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.

Into Imperial Rome

At every turn we come on some new crime against humanity done by fanaticism or greed. Into Imperial Rome there was swept, as into the museum of the world, the marbles, the statues, the bronzes, the ivories, the paintings and carvings, the precious works of human genius for some six or seven centuries — everything of rarity and loveliness that could be found between Cadiz and the Black Sea.

There were tens of thousands of statues in Greek marble, and as many in bronze; there were marble columns, monoliths, friezes, reliefs, obelisks, colossi, fountains. Halls, porticos, temples, theatres, baths, were crowded with the spoils of the world, rich enough to furnish forth ten such cities as London, Paris, or New York. It is all gone. There are but a few fragments now that chance has spared. Twenty sieges, stormings, pillages, a hundred conflagrations, the barbarous greed of the invading hordes, the barbarous fanaticism of the first Christians, the incessant wars, revolutions, riots, and faction fights of the Middle Ages, the brutal greediness of popes, cardinals, their nephews and their favourites — worst of all, perhaps, modem industrial iconoclasm — have swept away all but a few chance fragments.

Greek art of the great age

In the time of Pliny there must have been still extant thousands of works of the purest Greek art of the great age. There is now not one surviving intact in the whole world; and there are but two — the Hermes of Olympia and the Aphrodite of Melos — of which even fragments remain in sufficient preservation to enable us to judge them. Every other work of the greatest age is either, like the Parthenon relics, a mere ruin, or is known to us only by a later imitation. Of the bronzes not a single complete specimen of the great age survives. And this loss is irreparable. Even if such genius of art were ever to return to this earth again, it is certain that the same passion for physical beauty, the same habit of displaying the form, can never again be universal with any civilised people. And thus by the wanton destructiveness of successive ages, one of the most original types of human genius has become extinct on this earth, even as the mastodon or the dodo are extinct mystical bulgaria tours.

But masterpieces of marble and bronze were dross in comparison with the masterpieces of the human soul, of intellect, purity, and love, that have been mangled on this same spot and in sight of these supreme works of genius. The Christian pilgrim from some Irish or American monastery, from Santiago in Chile, from Armenia or Warsaw — the Catholic missionary on his way to die in China, or Polynesia, or Uganda — prostrates himself in the dust where Paul was beheaded and Peter crucified, where Gregory and Augustine prayed, and in the Colosseum he sees nothing but a monstrous black ruin; but he kneels in the arena where the blood of martyrs was poured forth like water, which has witnessed such heroic deaths, such revolting crimes. Each zealot —Catholic, Protestant, or sceptic — remembers only his own martyrs. Romans massacred Gaul and Goth; Polytheists martyred Christians; Papal creatures tortured Republicans, Protestants, and Reformers; emperors’ men slew popes’ men, and popes’ men slew the emperors’ men; Colonnas and Orsinis, Borgias and Cencis, Borgheses and Barberinis have poured out blood upon blood, and piled up crime on crime, till every stone records some inhuman act, and witnesses also to courage and faith as memorable and quite as human.

Traveller of 1889

Turn to our traveller of 1889. Berri, says Miss Betham- Edwards, has been transformed under a sound land system. It has indeed a poor soil; but, even in the ltriste Sologne,’ plantations, irrigation canals, and improved methods of agriculture are transforming this region. So rapid is the progress that George Sand, who died but the other day, would hardly recognise the country she has described so well. Here and there may be seen, now used as an outhouse, one of those bare, windowless cabins which shocked Arthur Young, and close at hand the ‘neat, airy, solid dwellings ’ the peasant owners have built for themselves.

Here Miss Betham-Edwards visited newly-made farms, with their spick-and-span buildings, the whole having the appearance of a little settlement in the Far West. The holdings vary from 6 to 30 acres, their owners possessing a capital of 5000 to 8000 and even 25,000 francs, the land well stocked and cultivated, the people well dressed, and signs of general content and well-being delightful to contemplate.

And as to metayage, ‘that miserable system which perpetuates poverty,’ Miss Betham-Edwards finds it now one of the chief factors of the agricultural progress of France, creating cordial relations between landlord and tenant. The secret of this curious conflict between two most competent observers is this: mitayage—the system under which the owner of the soil finds land, stock, and implements, the tiller of the farm finds manual labour, and all produce is equally shared — depends for its fair working upon just laws, equality before the law, absence of any privilege in the owner, and good understanding as between men who alike respect each other private tours istanbul.

