This glorious vision

This glorious vision, if not the most beautiful, is the most varied and fascinating of its kind in Europe. Some prefer the bay of Naples, or the bay of Salamis, or of Genoa; but neither Naples, nor Athens, nor Rome, nor Genoa, nor Venice, have, as cities, anything of the extent, variety, and complexity of Constantinople, if we include its four or five suburbs, its magnificent sea landscape, its bays, islands, and mountains, in the distance. For Constantinople does not stand upon an open sea like Naples, or Genoa, but on a great marine lake with its shores, vine- clad hills, headlands, and pearly mountain ranges in the far horizon. Like Athens or Venice, it has a seaport without an open sea outside. And as a city, it is vastly more grand and varied than Venice, Athens, Florence, or Edinburgh. Hence, Constantinople combines such sea views as we find round the Western islands of Scotland or of Greece, with the summer sky and vegetation of Italy, and the mountain ranges which fill the horizon from the plains of Lombardy.

Was it more beautiful in the age of the Empire than it is to-day? Perhaps from a distance, from the sea, the Stamboul of to-day is a far more striking sight than the Byzantium of the Caesars. The minarets, an Eastern and Moslem feature, are the distinctive mark of the modern city, and do much to break the monotony of the Byzantine cupolas local ephesus tour guides. There are four or five mosques which repeat and rival the church of the Holy Wisdom, and some of them have nobler sites.

Nor were the towers and battlements of ancient architecture to be compared in beauty and in scale with those of Mediaeval and Moslem builders. But the city, as seen within, in the Isaurian and Basilian dynasties, we may assume in the five centuries which separate Justinian from the First Crusade, must have greatly surpassed in noble art, if not in pictorial effect, the Ottoman city that we see. The enormous palace and hippodrome, the basilicas, churches, halls, and porticoes, with their profusion of marble, mosaic, bronzes, and paintings, their colossal figures, obelisks, and columns, the choicest relics of Greek sculpture, the memorial statues, baths, theatres, and forums — must have far surpassed the decaying remnant of Stamboul which so often disenchants the traveller when he disembarks from the Golden Horn.

III. Antiquities of Constantinople,

Constantine created his New Rome in 330, as never ruler before or since created a city. It was made a mighty and resplendent capital within a single decade. Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Mauritania, were despoiled of their treasures to adorn the new metropolis. Constantine built churches, theatres, forums, baths, porticoes, palaces, monuments, and aqueducts. He built, adorned, and peopled a great capital all at a stroke, and made it, after Rome and Athens, the most splendid city of the ancient world. Two centuries later, Justinian became the second founder of the city. And from Constantine down to the capture by the Crusaders, for nearly nine centuries, a succession of Emperors continued to raise great sacred and lay buildings. Of the city before Constantine little remains above the ground, except some sculptures in the museum, and foundations of some walls, which Dr. Pas- pates believes that he can trace.

Of Constantine and his immediate successors there remain parts of the hippodrome, of walls, aqueducts, cisterns, and forums, some columns and monuments. Of the Emperors from Theodosius to the Crusades, we still have, little injured, the grand church of Sophia, some twenty churches much altered and mostly late in date, the foundations of palaces, and one still standing in ruins, and lastly the twelve miles of walls with their gates and towers. The museums contain sarcophagi, statues, inscriptions of the Roman age. But we can hardly doubt that an immense body of Byzantine relics and buildings still lie buried some ten or twenty ‘ feet below the ground whereon stand to-day the serails, khans, mosques, and houses of Stamboul, a soil which the Ottoman is loth to disturb.