most trivial service, which, if not granted, they walked away muttering about beggarly foreigners, and saying, scornfully, they did not stand in need of money, shaking at the same time their scarfs well stocked with Spanish dollars. Their jackets were ornamented with double rows of silver, or even gold buttons, and they wore buckles of the same materials to their kneebands and shoes. The plague was to them a heavy visitation: those who survived had their little savings completely exhausted; and when, at last, the communications were re-established, they found the source of their former wealth drained. They were then humbled and crest-fallen; they wished they had been more prudent and reasonable in the time of their prosperity; but it was too late. Most of the foreign traders removed their establishments to the different harbours of France and Italy; the British naval and land forces were reduced; no more prizes were sold; no more goods were deposited to be introduced afterwards into the Continent; the ships went straight to Genoa, Leghorn, Naples, and Trieste; Malta became a port of secondary importance: one scanty compensation, however, was found, in the fall of the price of provisions, which, during the war, had risen to

an enormous rate.

The Maltese peasantry give indications of their Moorish or African origin; they are surly and jealous, but frugal, industrious, and religious. They cultivate with great pains their scanty soil, which produces some grain, good cotton, and abundance of excellent vegetables and fruit, especially oranges and lemons. They carry to town the produce of their orchards and kitchen-gardens; and you see them rush in, at the first opening of the gates, barefooted, with widestriped cotton trowsers, a check shirt, a jacket thrown across one shoulder, and a dusky-coloured sugar-loaf-shaped cap on, hanging on one side. They hate their old enemies the Turks; and when, after the English took possession of the island, Ottoman and Moorish vessels began to enter that harbour, in which, since the great siege of 1565, no crescent flag had entered, the Maltese could with difficulty be restrained from falling upon the crews as they anded. By degrees, however, they have become a little more reconciled to the sight of turbans; but many of them even now show marks of evident aversion in passing by an Islamite.

It was the Maltese peasantry, who, in 1798, effected the revolt against the French, which broke out first at Rabato, the suburb of Citta Vecchia, the old capital in the centre of the island. Some French commissaries had arrived there from Valletta to strip the churches of their silver ornaments. The ladders were fixed against the altar of the principal church, where a silver crown and some other valuable trappings of an image of the Virgin Mary attracted the attention of these foreign plunderers.

Already the irregularities of the French military had soured the minds of the Maltese peasantry, who, like all unsophisticated people, are jealous of the honour of their wives and daughters. They were brooding over their discontent in that sort of gloomy stiffed mood peculiar to Africans; when this new insult to the objects of their worship, and this barefaced spoliation of the property of their temples, decided the explosion of their anger. They seized any instrument of attack that they found in their way, stones, sticks, rusty swords, and firelocks; some ran to the house at Rabato, where a few French military were quartered, and wounded them, and then threw them out of the balconies, whence, on reaching the ground, they were despatched by the crowd below. They then ran to Citta Vecchia, which is surrounded by a wall and ditch: the weak French garrison shut themselves in, the two commissaries having had just time to mount their horses and ride furiously to Valletta for their lives, and to bring the news of the merited result of their imprudent and unprincipled attack upon both religion and property. The country people, however, soon got possession of Citta Vecchia, and the unfortunate French soldiers were destroyed, as well as all those who were caught scattered about the island. I heard related the fate of a poor drummer-boy, who remained concealed in a belfry for several days, and was at length ferreted out and murdered in cold blood. The different casali or villages followed the example of Rabato, and the whole island was in arms against the French. The latter retired within the fortifications of La Valletta and Cottoner, and the country people opened communications with the English blockading squadron. English troops landed on the island, and after a long blockade, the French, receiving no supplies, were obliged to capitulate. Thus Malta, taken by Buonaparte, from the weakness of the Grand Master, and the treachery of some of the Knights, was retaken from him by the spirit of the peasantry, and the enterprise of the English.

After that epoch the Maltese peasantry returned to their old occupations, remained peaceful, and thrived. No sign of discontent appeared among them, and if any dissatisfaction was at times expressed, it was principally by the citizens of Valletta, who are looked upon as half foreigners by the others, and who had imbibed some of the democratic spirit of their late guests.

The Maltese could have, at all events, but little reason to regret the dominion of the Knights of St. John. That society of military monks, all foreigners from various parts of Europe, swayed over the natives with absolute rule. Their will was law and as the order degenerated from its former discipline and religious zeal, as long peace and prosperity increased their luxury, which, at length, reached an almost incredible point,

their absolute power over the natives became more felt. From the reports of the Maltese themselves, there was but one road to favour and emolument, and that was through the protection of some of the great dignitaries of the order. These were often old men, sunk, perhaps, into mental imbecility, or enervated epicurism, and liable to the attacks of either flattery or female charms. The young Knights, the youngest sons of the Italian, French, and Spanish nobility, had not the same means of gratifying their love of pleasure, and saw with mixed envy and contempt the easy and luxurious life of their superiors. The old regulations of the order were neglected; their vow of making war against the infidels became a dead letter; and when the squadron of the order went out at periodical times upon a cruise, they seldom met with any of their old enemies the Mussulmans, who were informed in time by their emissaries of their motions, and who, satisfied with being let alone by the Knights, took care also to be out of the Knights' track. Now and then some Barbary corsair fell into their hands an easy prey, and the captive crew were exhibited in triumph to the eyes of the gazing Maltese, as another trophy won from the enemies of the cross. The squadron went on round the coasts of Italy and France, from Palermo to Naples, from Naples to Leghorn or Genoa, thence to Marseilles, and so on, giving entertainments on board in the different harbours they went to, and then returned to Malta to enjoy rest after their labours. Meantime the Mediterranean swarmed with Barbary pirates, the unhappy Italians and Spaniards were taken in sight of their native coasts, and carried to the slave-markets in Barbary; and yet Malta was still considered, from old habit, the bulwark of Christendom on that side. It is curious to those who are acquainted with Mediterranean affairs, to hear some people even now talk about the activity of the order of St. John in protecting christian merchantmen from the infidel pirates, and recommending their re-establishment on that score; while it is well known that it is since the fall of that order, and in consequence of the strenuous efforts of the christian monarchs, that the Mediterranean Sea, which was before infested with pirates, has become comparatively secure, and the flags of all the Italian powers which were schiavi, (i.e. liable to be captured,) for such was the humiliating expression in use, have now, with the exception I believe of the pope's, become free, and respected.

