sian church. An ancient but tasteless custom was injudiciously retained of degrading the exterior architecture by the application of bright and incongruous colours, which though sufficiently suited to the irregular and barbaric structures of the Muscovite Tsars, but ill accord with the classical elevations of so young a city as St. Petersburg.

With the reign of such an innovator as Peter, our remarks on the antiquities of Russian sacred architecture may be brought to a timely conclusion; nor will it be necessary to detain the reader by many observations on the churches of the modern capital, few of which, either in point of style or of history, can be supposed to possess much interest in the eyes of a foreigner. That, indeed, which is dedicated to St. Isaac of Dalmatia, derives a claim to our notice from the unusual richness of its materials, having been constructed in great part of coloured marbles under the reign of Katherine II.; but the architecture is heavy and poor, and the interior dark at noon-day. It was left unfinished at the death of the empress; and the slabs prepared for its completion, having been diverted by her unworthy successor to the decoration of his own new palace, the remainder of the church was most impotently concluded in brickwork—a circumstance which gave rise at the time to much interchange of severity between the wits and the autocrat of the north.

The church of our Holy Mother of Casan is the most beautiful which has hitherto been seen in Russia, and is, moreover, the work of a Russian architect,-a serf, as we have been told, of the Strogonoff family. It would not be easy to devise a more graceful accessory than the semicircular colonnade, which gives to the façade of this cathedral the air of a miniature of St. Peter's; but even here, a difficulty in the situation has led to the adoption of an arrangement, which detracts materially from the effect of the general design. We cannot but regret that this noble approach, instead of conducting the worshipper to the great western entrance of the temple, whence the perspective of the whole interior might be opened at once to his view, should be contrived with such provoking infelicity, as to land him at the door of a transept! The church contains thirty-six Corinthian columns, eachconsisting of a single piece of red granite, four feet and a half in diameter. These were all furnished from quarries in the rocks of Finland, and constitute, perhaps, the most considerable work of the kind which has been executed since the decline of Rome. other respects, however, there is little to admire in the interior; where the white-washed walls, though partially concealed by French standards taken in the campaigns of 1812-13, have in general a cold and unsatisfactory effect, when contrasted with the

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rich hues of the sombre but magnificent pillars. The last, indeed, is a defect which may be easily remedied with the progress of opulence and taste, and if others more essential must remain, the Russians will still have abundant reason to glory in the possession of this fine public building-a monument of the genius of their artists, enriched with the blameless trophies of their patriotic defenders, and by far the most successful addition which has been made, in our time, to the ecclesiastical architecture of Europe.

ART. III-A Geographical and Commercial View of Northern Central Africa, containing a particular Account of the Course and Termination of the great River Niger in the Atlantic Ocean. By James M'Queen. Edinburgh. 1821.

2. Papers relating to the Suppression of the Slave Trade. Printed by order of the House of Commons. 1821.

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N that part of the Gulph of Guinea, generally known by the name of the Bight of Biafra, are situated four islands at equal distances from each other, extending in a straight line to the south-west; their names, beginning at the northernmost and nearest to the African coast, are Fernando Po, Prince's Island, St. Thomas's, and Annabon. The last three belong to Portugal, and are peopled by a sort of half-cast Portugueze and negroes; the first and largest is destitute of Europeans, and inhabited by a peculiar race, differing in manners, language and features not less from the other islanders, than from the negroes on the neighbouring continent. It was among the numerous discoveries made by the Portugueze towards the end of the fifteenth century; and from its beautiful appearance, received, from Fernao do Po the discoverer, the name of Ilha de Formosa: this name, however, it soon lost, and, for the last three centuries, has been known only by that of Fernando Po. The Portugueze built a fort on this island, but for some reason or other shortly quitted it altogether; and, about the middle of last century, exchanged it with the Spaniards for the small island of Trinidad, situated about 500 miles from the coast of Brazil, opposite to the bay of Espirito Santo.

The new possessors attempted to form a settlement upon it, but very soon abandoned the design and the island together, alleging, as a reason, the ferocity of the natives. Since that period, so rare has been even the casual visit of any European vessel, that the present generation of islanders. had never seen one till the Pheasant sloop of war made her appearance there in the beginning of the present year; when Captain Kelly was visited by a man of colour, a native of Martinique, who called him

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self Tom Dixon, but was certainly not a Frenchman. This man appeared to be about forty years of age, thirty of which he had passed upon the island. He had sailed from Philadelphia, as a boy, in the Mary, Captain Anderson, for the river Bonni, to trade for palm oil, and on the homeward voyage was wrecked on the iron bound coast of Fernando Po; of twelve seamen, five only were saved, and of these he was the sole survivor, the rest having died several years ago. His language was that of the natives, mixed with a few words of French and English. Captain Kelly offered to take him from the island, but this he declined, as he had two wives and a family of children, and lived happily among them. From this person Captain Kelly expected to obtain much information respecting the inhabitants and the state of the island, but he did not make his appearance a second time; being probably afraid lest he should be discovered and claimed as an Englishman; or perhaps prevented by the natives, from an impression that he, who was able to converse in some degree with the strangers, would get more than his share of knives and other articles, which were given in exchange for poultry, yams, and other species of provisions.

