river, for a brother of the King of Unyoro occupied its banks, and was at war with him; they took a direct line across country, to Gondakoro, which led them along the chord of that bend of the Nile, to which we have already alluded. When they again struck the river, they found themselves in a Turkish camp, at 3° 10' N. lat. It was an ivory station, made by men in the employment of Debono, and established a short distance south of the farthest point reached by Miani. They were rapturously received, and Speke's men abandoned care and got drunk for a week. The Turks were preparing to start for Gondakoro, with the ivory they had bartered, and Speke waited till they were ready, for he was absolutely unable to get on without assistance. The Bari people among whom they were residing, are so disunited, that no village possesses a body of porters sufficient in number to travel securely by themselves; nor could they be spared to go, for, if they attempted to do so, the comparative weakness of the villagers who staid at home would invite the attack of their neighbours. The Turks moved in a great caravan; they wanted some 2,000 porters, so they exacted a certain quota from every village, by which means they got their men, and the balance of power among the natives was not disturbed. In this despotic, effective way, Speke was enabled to reach Gondakoro. He was, however, thoroughly shocked by the recklessness with which stolen cattle and plundered ivory were bought, and with the exactions and terrorism that are made to administer to the demands of the Turkish ivory trade. The Arab traders of Uniamesi were perfect gentlemen compared to these Turks, whose conduct was inhuman to the last degree. He thoroughly confirms what has been so often repeated of late by various travellers to Gondakoro.

The discovery of this great river springing from two lakes, does certainly confirm the belief that the ancient knowledge of the Nile was more advanced than that of recent times; but the want of circumstantial precision with which the ancient accounts are conveyed, left an impression adverse to their truth. They stride in one great leap from Khartûm to the sources, without any description of the intervening land, unless we except Strabo's, which is as follows, if we understand it aright. After clearly describing all the Nile, down to the Atbâra and Blue River, he says, 'But the Astapus is said to be another river 'which issues out of some lakes in the South, and this river 'forms nearly the whole of the Nile; it flows in a straight line, and is filled by the summer rains.' When we speak of geographical discovery, we rarely, if ever, mean the first sight of what no human eye had previously seen, but the visit of men.

who could observe geographically, and describe what they saw, so as to leave no obscurity as to their meaning. These conditions had never previously been satisfied as regards the Nile; for geographers, working with the fairest intentions upon the same data, came to diverse conclusions, and no map made by any one of them bore other than a rude and childish resemblance to what is now ascertained to be the truth.

The first person Speke saw when he reached Gondakoro was his old friend Baker, who had just arrived there, bound on a selfplanned journey of exploration and of relief to Speke. The interview, to use Speke's own words, intoxicated them both with joy. Baker gave him his return boats, stored with corn, and supplied him with every delicacy he could think of, and thus the journey ended. Mr. Consul Petherick, who had been furnished with 1,000l., the proceeds of a private subscription to bear relief to Speke, and who had undertaken to arrive at Gondakoro a year previously, had wholly failed in his mission. Strangely enough, he too arrived at Gondakoro, previous to Speke's departure from that place, but not in a condition to render that succour which Baker had so happily and gratuitously afforded.

Gondakoro does not seem to be quite such a desert as Petherick had represented, where Speke must necessarily have starved had no expedition been directed to meet him. On the contrary, a polished Circassian Turk, Koorschid Pasha, had been governor of the place for fourteen months: he instantly gave the travellers a dinner of a fat turkey, concluded with claret and cigars.

Thus closes the tale of a journey that involved a walk of 1,300 miles through the equatorial regions of Africa, and has solved almost the only remaining geographical problem of importance. It has been the Matterhorn of the Geographical Society, the grandest feat and the longest delayed. If Speke himself, or Baker, would cross from the Luta Nzigé to the Atlantic, and if some Gregory or Stuart would traverse Western Australia, the great secret chambers of the habitable earth would all be unlocked.

ART. VIII.-1. Les Écossais en France, les Français en Écosse, Par FRANCISQUE-MICHEL. 2 vols. 8vo. Londres: 1862. 2. Papiers d'État relatifs à l'Histoire de l'Écosse au 16me Siècle; tirés des Bibliothèques et des Archives de France, et publiés pour le Bannatyne Club d'Edimbourg. 3 vols. 4to. Paris. 3. Papers relative to the Royal Guard of Scottish Archers in France. (From Original Documents.) Printed at Edinburgh for the Maitland Club. 1 vol. 4to. 1835.

