it cost them a voyage of nearly six months! One or two reindeer are tied with thongs to the sledge, and they are off. At night, he tethers his faithful servants, and lets them find their scanty repast under the snow, while he creeps into his narrow tent, made of reindeer-skins, and lights his little lamp to keep him warm. If he has no tent, he wraps himself up in double reindeerskins, which by their peculiar mixture of wool and hair are proof against rain, snow and cold, and sleeps very comfortably on the hard-frozen snow, to continue his journey on the morrow. Thus numerous, powerful nations, on this continent as well as in Europe, exist only by means of this invaluable animal, without which neither northern Siberia nor the upper regions of America would be a fit abode for man. Like the camel of the south, the reindeer also requires a hunter's nomadic life. Even the Lapps and the Finns, who own immense domesticated herds, must travel with them, for pasturage. Together they move down from the beloved mountains, to fish at the sea-shore during the short summer months, and together they return to their home among the rocks. They ride them, and drive them; they milk them; they know them by sight, and call them by their names, and even their poor, insufficient language has not less than seventy-six different words for the beloved, indispensable reindeer! But what strange, terrible fate could ever lead men to still higher regions, where even the reindeer cannot exist, where the summer sun shines but upon eternal ice and snow, and where winter has an unbroken night of more than three months? Still, there are nomadic races living far beyond the northern coast of America-the only races on earth that have neither history, nor even tradition. Their religion consists in a few childish charms; their society knows not the form of law, nor alas! the spirit of love; their existence is barely above vegetation. Capt. Ross discovered in the northernmost parts of Baffin's Bay a tribe of two hundred souls, who had never heard of other men, cut off as they were, by the ocean and by impassable mountains, from all fellowbeings. Their narrow country was to them the whole earth, and all the rest they believed to be a desolate mass of ice. ASPIRATION. THOU sea, whose tireless waves Forever seek the shore Striving to clamber higher, Why wilt thou still aspire, THE ROMANCE OF CRIMEAN HISTORY.* OF the overflowing literature to which the Eastern war has given rise, to us, one of the most acceptable products is Mr. Milner's History of the Crimea. It is a very readable, and we think a trustworthy book. Mr. Milner is a man of research, evidently a careful student, and an agreeable writer. His style is easy and attractive. He takes the reader up lightly, and carries him along pleasantly. Perhaps he lacks nerve as a narrator; and one misses the glow and grace, which only a dramatic imagination can give to the groupings and the details of history. Nor ought we to lose the chance of vindicating our critical sagacity which is offered us by a suspicion that Mr. Milner is more deeply indebted, than the uninitiated would imagine, to a certain venerable quarto entitled L'Histoire de la Chersonèse Tauride, by M. Stanislaus Siestrzesewicz de Bohusz, a gentleman at whose name, indeed, our readers may sneeze, but whose merits as a chronicler we advise no one rashly to dispute. Leaving Mr. Milner and M. Bohusz, however, to settle their accounts as they may please, we propose to avail ourselves freely of the labors of both and of many other literary workmen besides, in order to sketch the outlines of the romantic history of that far-away peninsula, on which the eyes of the civilized world have been fixed with an interest so intense during the first campaigns of the great war of the Western Alliance. Three years ago the name of the Crimea was scarcely more familiar to our ears than that of Cambodia. Children learned its boundaries at school; antiquarians squabbled over its sites; but, for the most part of men in this western world, the Chersonesus was a very dim and shadowy fact, floating on the far horizon of fancy-just a trifle nearer to us than Cathay; just a trifle further from us than Cashmere. And yet the Crimea has an authentic history-most stirring and most strange. Within that small peninsula, great tragedies have been enacted. It has witnessed the rise and fall of mighty monarchs; the glory and the shame of great races of men. War and woman-these are the staple of romance; Ulysses "On the ringing plains of windy Troy, Drinking delight of battle with his peers ;" or: "In the boyhood of the year Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere Riding through coverts of the deer, With blissful treble ringing clear," these are the types of those eternal passions which make history romantic. A woman's smile or a warrior's sword shines on every page of the Crimean history; and we fear not to affirm that. if all possible histories could be fairly written, few would charm with more irresistible magic than this. How pathetic is the picture with which it first rises upon our sight. Three thousand years ago, the barks of the confederate princes of Greece lay in the port of Aulis, waiting for the wind to waft them to the shores of the divine Troy. They waited, but no breeze shook their sails. The wrath of the gods was visibly kindled against them; and, from one to another, the princes looked, seeking the offender. That offender was their royal chief. Agamemnon, king of men, had slain the favorite stag of Diana; and the goddess, said the solemn priest, would never loosen her hold upon the fleets of Greece, till the wrong she had suffered should have been appeased, by the sacrifice of the sinner's beauteous child-the young Iphigenia. The sacrificial knife hung suspended in the hand of Chalchas above the maiden's devoted head; when Diana appeased at once, and moved with pity, snatched the victim from the altar, and bore her away to be a votary and a priestess in the