Greek merely in name, and comprising such large sections of a non-Hellenic population as Servia, for instance, and Bulgaria, then, we confess, we feel staggered; and all the historic analogies which Sir Archibald Alison so skilfully presses into his service will not give wings to our drooping faith. The best-instructed man with whom we ever conversed on the subject—Dr George Finlay, who has lived among the Greeks all his life—declares that such a combination is impossible: the principle of cohesion is too weak, that of repulsion too strong: the splendid aggregate would fall to pieces in a few years; and out of the confused elements a new compulsory crystallisation take place under the influence—very likely—of Russian polarity. Sir Archibald Alison himself, in one of the phrases which he accidentally drops, seems to admit the truth of this view. “Diversity of race,” he says, “so far from being an element of weakness, is, _when duly coerced_, the most prolific source of strength.” Very true, when _duly coerced_; but it is this very principle of coercion that would not exist in the supposed Byzantine empire; and could exist only, according to one of Sir A. Alison’s own analogies, through the violent subjection of all the other races by the one that happened to be strongest; for so it was, as Livy shows in bloody detail, that the different races of Italy were coerced into a grand national unity by the Roman Latins. But even after all that bloody cementing, the aggregate of the Italian States, as no one knows better than Sir Archibald Alison, was kept together by the loosest possible cohesion; as the terrible outburst of the Marsic or Social war testifies, which well-nigh split Italy into two, at a time when Julius Cæsar, its future master, had not yet begun to trim his beard. He certainly, the lion, and his nephew Augustus, the fox after him, did use the bloody cement successfully, and exercised a strong coercion, the effect of which is visible even now among the again-divided possessors of the Italian soil; such a coercion as the present Czar of Russia might perhaps at the present moment be in the fair way of exercising for the sake of the Orthodox Church, had Sir Archibald Alison’s Byzantine empire been patched together with a few purple rags in the year 1828. Or again, to take another of his analogies, has Sir Archibald Alison forgotten what was the state of Greece, not anterior to, but immediately after the Persian invasion?—did it not plunge at once into all the pettiness of provincial rivalry? and was not the great Peloponnesian war a speaking proof, that there were no elements of cohesion even among pure Greeks, and in the best days of Greece, strong enough to keep that unfortunate country from consuming its own vitals in civil war, and becoming, by voluntary self-betrayal, first the scoff of the Persian, and then the prey of the Macedonian?—With these examples before us, we cannot but