to be made, should naturally look for them in our direction, and not so far a-field as a Scotch Review. The government, in some of its brightest members, has not shown

itself indisposed to aid our efforts. We confess, in this affair of Dr. Wolff, we have our own notions of right and justice; we have expressed these in our last Number, we have pointed out a course which we shall yet, we trust, see realized in this matter, and we shall in this enter into further details, which, but for this unhappy article in the Edinburgh, might have slumbered. We now proceed to the Solons of the North. In the first page of the article we have a colouring given to the Stoddart and Conolly affair of the most artful character.

"These two distinguished officers, while employed on friendly missions to Central Asia, were seized, imprisoned, and treated with the greatest barbarity by the Ameer of Bokhara."

Friendly missions! Sir John M'Neill sent Colonel Stoddart, vested with the full powers of an envoy, to complete a treaty in Bokhara. Sir William M'Naghten instructed Captain Conolly in a similar manner. Friendly missions! Captain Conolly and Colonel Stoddart were both envoys in an absolute and clear sense of the term, and every insult offered to them was as much offered to the British crown as though Sir Stratford Canning or Sir John M'Neill had been the recipients. That is the exact position of the case, and no special pleading can do away with facts.

The next statement we must own we read three times before we could believe our eyes; we then looked for a table of errata, but no, the passage stood intact.

"He (Dr. Wolff) has ascertained, as fully as a fact can well be ascertained, that the original intelligence of the murder of these two meritorious officers is substantially correct." Now, in principio, we should be glad to know, as this article was published before Dr. Wolff's work, by what possible clairvoyance the reviewer could ascertain or determine that point or Dr. Wolff's mind on the matter. If any man were to say, I am quite convinced, from the evidence of a book I have never read a line of, that two British officers were murdered in 1843, we should consider him a fair candidate for St. Luke's, Bedlam, or any other receptacle for the demented. But it is so. Such a writer we feel much beneath our refutation, but as the government did rely on the statement of Saleh Muhammed, which the reviewer affirms that Dr. Wolff proved to be substantially correct, we shall examine that statement. In the first place then, when Dr. Wolff encountered Saleh Muhammed at Meshed, with a full sense of the personal danger he must incur in visiting Bokhara, his natural leaning, one would feel inclined to think, would be to agree with Saleh Muhammed. He says, however, he did not believe the truth of his statement of the execution of Stoddart and

Conolly. Further conversation only increased this impression. Saleh Muhammed had learnt it from one solitary person at Bokhara. Kerban, the chief of the caravan, gave an absolute contradiction to this statement, having seen them alive after Saleh Muhammed had pronounced them dead. A Turkomaun chief gave similar assurances. The Assaff-ood-Dowla, the Persian viceroy of Khorassaun, sent word that the envoys were alive in the last year, 1843. The people of Meshed were none of them aware of any such execution. Saleh Muhammed himself admitted that the two persons executed might not have been Stoddart and Conolly. He varied materially even in the details of his own story. First, he had it from the executioner of Stoddart, then not. He used every possible means to deter Dr. Wolff from those investigations at Bokhara that he knew would prove fatal to his veracity. With all the beautiful and romantic air which the Edinburgh reviewer, the Romancer of the North, has given him, he made a claim on Colonel Sheil for 120 tomauns, which Dr. Wolff heard from various quarters he had previously received from Major Todd.

So much for the Akhund Zadeh, with whose account Dr. Wolff is wholly at issue with respect to the time of the execution; to the official date of which, as furnished by the Ameer of Bokhara, and Abdul Samut Khan, confirmed by Abbas Kouli Khan, the Persian ambassador as Sarratan, 1259, and by his own mature reflection, he adheres. The execution was not public, as Saleh Muhammed describes it, neither was it in the place he describes. It really does require a front of uncommon brass to assert that when Dr. Wolff contradicts Saleh Muhammed in time, place and circumstance, he confirms the Akhund Zadeh's testimony.

We shall offer no observation on the ridicule attempted to be thrown on Captain Grover, by a contrast of his method of seconding his friend in the Home department; we shall only say that no ministry, no home secretary, nor body of statesmen, could have used more energy in co-operation with any friend or ally than he did. The energetic character of the two friends at home and abroad, the perfect harmony and sympathy between the two departments, as the reviewer jeeringly calls them, amply proved that the Home did its best for the Foreign, and the Foreign nobly seconded the Home. Europe almost to a man sympathized with the two friends, nor did the barbarous Ameer, even, slight their mutual affection or deride it; that was left for a northern reviewer. Dr. Wolff and Captain Grover are not men to be despised as controversialists; their powers far exceed those of their shallow reviewer. Captain Grover certainly did point out to the government many glaring errors, such as the register