with excellence in copper and in wood, and of his pieces a very great number have reached the present time. Considered as the first efforts of a new art, they have great merit. In some of those prints which he executed on silver and on copper, the engraving is elegant to a great degree. The inmediate successors of Albert Durer were Lucas of Leyden, Aldegrave, and Sebald Behem, or Hisbens, who all engraved very much in the manner of Albert. In Italy, at the same time, Parmegiano had begun to etch some of his own beautiful designs, and is, by many, supposed to have been the inventor of the mode of engraving by means of aquafortis, which expresses the design of the artist with much greater freedom and spirit than the laboured stroke of the graver, though its lines have less softness and delicacy: a combination of the two is, therefore, most happily employed by the modern artist, and is productive of an excellent effect, especially in landscape. In Italy, likewise, Mark Antonio and Agostino, contemporaries of Parmegiano, were successfully employed in making engravings from the works of Raphael. These engravings were then much sought after, and are yet in request on account of their antiquity; but in point of merit, and as giving an idea of the beauties of the original, they have been infinitely surpassed by the works of posterior engravers.

There is no art whatever, which from its first discovery has undergone so rapid an improvement as that of engraving. When we compare the prints of Albert Durer, or of Lucas of Leyden, with those of Goltzius, engraved about seventy years after, the difference is perfectly astonishing. But when we come down about eighty years farther, and examine the prints of Poilly, Audran, and Edelinck, we are ready to acknowledge a proportional improvement. From that time to the present, in some respects the advancement has been equally sensible, though in others not so apparent. It must be readily confessed that the landscapes of Woollet are greatly superior to those of Bolowert,

Saddeler, and Bloemart; but it is a little doubtful whether the historical pieces of Strange, of Bartolozzi and Cunego, surpass those of Poilly, Edelinck, and Treij. This superiority has been achieved by Raphael Morghen.

The moderns, who have carried the use of the graver to a very great height, and have confessedly much improved in the art of etching, have now laid aside one mode of engraving practised by the ancient artists, and brought by them to a very great degree of perfection-engraving in wood with different teints, which was performed by different plates. The inventor of this art was Ugo da Carpi, an Italian; and it was brought to great perfection by Andrea Andreani, of Mantua. The spaces of white and the washes of which the middle teint is composed, give to these prints all the softness of drawing; and some experiments have been made in the same way with different colours, which give these performances in some degree the effect of painting.

As I shall not have another opportunity of particularly mentioning the arts dependant on design, it would be improper to quit the subject without taking notice of a mode of engraving different from all those I have mentioned, though its invention belongs to a period considerably later than that of which we now treat: I mean the mode of engraving in mezzotinto. It was invented by the celebrated Prince Rupert, son of the Elector Palatine, about the year 1650; and the hint was conceived from observing the effect of rust upon a soldier's fusil, in covering the surface of the iron with innumerable small holes at regular distances. Rupert, who was a great mechanical genius and viituoso, concluded that a contrivance might be found to cover a plate of copper with such a regular ground of holes closely pierced as to give a black impression, which, if scraped away in proper parts, would leave the rest of the paper white; that thus light and shade might be as finely blended, or as strongly distinguished,

as by the pencil in painting. He tried the experiment by means of an indented steel roller, and it succeeded to his wishes. A crenulated chisel is now used to make the rough ground in place of the roller. This art has been brought to very high perfection. Its characteristic is a softness equal to that of the pencil, and it is therefore particularly adapted to portraits; and nothing, except the power of colours, can express flesh more naturally, the flowing of hair, the folds of drapery, or the reflection from polished surfaces. Its defect is, that where there is one great mass of shade in the picture, it wants an outline to detach and distinguish the different parts, which are thus almost lost in one entire shade; but in the blending of light and shade, there is no other mode of engraving that approaches to it in excellence.

The age of Leo, though principally distinguished by the perfection of the arts of design, was likewise a period of very considerable literary splendour. Ariosto, Bembo, and Sadolet, divided the favour of Leo and the esteem of the public with Raphael and Michael Angelo. Guicciardini in the same period rivalled the best historians of antiquity, and Machiavel shone equally in history, politics, philosophy, and poetry. But the literary genius of this age will fall to be more particularly treated afterward in giving a connected view of the progress of literature and of the arts and sciences from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century.

CHAPTER XXIII.

SURVEY of the State of the principal Kingdoms of Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries:-Selim reduces Egypt-Solyman takes Rhodes, subdues Hungary, Moldavia, and Wallachi-Selim II. takes Cyprus--Battle of Lepanto-Persians under Shah-Abbas-Government and Re ligion-Tartars-India, early particulars of-AurungzebeBramins-Division of Castes.

THE Turks, we have seen, in the middle of the fifteenth century, subverted the empire of Constantinople, which, from that period, became the imperial seat of the Ottoman dominion. In treating of that great revolution, I took occasion to offer some considerations on the government and political constitution of the Turkish empire-that great fabric of despotism.

The Turks proceeded to extend their conquests. Mahomet II. subdued a great extent of territory. Se lim I. added new conquests. In the year 1515, he made himself master of Syria and Mesopotamia, and undertook the reduction of Egypt, which was then in the possession of the Mamelukes, a race of Circassians who had been masters of that country ever since the last crusade. The arms of Selim put an end to their dominion; but, what is a very extraordinary fact, he allowed the last of the Mameluke kings to govern Egypt in the quality of his bashaw; and these Mamelukes, though nominally under the dominion of the Grand Seignior, continued in reality the sovereigns of the country, acknowledging but a very slender subjection to the Ottoman power.

Solyman, the son of Selim, who is termed Solyman the Magnificent, was a formidable enemy to the Christians and to the Persians. He took the island of Rhodes in the year 1521. The Knights of St. John were at this time in possession of this island, from which they had expelled the Saracens in 1310. They made a noble defence, assisted by the English, Ital

fans, and Spaniards; but after a siege of many months were forced to capitulate. Solyman, a few years afterward, subdued the greatest part of Hungary, Moldavia, and Wallachia. He failed in his attempt upon Vienna; but turning his arms eastward against the Persians, he made himself master of Bagdad and subdued Georgia. He concluded a treaty of alliance with the French, which subsisted for two centuries. His son Selim II., in the year 1571, took the island of Cyprus from the Venetians; and this industrious people were carrying on a brisk trade with the Turks at the very time they were making this conquest. Genoa, Florence, and Marseilles were rivals with Venice in the trade of Turkey, for the silks and commodities of Asia. It is remarkable that the Christian nations have traded with the Ottoman empire to a very large extent, without its ever having been known that a furkish vessel came into their ports for the purposes of commerce, in return for the vast fleets which they annually send to those of Turkey. All the trading aations of Christendom have consuls who reside in the seaports on the Levant, and most of them have ambassadors at the Ottoman Porte, while none are sent from thence to reside with other nations.

The Venetians, sensibly feeling the loss of Cyprus, which, besides the advantages of its produce, was a inost convenient entrepot for their trade to the Levant —and finding their own force insufficient for its recovery from the Turks, applied to Pope Pius V. for the benefit of a crusade. The pope gave them more effectual aid, by waging war himself against the Ottoman empire, and by entering into a league for that purpose both with the Venetians and with Philip II. of Spain, the son and successor of Charles V.

Pius,

who was a good politician and a great economist, had amassed, in the course of his pontificate, such wealth as to render the holy see a very formidable power. The wealth of Philip II. was considered at that time as inexhaustible. A great armament was immediately