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the Government School of Design by the King of the French. The Royal Academy has long been in possession of a series of casts from it, but, being in separate glass cases, the effect as a whole is entirely lost. Our beautiful group of females is taken from one of the compartments of the right door, representing the "Passage of the River Jordan."

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CIRCASSIA, unless we take some parts of Daghistan, is a cold and barren country compared to the sunny and fruitful Georgia; but still it abundantly supplies the wants of its inhabitants with all the produce of a temperate climate. It is true its surface is principally harsh and rugged, and offers every element of terrible sublimity-the wildest and most awful glens and precipices, in which the avalanche crashes and thunders,

or which resound to the dash of the fiercest torrents. Rank and pestilential marshes also render poisonous the air of the undrained hollows, to which the sun thaws down the snow of the impending hills, and into whose gloomy chasms its rays can never penetrate to dry up the sodden vegetation which absorbs the descending waters. But these same mountains offer also scenes of calm and pastoral beauty, rich meadows, beautifully wooded hills, and mountains cultivated almost to the summit, village rising above village, surrounded by its luxuriant patches of maize, of buckwheat, and of millet. Such are all the northeastern shores of the Black Sea; the hills swarming with life and animation, even close to the Russian forts upon the shore, and scarcely without the reach of the cannon of the Russian fleet.

These mountains are inhabited by several nations, divided into an infinity of tribes, who evidently do not own a common origin, but who have, apparently, at some time mingled with, and caught some of the features of, the beautiful Cherkessian race, which still remains unalloyed and pure. Notwithstanding this general family likeness, as well as certain points of resemblance in costume, in habits, in the general love of freedom, and in their warlike temper, there exists amongst them a marked distinction of character, of language, and of physical conformation. Irreconcileable enmities array one nation against the other, and bitter feuds divide the tribes of each people within itself.

This is a fact to which the Russians allude with triumph; but it is in the face of these discouraging circumstances that the Caucasian fortress has been maintained for a long series of years against all their efforts; and so great appears to be the growing hate against the Muscovite, that of late the most inimical of the mountaineers have been seen to forget their traditionary quarrels to unite against the common foe; and, if this feeling should become general amongst the hitherto disunited populations, it may readily be imagined what an immense accession of strength it will give to them collectively.

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The principal nations of Circassia are the Cherkesses, the Abasians, the Ossetinians, the Karbardians, the Tchetchenchis, and the Lesguis; and of these the Cherkesses and the Abasians, the most ancient races inhabiting the north-eastern part of the Caucasian range, are so fierce in their hostility to the Muscovites, so ardent in their execration of them. that they may be considered as utterly irreconcileable and indomitable, except by literal extermination, whilst they may, at the lowest computation, be reckoned to outnumber, by half, all the rest of the united nations of Circassia.

From the difficulty of visiting the Circassians at home-from the impossibility of learning half a dozen different tongues, all radically different, which are spoken amongst them-and from the jealousy and misrepresentation of Russia, no people offering one tithe of the same interest are at the present moment so little known. The calumny of the Russian Government, and of its hireling traveller, has long depicted them to Europe as savage, faithless, and untameable freebooters. Her officers engaged against them in a war to the knife, exaggerating facts, represent them as atrociously cruel, or attribute to their national character a ferocity which, even where it has really been displayed, arises from the very nature of the struggle.

But, amidst the general anathema which is pronounced against them, every detailed and authentic fact, every circumstantial account given even of those

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