prefect, the balance an administrator of justice. But a horse-tail to denote a ruler! Strange association! Unlikely symbol! Instead of symbolizing authority and rule, the tail is in other scripture put in direct contrast with the head, and made the representative rather of the degraded and the low.' Besides which it is not here the lordly lion's tail, but that of the horse. Who could ever, à priori, have conceived of such an application of it? And yet among the Turks, as we all know,-among the Euphratean horsemen that were to kill the third part of men, that very association had existence, and still exists to the present day. It seems that in the times of their early warlike career the principal standard was once lost, in the progress of battle; and the Turkman commander, in its default, cutting off his horse's tail, lifted it on a pole, made it the rallying ensign, and so won the victory. Hence the introduction and permanent adoption among the Turks throughout their empire of this singular ensign ;-among the Turks alone, if I mistake not, of all the nations that have ever risen up on this world's theatre: 3 and this as that which was thenceforward,--from the vizier to the governors of provinces and districts, to constitute their badge, mark their rank, and give them name and title. For it is the ensign of one, two, or three-horse tails that marks distinctively the dignity and power of the Turkish Pasha.-Marvellous

1 So Deut. xxviii. 44; Οὗτος εσται εις κεφαλην, συ δε εση εις εραν be the head, and thou shalt be the tail."

"He shall

2 So Tournefort in his Travels; also Ferrario. The following is Ferrario's account of the origin of the ensign. "An author acquainted with their customs says, that a General of theirs, not knowing how to rally his troops that had lost their standards, cut off a horse's tail, and fixed it to the end of a spear; (pomo d'una lancia;) and the soldiers, rallying at that signal, gained the victory." Costumi &c. i. 126.—He adds further that whereas " on his appointment a Pasha of three tails used to receive a drum (tamburo) and a standard, now for the drum there have been substituted three horses' tails, tied at the end of a spear, round a gilded haft. One of the first officers of the palace presents him these three

tails and a standard."

3 The Hetman of the Cossacs that migrated to Poland is said to have been presented by the Polish king with a horse-tail also, among other ensigns of authority. But these Cossacs were but a small tribe; and it seems likely that they borrowed this military ensign, as as they did many of their military terms, from the Turkmans.

4 In Blackwood's Magazine for August, 1842, the writer of the Chapter on Turkish history, thus appropriately makes use of the figure. "The recent over

"His

prefiguration! And who but He could have depicted it, to whom the future is clear as the present, and who in his Divine prescience speaks of things that are not as though they were. "And with these they do injustice;" adikeσ. αδικεσι. Alas! where is the historian of the Turkish conquests and empire that does not tell of the oppression of the christian rayah by these Turkman Pashas! As Knolles, in his Sketch of the Turkish Greatness, expresses it; Bassaes, like ravening harpies, as it were suck out the blood of his poor subjects." And where is the traveller through European Turkey (at least if his travels dated before the late Greek revolution) that has not with his own eyes witnessed the same? Even now the scene rises in memory before the author, of the long train of a Turkish Pasha, proceeding to his Pashalik in Greece, that past him by, winding in picturesque array up one of the passes of Mount Othrys, near where that mountain-chain frowns over Thermopyla: and bright, he remembers, shone the sunbeams on the varied colourings, the "red and blue and yellow," of the horses, horsemen, and foot-retainers, in the procession; and proudly the ensign was borne before the Turkman of two horsetails, to mark his dignity. But associated with the remembrance there rise up other recollections also: -the scene of a village which, on entering a few days before with his companions, he had found deserted, though with marks of recent habitation; and from which, as a straggler emerging from his hiding-place informed them, men, women and children had fled to the mountains, to escape from the visit, on some errand of oppression, of one of the officers of a neighbouring Pasha. Nor again can the scene be forgotten of other

throw of the Mameluc power by the Ottomans had extended the shadow of the horse-tails far along the coast of Africa." He is speaking of the times of Barbarossa.

And in this same North of Africa it still furnishes its figure to the fragment of the once mighty Turkish empire there remaining. On General Bugeaud's summoning the tribe of Mascara to submission, the answer began thus: The horse of submission has no tail." Semaphore de Marseilles, June 12, 1841.

permanently deserted villages, such as the traveller's path each day almost had to pass by; and often with nothing but the silent grave-yard in its loneliness, to tell the tale of former life and population. Thus was there set before his eyes how the inhabitants had failed before the oppressions of the Turkman Pashas: and, long ere he thought of entering on the direct investigation of prophecy, the singular aptitude and truth of this symbol, as applied to them, fixed itself on his mind: "The horse-tails were like unto serpents, having heads; and with these they do injury and oppress."

5. There remains for explanation but one point more in the prophecy; viz. the time within which the commission to destroy the third part of men was to be accomplished. This is a point of great interest and importance and, although freed by our explanation of the four angels spoken of, and of their binding near the Euphrates, previous to the sixth Trumpet-blast, from no little embarrassment,' it is yet one not altogether devoid of difficulty. Indeed some critical research will be in the first instance essential, in order satisfactorily to fix the meaning of the phrase in which the chronological

1 See my Note p. 462 suprà.-Nothing, I conceive, can well be clearer as to the chronology of the prophecy than these three things: 1. that the four angels must have been in existence both at the time of their binding, and at the time of their loosing:-2. that the time of their loosing must have been at the sounding of the sixth Trumpet: :-3. that the predicted period of the hour, day, month and year, must have been the interval between their loosing and their accomplishment of the stated subject of their loosing, viz. to slay the third part of men, Now alike Mede and Newton, Faber and Keith, explain the binding to mean the restriction of the Turkman power by the crusades; and the epoch of loosing, and of the sixth Trumpet-sounding, as an epoch somewhere between A.D. 1280 and 1301, when the curbing-power of the crusades had ceased, and the Othmannic Turkman come to the supremacy. But at this epoch neither Mede's quaternion of kingdoms, nor Faber's, were in existence.-Further, the period of the hour, day, month, and year, being made to end by Mede and Keith, where I think the Apocalypse makes it end, viz. at the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, and fall of the Greek empire, it is necessarily from its length made by them to begin about 1055; i. e. 250 years before their epoch of the sixth Trumpet's sounding. On the other hand Bishop Newton and Mr. Faber, rightly deeming that its true commencing epoch must be that of the Trumpet's sounding and the angels' loosing, do yet make it end, in consequence of their date of the sounding, 250 years after the slaying of the third part of men, the Greek empire.

I have thus reverted to and expanded my chronological argument at p. 462, from a sense of the importance of the point involved in it.