NEW EMPIRE OF ABYSSINIA. 4J) 



places it on a level with the meanest citizens. Its members are 

 moral, studious, and comparatively honourable, whatever Bruce aud 

 others may have said to the contrary. Neither does the army form 

 a separate class or permanent force : every balcgoult owes military 

 service in proportion to the importance of his fief and for a fixed 

 time, as was the case with our feudatories of the middle ages. There 

 is, nevertheless, in the Empire of* the Yrgus a floating population ef 

 from 60 to 80,000 men who make a trade of war; but this body baa 

 no more influence upon general politics than formerly the lansquenets 

 and free lances had among us. It may therefore be saitl definitely^ 

 that the ruling class in Abyssinia, during orderly times, is the rural 

 population, represented by more than 80,000 country gentlemen, 

 and, during revolutionary peried;', by the confederate aristocracy 

 which seizes upon the power by a bold stroke nearly always ephe- 

 meral. 



French travellers who have visited Abyssinia, during the last 

 thirty years, from Messrs. Combes and Tanisier down to the 

 Messrs. d'Abbadie, have seen it, after convulsions which have occu- 

 pied a century, arrive at a condition, identical, in more than one 

 respect, to that from which France emerged eleven hundred years 

 ago, by the powerful hand of the Carlovingian kings. A dynasty of 

 princes without power, surrounded with mock homage, and tossed 

 about by all the caprices of a half-feudal, half-pretorian oligarchy: 

 civil war in permanent possession ; the church alone standing, yefc 

 already invaded by barbarism and the spirit of violence ; are what ia 

 France succeeded to the sons of ('lovis, and in Abyssinia to the 

 Davids, the Claudiuses, and the Fasilides. The annals of ancient 

 Abyssinia have often occupied the attention of travellers and histo- 

 rians ; but they have alwavs neglected to study the more intimate 

 history of this monarchy, graft;ed upon an ancient civilization that to 

 us now seems barbarous. Half-Caesars and half-pontiffV, their crowu 

 adorned with a triple row of diamonds and surmounted by a mitre 

 bearing a cross, the old Negus lived under tents, without an}'^ fixed 

 residence, and consequently without any fixed capital, surrounded 

 by an army ever ready to maintain the integrity of too vast an em- 

 pire. The name of Prester-John, given to the ATegus, by the firsfc 

 Europeans who saw them during the Crusades, well expresses the 

 strange, half-fabulous character which, more than once, exercised the 

 imaginations of our forefathers. The emperor, who three centuries 



Vol. X. D 