The appearance of the island is extremely beautiful: its length from north to south is about thirty miles, and its breadth about twenty. Two high peaked mountains, (one of them remarkably so,) the black sand on the beach, and the scoriæ and other substances which had evidently undergone the action of fire, denote it to be of volcanic origin. From the northern extremity the land rises, in a gradual slope, to a ridge of hills which connects the two peaked mountains, and the whole surface of the slope is covered with a forest of trees of the most luxu riant growth. Beyond this region of wood, the crest of the hills, and the sides of the mountains as far up as about one-third of their height, appeared to be generally in a state of cultivation : on the summits of these hills stand the towns and villages of the natives. The houses are of wicker work, all nearly of the same size and plan; they are built round an open area, and each is surrounded with a railed fence or enclosure, within which their cattle are shut up at night. The means of subsistence must be abundant, as the price of a sheep, or goat, was a common knife, of the value of three-pence; and a piece of iron hoop, a couple of inches in length, would purchase two or three of their finest fowls.

Captain Kelly describes the inhabitants as a fine race of people; they are, he says, of a middle stature, with limbs well formed, muscular and active; their countenances very peculiar, the general contour of the face being that of a square with the

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angles rounded off; the nose, the lips, and the quick and piercing eye, approaching much nearer to the European than the African features: they have woolly hair, which being twisted and daubed with red clay behind, appears like strings of candles dangling from their heads. This decoration was common to both sexes. Like most savages, they wear round their neck, wrists, ankles and loins, the vertebræ of snakes, the skulls and jaw bones of monkeys and other wild animals, and strings of shells of various colours. The hue of the skin was evidently black; but they were all so completely covered with a reddish coloured clay and palm oil, and their faces so besmeared with fine pulverized yellow ochre, as to give them the appearance of mulattoes. The only mark of distinction observed among them, was that of a hat and feather worn by one person, which seemed to point him out as a chief or superior. No other clothing was in use than a straw hat, with a pair of ram's horns in front, for the men, and a fringe of a certain species of rush, about nine inches long, or of leaves from the nearest tree, tied round the loins of married people of both sexes; the unmarried seemed to neglect all clothing and went about in a state of perfect nudity. The most pure virgin,' says Captain Kelly, appeared as unconscious of indecency, and as free from insult, by the exposure of her person, as she would have been in European countries, under the protecting shield of the vestment of a convent.' The use of intoxicating liquors, and of the tobacco leaf, appeared to be equally unknown to them. The unfermented juice of the palm tree, the purest streams of water, the vegetable products of the island, with the domestic animals, sheep, goats, and fowls, afforded them plenty of subsistence; the chief article however of their food was the yam, which Captain Kelly describes as being of a finer flavour than any he had ever tasted elsewhere. The Spaniards affect to consider these islanders a 'ferocious' people: Captain Kelly, on the contrary, found them a kind, good-humoured, and inoffensive race; and, during his stay among them, had not, he says, the least occasion to conclude that they were either treacherous, or vindictive.

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The language of these people was not less different, as we have said, from that of the continental negroes, than their manners and appearance: for although the Pheasant was provided with interpreters for the whole line of coast, from Sierra Leone to Calabar, not one of them understood a single syllable that they uttered. Neither did it appear that the superstitious veneration of the fetish, so universal along the coast of Africa, was at all known to the natives of Fernando Po.

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Numberless little streams were trickling down the sides of the hills into a noble bay on the north west side of the island; besides three very considerable rivers, one at each extremity, and the third about the middle of the bay; at all of which, ships may water with the utmost facility. A small island covered with wood, (which may be procured here in any quantity,) and inhabited by about a hundred families, who subsist by fishing, affords shelter to that part of the bay within it. Though the thermometer of Fahrenheit rose to 86° in the afternoon, the land and sea-breezes gave to the temperature a freshness quite unknown on the adjacent coast. And as a proof of the goodness of the climate, it may be observed that no appearance of those loathsome diseases, elephantiasis, scrophula, guinea-worm, hydrocele, &c. to which the negroes are so subject, was perceptible among the many hundreds who crowded to the coast on the occasion of this visit.

To the bay, round which the country rises in a grand and beautiful amphitheatre, Captain Kelly gave the name of George's Bay. 'Next to the bay of Naples (he says), I know of no place more capable of being converted to a finished picture by the hand of art and industry than this; let only the immense forest on the slope give place to cultivated plantations of sugar-canes, the brows of the hills be studded with coffee trees, and a town, of sufficient importance to form the capital of the island, be built on the rising ground near the east angle of the bay, where a river would flow beneath it, navigable for boats drawing seven and eight feet of waand Fernando Po would far surpass any of the islands of the British possessions in the West Indies.'

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We have been induced to give this brief sketch of an island, which, though so near home, has not, to our knowledge, ever been described, chiefly because it is considered by Captain Kelly as a most eligible spot for employing the captured negroes, instead of sending them a long voyage of six or eight weeks to Sierra Leone; for checking, and probably destroying, the present abominable traffic of slaves in the neighbourhood of the equator; and for establishing a legitimate trade with the interior of Africa, through the channels of the numerous navigable rivers falling into the Gulph of Guinea, and the bights of Benin and Biafra, as the New Calabar, Bonni, Cross River, Old Calabar, and the Rio del Rey; the Cameroons, St. Benito, D'Angra, and Gabon; all of which would then not only become sources of wealth to Great Britain, but the connection, to which they would lead, might be the means of materially facilitating the introduction of christianity and civilization among the much injured and long depressed natives of this part of Africa.

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