THE REVOLT OF ISLAM.
[To THE Emelt OF THE " SPEOTATOR.1 SiR,—Shelley's almost forgotten epic poem, "The Revolt of Islam," reads like a prophecy of the events now occurring in the Ottoman Empire. The poem, written nearly a hundred
years ago, describes the inauguration of a social millennium at Constantinople brought about by the preaching of the gospel of humanity to the people by a Greek suffragist named Cythna, whose lover Laon has been carried into slavery by the Turks, and who has herself been a slave in the Sultan's seraglio. The Social Republic is proclaimed in Stamboul, the Sultan resigns himself to the situation and the position of a private citizen, and the Turkish lion and the Greek lamb lie down together, while the Grecian girl leads them. But the mailed Monarchs of Christian Europe (Shelley wrote in the days of the Holy Alliance) unite to crush regenerated Islam, and their combined forces besiege and bombard Constanti- nople. In spite of the beauty of style and imagery, the prolixity of the narrative deters and repels the reader, and I doubt if any one has ever read through the poem to the bitter end, in which the poet prophesies the final triumph of his ideas, and looks forward to the time when the last King shall receive his dying shrift at the hands of the last priest.—I am,
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