Serbia under George Brankovich, who succeeded as 'Despot' in 1427, was thus practically a Danubian principality. The new Despot, a man of sixty years, was an experienced diplomatist; but there are times in the Balkans when force is more valuable than the subtlest diplomacy. A warlike Sultan, in the person of Murad II, sat on the Turkish throne; and he soon showed his intentions by demanding the whole of Serbia, and invading that country. Brankovich had to move his capital from Krushevatz to the bank of the Danube, where at Semendria he built the fine castle with the red brick cross in its walls which is still a memorial of Serbia's past, while, in order to secure himself an eventual refuge in Hungary, he handed over Belgrade to the Hungarian monarch, notwithstanding the protests and tears of its citizens. Brankovich in vain tried to purchase peace by giving his daughter with a regal outfit to the Sultan. Ere long, however, the Sultan, incited by a fanatic who accused him of sinning against Allah by allowing the Serbian unbeliever to bar the way to Hungary and Italy, demanded the surrender of Semendria. Brankovich fled to Hungary, thence to his last maritime possessions of Antivari and Budua, and thence to Ragusa; but the victories of John Hunyady, 'the White Knight of Wallachia,' induced Murad in 1444 to restore Serbia to the Despot, on payment of half its annual revenue.

Brankovich by his enlightened egoism' managed to maintain a precarious autonomy till after the capture of Constantinople (1453). Then Mohammed II resolved to end what remained of Serbian independence, and to capture the famous silver mines of Novo Brdo, which, as his biographer, Kritóboulos, remarked, had not only largely contributed to the splendour of the Serbian Empire, but had also aroused the covetousness of its enemies. Indeed, the picture which the Imbrian writer draws of Serbia on the eve of the Turkish conquest is almost idyllic, with her 'cities many and fair,' her 'strong forts on the Danube,' her 'productive soil, swine, and cattle, and abundant breed of goodly steeds.' But the flower of the Serbian youth had been drafted into the corps of janissaries to fight against their fellow-Christians; the prince was a man of ninety and a fugitive; while Mohammed, like the Germans of to-day, had

marvellous artillery. Still Belgrade, then a Hungarian fortress, resisted, thanks to the skill of Hunyady and the fiery eloquence of the Franciscan Capistrano. But the nonagenarian Despot was wounded in a quarrel with the Hungarian Governor, and on Christmas-eve, 1456, died. Of his sons, the two elder had been blinded by the late Sultan, so that his third son, Lazar III, succeeded him. His speedy death resulted, at this eleventh hour of Serbian history, in the union of Serbia and Bosnia by the marriage of one of his daughters with the Bosnian Crown Prince, Stephen Tomashevich-an arrangement which even Dushan, in all his glory, had never achieved. The Bosnian Despot of Serbia took up his abode at Semendria; but the inhabitants, regarding their new master with disfavour as a Catholic and a Hungarian nominee, opened their gates to the Turks. Before the summer of 1459 was over, all Serbia had become a Turkish pashalik, except Belgrade, which remained a Hungarian fortress till 1521. Four years after the fall of Serbia her last Despot, then King of Bosnia, was beheaded at Jajtze, and his kingdom annexed by the Turks.

Thus the history of medieval Serbia was closed. But members of the Brankovich family continued to bear the title of Despot in their Hungarian exile, whither many of their adherents had followed them, till the extinction of their house two centuries ago. The Serbian Patriarchate, abolished in 1459, but revived by the Turks in 1557, existed till 1767; but from the time of Mohammed II to that of Black George in 1804, when Danubian Serbia rose from her long enslavement, the noblest representatives of the Serbs maintained their freedom in the Republics of Ragusa, the South Slavonic Athens,' and Poljitza, the South Slavonic San Marino,' and among the barren rocks of what till a few months ago was free Montenegro.

WILLIAM MILLER.

Art. 11.-DISRAELI; THE MIDDLE PHASE.

The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, 1846-1868. Vol. III, by W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle; Vol. IV, by G. E. Buckle. Murray, 1914, 1916.

THE War, whose influence permeates everywhere, leaves, or seems to leave, nothing unchanged. Even towards the biographer groping in his study among the relics of dead men it feels its way, modifying his landmarks and causing his judgments to tremble. He may ignore it, but it will not for that spare him. A change of values has run through the society he inhabits; and even the shades of men will be tried by unfamiliar measures. The cataclysm caught Lord Beaconsfield's biographers half-way upon their road. Mr Monypenny had laid his plans in the gay sunshine of a smiling world, to which visionaries foretold eternal peace, and where politics had grown to seem a game and the wrath of politicians as the wrath of lovers; but he himself was cut off before his race was run, and the friend who has taken his place has had to bear the double burden of a task unfinished and ill-conceived and a public temper changed out of all recognition. For the laughing and luxurious crowds have scattered to the winds. Cynicism has become bad taste, and worse. The eternal moralities are once more in the ascendant. Politics are reckoned a grave concern; solemn plausibilities are on every tongue; Vengeance cries aloud in the streets. It is the hour of Gladstone, not of Disraeli.

