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 been the chief banker as well as the chief exporter along the Danube. In the sphere of politics it was the institutions of England, as well as those of France, which all lovers of liberty took as their model, when the new generation of Roumanians entered upon its difficult fight — first, against the Russian Protectorate, then against Turkish innovators d la mode de I'Occident ; and it was to the Consulates of England, as well as of France, that they turned for support. At this — the first, Consul at period Colquhoun and David Urquhart Bucarest ; the econd, author of an extensive and important work on the Ottoman Empire —exercised an active and beneficent influence on the political development of the two Danubian principalities. But these promising beginnings un Only France, under Napoleon III., fortunately led to nothing. was left to protect a movement which, nevertheless, should have appealed to English public opinion at a time when the Magyar dictator, Kossuth, was being received with acclamations in his exile. Since it was a question of carving out an united and independent Roumania from the body of the moribund Turkish State, the champions of the dogma of Ottoman integrity became the enemies of all Roumanian efforts and hopes. English prestige in Roumania was affected for a whole generation, and one has only to turn over the leaves of a book dedicated by a friend to the memory of Sir William White (who was British Minister at Bucarest in to Constantinople), 1878, before being sent as Ambassador in order to realise how insignificant a part England then played with regard to Roumania's political development.

Ill Mr. Blutte, when British Consul in Bucarest, wrote en Roumanian landscape, thusiastically of the beauties o " as classical as that of Italy." From the heights of the Transylvanian Alps to the marshy banks of the Danube, hidden in primaeval willow forests, every kind of scenery and vegetation is to be found, in a kind of harmonious progres sion unique in Europe. Within the borders of the kingdom alone there are many different climates ; the climate of Moldavia, which is akin to that of the Russian steppes ; the mild climate of the Wallachian plain ; the Mediterranean climate of Oltenia, which is similar to that of neighbouring