The truth is, that the utility of the order of St. John belongs to a much older period; it dates at the time when the Mussulmans threatened to overrun Europe, and then it was that the brave Knights of St. John were truly the defenders of Christendom. At Acre, at Rhodes, and lastly at Malta in 1565, their valour was the rock against which the power, first of the Sarra

sins, and then of the Ottoman sultans, Mahomet II., Soliman the Great, and Amurath, miscarried: but in latter times, when the Porte, instead of carrying on offensive wars, was obliged to adopt the defensive against the Austrians and Russians,-when the Ottomans no longer thought of extending their conquests but of preserving what they had,-when they no longer appeared on the coasts of Italy, and were at peace with the Italian and other western states; the original and important vocation of the Knights of St. John, that which had called forth such formidable energies, that vocation was over; and the order of Malta sat themselves quiet on their impregnable rock, enjoying the income of numerous commanderies throughout all Catholic Europe, the preservation and the administration of which were their principal business. It was this fondness for their continental property that was the ultimate cause of their ruin. They negotiated with the French in the hope of saving their property; until at last in June, 1798, the French fleet appeared; and, strange to say, the impregnable fortress of Malta surrendered without firing a shot. The fall of Malta can only be compared to that of Venice, which it followed, the same mixture of pusillanimity and treachery, weakness and oppression.

The moral strength of the order of Malta in its origin and for a long subsequent period, was founded upon an exalted religious enthusiasm, which by some would be called fanaticism, and which ill accords with the spirit of our sober, calculating age. If even the Christian powers were to attempt in our days to drive the Turks out of Europe, it would not be so much because the Turks are infidels, but because they are barbarians; and because their policy, both domestic and foreign, is at variance with our notions of justice and common humanity. In such a contest, the Knights of St. John, were they in their former state, could only come in as weak auxiliaries. They might, however, appear to more advantage in the actual struggle between the Greeks and the Turks; because religious enthusiasm, although not perhaps the first, is still one of the springs that actuates the former. The establishment of the Knights of St. John in one of the Greek islands, which has been talked of, might serve as a central point for the Greeks to rally round, and as a bulwark against the future inroads of the Asiatic Ottomans. But the poverty of the Order, the scarcity of its members, and the difference of religion between them as Roman Catholics and the schismatic Greeks, are sufficient to counteract the good that might be expected from them. The Order of Malta, like other religious institutions of the middle ages, which were called for by, and calculated for, the times, survived the circumstances for which it was instituted, and which cannot occur again. It has become useless, and has therefore

dwindled into nothing. It thrived under the massive armour and grim vizors of the companions of L'Isle Adam, and La Valette, and it died in the silk and ermined robes of Rohan and Hompesch. Young knights now entered the Order, not to be the champions of Christianity, but to secure a maintenance suited to their birth, and to enjoy themselves under the fine sky of Malta, and in the halls of their splendid Alberghi, and in soft dalliance with the Maltese, Sicilian, and Greek beauties, that resorted to this place of their residence.

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Their vow of chastity was, what all such vows must be, for very great majority of those who are so rash as to take them; they were poor, only until they rose to a vacant commendary, or to some of the dignities of the Order, and their vow of obedience was at last forgotten, like the other, by the neglect of the superiors to enforce that obedience. Apostate knights, full of the revolutionary ideas they had brought with them from France, delivered those bastions and cavaliers which had been cemented with the blood of so many Christian heroes, into the hands of those who looked upon the whole Christian religion as a mockery. Several of these traitors (for traitors they were to God and man) embarked in the fleet of the conqueror, visited the shores of Islam, saw their new friends and allies proclaim their belief in the abhorred doctrines of Mahomet, the arch enemy of that Cross they had swore to defend; and at last, many of these wretched beings, forsaken by man, as they had forsaken their God, perished miserably on the sands of Egypt, or on board the French fleet at the memorable battle of the Nile.

With reminiscences like these I have stood many a time on those very ramparts of Valletta and Borgo, and I could almost fancy the shades of the grim knights of old, hovering along their well known curtains and bastions, and wondering at the foreign appearance of their present defenders. Still their stern souls, angry at the degeneracy of their successors, who betrayed their sacred trust, would be soothed by seeing the cross wave triumphant over that spot consecrated by so much Christian blood.

Every thing here reminds one of the deeds of former times. There is the point of St. Michael, which the Algerines, in the fleet of the Porte in the memorable siege of 1565, attempted to scale from the sea-side, but in vain; they were dashed headlong against the rocks, or sunk in the waves below: at the other end of the city of Senglea is the church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, on the spot to which the Turks had penetrated, and where they were stopped by the Christian heroes, and finally driven back with great slaughter. Opposite Senglea, across the creek, is the town still called Vittoriosa, and the bastion of Castille, the very spot where the heroic Johan la Valette stood with his half pike in