temple of Cape Parthenium among the Tauri of the Tauric Chersonese. Hard by the monastery of St. George at Balaklava the remains of that old temple are standing now. The sentiment and pathos of Euripides gave immortality to the legend; and we doubt not that many an English *The Crimea, its Ancient and Modern History. By the Rev. THOMAS MILNER. London, 1855. man, not all unmindful of Eton and of Oxford, has delighted himself in the lapses of the weary siege of Sebastopol with tracing in the nooks and crannies of the iron-bound coast, and the landlocked inlets of the sea, that still retreat wherein Orestes, the brother of the priestess, accompanied by his faithful Pylades, sought concealment after their shipwreck, and were discovered by the fishermen, whose trade it was to fish the murex up" for his fine purple dye. 66 Homer says nothing of Iphigenia and her touching story; but the shores of the Crimea are not without an echo of his song. Ulysses, always roaming with a hungry heart, is supposed to have touched at the Tauric Chersonese. Did he sail westward or eastward from the fields of Troy? Dubois de Montperreux carries him into the Euxine; and surely the Times Correspondent, himself, could give no better picture than this of the harbor of Balaklava. "Within a long recess a bay there lies, Edged round with cliffs, high pointing to the skies: The jutting shores that swell on either side, For, here retired, the sinking billows sleep, Odyssey, Book X. Thus it is that the peninsula, which, under various guises-as Taurida, the Tauric Chersonesus, Crim Tartary, and now as the Crimea-has so often flashed out on the world's history, begins to glimmer faintly, in mist and fable, there, on the shores of the Inhospitable Sea, three thousand years ago. What was the rude race which first peopled it a race so rude, that all strangers cast upon their shores became a sacrifice to their inhospitable gods? Succeeding revolutions have of course all but obliterated the traces of the first Keltic inhabitants. Their remains are but slight-slight, yet significant-remains which, apparently meaningless, are yet eloquent and persuasive to the archeologist and the ethnographer. Keltic, then, the first people was. When this people reached the Crimea, it would, of course, be difficult to determine. Any research in that direction would require VOL. VII.-10 to be pursued in the geologic, rather than the historic method-by that paleontologic mode of investigation employed by the geologist or the archeologist. In all probability they roamed the steppes, and dwelt among the hills of the Crimea for centuries before they became known to Greek adventure. There is even a myth which would point to the discovery of the peninsula by the Argonauts, which antedates, by a hundred years, the annals of "Thebes or Pelop's line, Or the tale of Troy divine." Herodotus, too, speaks of an invasion of the Scythians into the country of the primitive Tauri or mountaineers, fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. With these the aborigines would seem to have united: and it was these Tauro-Scythes that became known to the Greeks as Cimmerians—an old vocable (CRM) which we find resounding through a variety of names, as Cimmeria, Crimea, Crim (Tartary), Crimbres, Cymry. Tradition makes these a "savage race, using stones and clubs as weapons, fierce to strangers," and even massacring those who arrived on their shores. The hostility of the inhabitants, joined to the difficulties and dangers of the navigation of the Black Sea, it doubtless was which caused the Greeks to give it the appellation of the Inhospitable-aževos. This reputation it retained long enough. Ovid, the Roman poet, and Tertullian, the Christian bishop, have both poured out their execrations upon it. And so through centuries of darkness, of Cimmerian darkness, 'mid which glimmers only the faint light of fable, these Kelts, these Scythians lived. On the extreme verge of ancient civilization dwelt they, "beyond the ocean stream, wholly wrapt in mists and darkness, where Helios never looks down with his illuminating sunbeams." Off to the east lay those wild, mystic Caucasian crags whereon agonized the divine Prometheus, who brought down the celestial fire to mortals; those crags the wandering Io crossed in her journeyings. Hidden in that little peninsula, all unknowing and unknown, the Kelts remained, till, in the seventh century, they flashed out on the history of the world, in a quite unexpected manner. In the seventh century, B. C., the Greeks commenced an extensive colonial system along the shores of the Black Sea. Its coasts were explored-Greek civilization and Greek commerce were planted thereon, and the Pontic itself came to be regarded no longer as the Inhospitable, but as the Hospitable Evevos-Euxine Sea. Two Greek settlements were made about this time in the Crimea. One from Miletus to the Eastern peninsula of Kertch, the other from Heraclea to the southwestern part of the Crimeathe Heracleatic Chersonesus, as it was afterwards called. The Milesians founded the city of Panticapæum, the present Kertch, and Theodosia, to which the Tartars afterwards gave the appellation of Kaffa. The settlers from Heraclea built the city of Cherson-not the Cherson near the Dneiper-but another city of the same name, close by the harbor of Sebastopol-Sebastopol, in fact, being built on the ruins of one of its suburbs. This little republic flourished some two thousand years. Its history is full of romance: we shall meet with it again. The extensive settlements made by the Milesians in the eastern part of the Crimea, were, in course of time, consolidated into one power, under the name of the Kingdom of Bosporos, whereof Panticapæum became the capital. It begins to be of importance, say five centuries before Christ, and flourished, altogether, for about eight hundred years. This kingdom would seem to have been, on the whole, not without a certain splendor. For three hundred years Panticapæum and Theodosia carried on