IN

N the midst of international questions of every shape and shade, and when the value of every conceivable form of international relation is daily submitted to the test of fresh experience, it is interesting to turn to the history of an alliance, the direct effects of which have ceased for three centuries to be appreciable to politicians, but which is still so important in the eyes of men of learning and ability as to entitle it to a literature of its own. The alliance of France and Scotland was, indeed, a memorable friendship, standing out from all merely political arrangements not only by intimacy and warmth whilst it endured, but by the lasting effects which it left behind it. These M. Francisque-Michel has traced,—in the public history, and still more in the private and domestic annals of France. In Scotland they meet us at every turn,— in the institutions, habits, and speech of the people, from the organisation of the Court of Session, the terminology of the law, and the constitution of the Presbyterian Church, to the baking of 'kickshaws' (quelque choses) and 'petticoat'tails' (petits-gâteaux), and the opening of an oyster.* The high-roofed gable and the pepper-box turret of the French chateau gave to Scotland a style of architecture which became domestic amongst us in the sixteenth century, and which has been revived in our own days with great propriety and taste. We claim for the popular cookery of Scotland, distinguished by an enlightened use of vegetables and of broths, a marked superiority over the barbarous culinary preparations of South Britain; but it must be confessed that we owe that superiority to the lessons of our French allies. And, as we write, we are informed that in more than one Scottish village lingers the tradition of a French tambour-stitch, which was probably imported when the newest fashions came from the Court of Blois or Fontainebleau.

* In Scotland, as in France, oysters are opened with the hollow side undermost, so as to retain the juice-a process which is too often reversed in England.

M. Michel says that a sense of the disproportion between the small space accorded to the Scottish alliance in the ordinary histories of France, and the magnitude of the part which it really played in the history of his country, was one of his motives for undertaking the work to which he has devoted so considerable a portion of his life. However the matter may have stood when M. Michel commenced his labours, five and twenty years ago, our countrymen will be extremely unreasonable if they are not more than satisfied with the amende honorable which has now been made to them. Of the class of writers - archæologists and compilers, rather than historians-by whom the task of reviving this curious and interesting page in the history of the two countries has been accomplished, M. Michel has been the most industrious, and he is consequently the most exhaustive. In the good work of restoring, as it were, to each other, two old schoolfellows and comrades in arms, whom the changes and chances of life had drifted asunder, he holds, and probably will continue to hold, the first place. He is so far from a faultless writer, that, taking into account that he is a Frenchman, and remembering the precision with which Frenchmen distribute their matter, and the clearness, sharpness, and brevity with which they write, it is almost incredible that he should have produced so disorderly and dull a book. But the merits of M. Michel's performance altogether outweigh its defects; and, of the former, one of the greatest consists in the extent to which it has rectified and widened our conception of the subject of which it treats.

Hitherto this alliance between the most polished court of continental Europe and our ruder forefathers has been viewed chiefly in relation to two or three well-known historical events; for to say the truth the league of Scotland and France grew up under the shadow of England, and was strengthened by common hatred or common fear. In the popular conception of it, in France more especially, these passions centre in the single person of Mary Stuart. Everybody knows the ties which bound the beautiful and unhappy Queen to France,-that her mother was a Frenchwoman-that France was the land in which her own happy girlhood was spent-that for a brief period she sat upon the French throne (France and Scotland being then united by what would now be called a personal union)-that when she ultimately returned to her paternal kingdom she was accompanied by French attendants, and continued to be surrounded by them during her whole life, and that up to the last she herself always both spoke and wrote by preference what was indeed

her mother's tongue. So constantly are these facts present to the minds of Frenchmen, that they regard her less in the light of a beautiful exotic that flourished for a time in the rich soil of France, than as the fair and fragile emblem of their country transplanted, by an adverse destiny, to arid and sunless Scotland. But the rough unkindness of Scotland is forgotten, and the lily is seen only as crushed and broken at last by the jealousy and bigotry of England. M. Mignet has with entire justice and incomparable skill combated the prepossessions of his countrymen; but no Frenchman can forget that on the scaffold at Fotheringay Mary Stuart reminded her executioners that it was on the Queen Dowager of France that they were about to lay their sacrilegious hands.

What has been said of the powerful and indelible character of the influences of ballad poetry, might be said with equal truth of the sympathies and antipathies which arise from occurrences that appeal very strongly to the national imagination. Scottish auxiliaries fought by the side of Joan of Arc, under the banner which, according to M. Michel, a Scotchman had painted; and Scotchmen stood around as sympathising spectators of her last sufferings at Rouen. In like manner Scotland shared the insults offered to France in the person of Mary Stuart. It is quite surprising to how great an extent these facts, and the many pathetic incidents with which they are connected, dwelt upon as they are in early youth, still colour the feelings with which Frenchmen in general regard the two divisions of this island.

But the marriage of Mary Stuart, and the occurrences which arose out of it, down to the latest generation of her male heirs, are not the only links which, even in the popular imagination, bind Scotland to France. Many other royal marriages which preceded it are for the most part forgotten- even that of the fair and tender Madeleine de Valois. But the institution of the Scottish Guard, for example, is popularly remembered; and Quentin Durward has as many readers in France as in Scotland. Then, by a more limited class of persons, the Scottish colleges, and the numbers of Scotchmen who held learned appointments in the Universities of France, are called to mind; and the intellectual relation between the two countries which extended down to a very recent period, if it does not still exist, is supposed to be the source at once of their national sympathies and of their political ties.

*Whilst M. Victor Cousin lives, - the pupil of Royer-Collard, the friend of Hamilton, and the eloquent expositor of the Scottish school of philosophy, we may surely hold the chain to be unbroken.