462 Essay on
��History of the Turks ; an author highly commended in the Rambler, N. 12,2, x . An incident in the Life of Mahomet the Great, first emperor of the Turks, is the hinge on which the fable is made to move. The substance of the story is shortly this. In 1453 Mahomet laid siege to Constantinople, and, having reduced the place, became enamoured of a fair Greek, whose name was IRENE. The sultan invited her to embrace the law of the Prophet, and to grace his throne. Enraged at this intended marriage, the Janizaries formed a conspiracy to dethrone the emperor. To avert the impending danger, Mahomet, in a full assembly of the grandees, ' Catching with one hand,' as KNOLLES relates it, ' the fair Greek by the hair of her head, and drawing his falchion with the other, he, at one blow, struck off her head, to the great terror of them all ; and, having so done, said unto them, Now, by this, judge whether your emperor is able to bridle his affections or not 2 .' The story is simple, and it remained for the author to amplify it with proper episodes, and give it complication and variety. The catastrophe is changed, and horror gives place to terror and pity. But, after all, the fable is cold and languid. There is not, throughout the piece, a single situation to excite curiosity, and raise a conflict of /passions. The diction is nervous, rich, and elegant ; but splendid / language, and melodious numbers, will make a fine poem, not / a tragedy. The sentiments are beautiful, always happily ex- \ pressed, but seldom appropriated to the character, and generally \too philosophic. What Johnson has said of the Tragedy of Cato may be applied to Irene : ' it is rather a poem in dialogue
in the twenty-fifth chapter where Sir the note-book of Locke ; and the Hans Sloane is mentioned as " the autographs of Samuel Johnson's founder of the magnificent museum Irene, and Ben Jonson's Masque of which is one of the glories of our Queens ; and the rough copy of the country" is preserved at that mu- translation of the Iliad, written, as seum in a cabinet, which may truly Pope loved to write, on the margin be called the place of honour. ... of frayed letters and the backs of There may be seen Nelson's hasty tattered envelopes .' Trevelyan's Mac- sketch of the line of battle at the au/ay, ed. 1877, ii. 396. Nile ; and the sheet of paper on * Life, i. 100.
which Wellington computed the 2 The General History of the
strength of the cavalry regiments Turkes, by Richard Knolles, ed.
that were to fight at Waterloo ; and 1603, p. 353.
than
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