a grand and massive system of commerce with the mother-country. Their galleys sailed, freighted with corn, wool, furs, salted provisions, and sturgeons, for Greek gourmands. Their little peninsula became the granary of Greece. The fertility of its soil enabled it to send an annual export of 400,000 medimni of corn to Athens; and even yet it has not altogether lost its ancient character. Oliphant mentions the curious fact that the buck-wheat of Kertch carried off the prize at the World's Fair, in London, 1851. "It was to Athens, in the age of Demosthenes," says Mr. Milner, "what Egypt became to Rome, in the days of the Empire-the country on which her citizens depended for the staff of life, a mart for her traders, and a nursery for her ma rines." Leucon, the fifth sovereign, lives in history as a wise and powerful prince. He gained the eternal gratitude of Attica, by feeding it during a great famine. But the most romantic figure in the history of the Bosporanic Kingdom is that of Mithridates, the mighty sovereign of Pontus, that prince whom Cicero held to be the greatest monarch that ever filled a throne. The Crimea fell into his hands when the Greek colonists found themselves impotent against the harassing attacks of the interior tribes. Crimean cohorts were ranged beneath his banners, while for thirty years he bade defiance to the eagles of Rome. Defeated at length in that famous battle fought by moonlight on the banks of the sacred Euphrates, the Pontic sovereign fled, before the victorious Pompey, into the heart of the Crimea. There in that very Panticapæum, now called Kertch, he lived out the few last and miserable years of his magnificent career. "Though old and afflicted with an incurable ulcer, he bated not 'one jot of heart or hope;' but conceived the daring project of marching westward round the shores of the Euxine, gathering the wild tribes of the Sarmatians and the Getai to his standard, and throwing these masses upon the frontiers of the Roman state!" Well might the republic decree twelve days of thanksgiving for the overthrow of so indomitable a foeman. But the valor, and the wisdom, and the will of Mithridates, his skill in policy, and in arms, his cunning in medicine, all availed him not against an enemy mightier than Pompey. Treason and ingratitude smote him down, and he lies buried in Crimean soil. They point you now to his tomb. His ungrateful son Pharnaces did not long enjoy the throne he had basely purchased. He quarreled with his Roman masters; and on the field of Zela, Cæsar "came, saw, and conquered” him. The Crimea passed under the sway of Rome, and it was one of the first provinces detached from the colossal empire in the great northern convulsion. The Goths overwhelmed it, and the Bosporanic province disappeared from history, about the fourth century. The modern town of Kertch still preserves many traces of the Bosporanic days. Vestiges of towers and mighty walls, 1856.] 66 The Romance of Crimean History. thousands of barriers or tumuli attest adorn the museum at Kerteh, till the It is a striking illustration of the profound ignorance in respect to the Crimea, which prevailed before the eastern war broke out, that it should have been left for an American traveler, Mr. George Sumner, of Boston, to inform the British government of the existence of this collection at Kertch, and to suggest to them the propriety of looking after its safety. And Bosporus fell; Cherson, meanwhile, however, continued to flourish. flourish she did till the thirteenth century of our era-escaping, for ages, the weakness and decay into which the Hellenic race was plunged-preserving for a thousand years, while Greece was sunk in abject slavery and degradation, her glory and her freedom-with "A Homer's language murmuring in her streets, And in her haven many a mast from Tyre." Cherson, with her own free institutions, governed by her own elective Archon, cherishing the customs and imitating the policy of Greece, long maintained her commercial prosperity and her political liberties. It was not until about the middle of the ninth century that the Emperor Theophilus destroyed, in a measure, the independence of Cherson, by bringing it under the dominion of the Eastern Empire. Thus brought into contact with the corrupt spirit of the Byzantine power, the integrity of the little republic soon vanished; and it was thus prepared to fall an easy prey to the Tartar hordes which, four centuries later, swept across Europe. Meanwhile, however, let us glance at its history. Ďuring these early centuries we the old age of Constantine the Great, mann, The history of Cherson, during these imperial ages, is preserved to us only in a general way; but we catch glimpses of romance throughout. Here, for instance, is a story related by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the imperial author of the De Ceremoniis. Like a snatch of an old Homeric epic, it is borne across these fifteen centuries. About the middle of the fourth century, Lamachos was president of Cherson, and Osandros, King of Bosporos. The Chersonites and Bosporians had, for a number of years,, been at war with each other, and it was now proposed, in order to unite the two States in amity, to marry the son of Osandros to the only To this the daughter of Lamachos. Chersonites consented, on condition that the young Asander should never return to Bosporos, under pain of death. The marriage was celebrated, and Asander dwelt with the young Gycia in the palace of Lamachos, which was a building of regal splendor, covering four of the quadrangles marked out by the intersection of the streets in the quarter of Cherson called Souza, and having its own private gate in the city walls. Two years afterwards, Lamachos died, and Gycia became heir to his princely fortune. At the end of a year, Gycia went out to decorate her father's tombhaving obtained permission from the Senate to entertain the whole body of the citizens of Cherson at a funeral banquet on the anniversary of her father's |