had laid hands upon her; and spite of all her efforts to regain her liberty he held her fast, and sent her taskmasters as cruel and exacting as the leaders of barbarian hordes had been before.  And yet her spirit was indomitable; bowed but not broken she continued to live on, and ever strove for freedom.  Mircea, Stephen, Michael, those are the names which vindicate her claim to courage, and which shield her from the charge of cowardly submission.  And next she is the object of contention between two neighbouring despots, the one endeavouring to hold, the other to annex her.  It is a marvelt hat between them she was not dismembered limb from limb.

At length for her, as for all suffering peoples, the day of liberation was at hand; the iron bonds which Oriental despotism had forged were loosened by the agency of Western progress, and, lightened of her load, she this time struck a more effectual blow for liberty, and was amongst the first to unfurl the flag of freedom in the East.  But a long succession of barbarian governors, the license of repeated military occupations, the proximity of Tartar savagery on the one side and of Oriental effeminacy on the other, these incidents of her long-continued vassalage have necessarily, and, it is to be hoped, but for a time, left their evil influence upon the nation, which it is now the earnest endeavour of her patriotic leaders to exterminate.

[Footnote 193:  Ozanne, p. 226.]

CHAPTER XV.

PRESENT ROUMANIAN LEADERS AND THEIR POLICY.

The King—­Customs of the Court—­The Queen—­Her attainments—­Extract from her poetry—­Madame Rosetti—­Her patriotism and adventures—­M.  Constantin A. Rosetti—­His career and public services—­M.  Bratiano—­Other leaders of public opinion—­The party of progress—­Their past foreign and domestic policy—­Geographical boundaries—­Panslavism and Panroumanism—­The future policy of Roumania—­Growth by pacific means—­(Note:  Comparative values of Russian, Turkish, and Roumanian securities)—­Roumania and Great Britain—­Conclusion.

I.

We have passed in hasty and imperfect review those features in the national life of Roumania which we believed would be of interest to our readers, and will now endeavour to present to them sketches of a few of the persons of distinction who are forming public opinion, and are the leaders of progress in the country, premising, however, that there are many omissions, due partly to our own ignorance, and partly to the fact that the discussion of the merits and demerits of some of the public men would not have been fitting in this treatise.