If the protagonist be wanting the programme at least is to the fore. Gladstonian principles are borne on all the winds that blow. It is, we are assured on every hand, the battle of democracy that we fight; and the suffrage, when peace is signed, or even before, is likely to be distributed on the most lavish lines, to all and sundry, without check or hindrance. Christian ethics, or at least some more or less accurate conception of them, have been asserted with truly Gladstonian confidence; and the cause of civilisation is presented as the cause of the saints. The rights of small nations are a common article of faith. Home Rule has followed in their wake. The Turk, whose empire we had preserved,

and whose iniquities we had condoned, is now finally abjured. And Disraeli's ghost has been sent before its time to walk behind the footlights, where, indeed, Disraeli's self had always in some sense moved.

This, then, or something like it, is the change which the War has wrought in the subject of Mr Buckle's studies. Disraeli, one might perhaps say, was a creed and is a character. The world will not indeed altogether forget him, but the new generation that is growing up under the shadow of the widest of all wars will think of him rather as we had been accustomed to think of 'the Jesuit of Berkeley Square,' or of Bolingbroke or Halifax.; not having much use for him, perhaps, except in an idle hour as an enigma to be solved. Every year a biography is delayed, its potentialities, except in the case of the greatest men or the greatest biographers, are reduced by so many pages; and the Life which in 1890 might have safely extended to five volumes will in 1920 seem over long in three. And a five-volume Life, which makes its appearance volume by volume, suffers, besides, every immediate disadvantage. The intelligent reader is repelled by the barbarous arrangements of the serial story. The fire is kindled and then perishes again; by the close of the strange drama, we have half forgotten the commencement. If Mr Buckle is unsympathetic, the ghost of Disraeli, one may at least be confident, would, if appealed to, not withhold its compassion--would, in fact, quickly appropriate a familiar witticism and sardonically apologise for taking so unconscionable a time in coming to birth.

But enough has been made of such complaints; and it would be ungracious to the dead and unjust to the living to dwell upon them. Mr Buckle has discharged a task in any case difficult, and rendered doubly difficult by Mr Monypenny's death, with all the competence and all the care that the world has a right to expect in one who has filled a unique position and occupied a famous chair. The book displays a continuity of treatment which is truly admirable. If it is not the product of one author, it is at least the work of one school, and that school the best in English journalism. The language is of that character, at once distinguished and confident, for which we are accustomed to look to Printing-House

Square. And the thought is in keeping with it, betraying no secrets, risking no intimacies, climbing no heights nor plumbing any depths, but remaining always urbane, temperate, and abounding in adaptability. Who could fail to suspect that the mind which steers us so skilfully through the mazy windings of Disraelite ethics is one and the same with that which we had once recognised as the benevolent autocrat of our breakfast tables, to whose persuasive influences our minds had often yielded in the submissive hours of common day, but against which we had sometimes chanced to rebel amid the republican fashions of the evening? For the stiller and more critical seasons, when the growing darkness without provokes the inward eye to an unnatural alertness, Mr Buckle's philosophy, it must be confessed, does not altogether suffice. It is not merely that at such times the palate welcomes those strong wines of morality, with which the biographer of Disraeli's great opponent seasons every page he writes; it is that, in fact, the waters Mr Buckle provides, being neither sweet nor bitter, furnish no manner of refreshment.

Roughly speaking, the two volumes under review describe respectively Disraeli's attempts to convert his party to free-trade and to democracy. In each case he proved brilliantly successful; but, in the one instance, he was himself adopting a policy for the adoption of which he had once assailed another human being with all and more than all the venom of the political vocabulary; and, in the other, he was responsible for introducing, without having first resigned or consulted the constituencies, a change more fundamental than, and as little expected as, any for which Peel had been responsible. The moralisation of statecraft and the canonisation of statesmen are, of course, some of the less admirable functions of the Daily Press. But, when politics pass into history, such operations cease to carry conviction; and in the case of Disraeli they are peculiarly ill-judged. No serious critic will ever place him amongst the honest people of the world; and no amount of conventional morality will ever embellish a being so altogether original. He was both an audacious adventurer and a brilliant actor; and he dared and posed with humorous