Large tracts in France

With these, it is an excellent system of farming, very favourable to the labourer; without these, it may almost reduce him to serfdom. It may thus be one of the best, or one of the worst, of all systems of husbandry. As Arthur Young saw it under the ancient system of privileged orders, it was almost as bad as an Irish tenancy at will. Under the new system of post-revolutionary equality, it has given prosperity to large tracts in France.

From Autun in Burgundy, Arthur Young travelled across the Bourbonnais and the Nivernais, and he found the country ‘villainously cultivated’; when he sees such a country ‘in the hands of starving metayers, instead of fat farmers,’ he knows not how to pity the seigneurs. To-day, his editor finds ‘fat farmers’ innumerable, for metayage has greatly advanced the condition of the peasants. The country that lies between the mouths of the Garonne and the Loire is precisely that part of his journey which wrings from Arthur Young his furious invective against the great lords whom he wished he could make

‘to skip again.’ Now, the Gironde, the Charente, and La Vendde are thriving, rich districts, intersected with railways; ‘ and, owing to the indefatigable labours of peasant owners, hundreds of thousands of acres of waste land have been put under cultivation.’

Or turn to Brittany, which Arthur Young calls ‘a miserable province ’; ‘ husbandry not much further advanced than among the Hurons ’; ‘the people almost as wild as their country ’; ‘ mud houses, no windows ’; ‘ a hideous heap of wretchedness ’ — all through ‘ the execrable maxims of despotism, or the equally detestable prejudices of a feudal nobility.’ And this is the rich, thriving, laborious, and delightful Brittany which our tourists love, where Miss Betham-Edwards tells us of scientific farming, artificial manures, machinery, ‘the granary of Western France,’ market gardens, of fabulous value, and a great agricultural college, one of the most important in Europe.

Ferdinand of Arragon

It may surprise some readers to treat the thirteenth century as the virtual close of the Middle Ages, an epoch which is usually placed in the latter half of the fifteenth century, in the age of Louis xi., Henry VII., and Ferdinand of Arragon. But the true spirit of Feudalism, the living soul of Catholicism, which together make up the compound type of society we call mediaeval, were, in point of fact, waning all through the thirteenth century. The hurly-burly of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries was merely one long and cruel death agony. Nay, the inner soul of Catholic Feudalism quite ended in the first generation of the thirteenth century — with St. Dominic, St. Francis, Innocent in., Philip Augustus, and Otto iv., Stephen Langton, and William, Earl Mareschal.

The truly characteristic period of mediaeval- ism is in the twelfth, rather than the thirteenth, century, the period covered by the first three Crusades from 1094, the date of the Council of Clermont, to 1192, when Coeur- de-Lion withdrew from the Holy Land. Or, if we put it a little wider in limits, we may date true mediaevalism from the rise of Hildebrand, about 1070, to the death of Innocent HI. in 1216, or just about a century and a half. St. Louis himself, as we read Joinville’s Memoirs, seems to us a man belated, born too late, and almost an anachronism in the second half of the thirteenth century sofia city tour.

We know that in the slow evolution of society the social brilliancy of a movement is seldom visible, and is almost never ripe for poetic and artistic idealisation until the energy of the movement itself is waning, or even it may be, is demonstrably spent. Shakespeare prolonged the Renascence of the fifteenth century, the Renascence of Leonardo and Raphael, into the seventeenth century, when Puritanism was in full career; and Shakespeare — it is deeply significant — died on the day when Oliver Cromwell entered college at Cambridge. And so, when Dante, in his Vision of 1300, saw the heights and the depths of Catholic Feudalism, he was looking back over great movements which were mighty forces a hundred years earlier. Just so, though the thirteenth century contained within its bosom the plainest proofs that the mediaeval world was ending, the flower, the brilliancy, the variety, the poetry, the soul of the mediaeval world, were never seen in so rich a glow as in the thirteenth century, its last great effort.

Thirteenth century as a whole

In a brief review of each of the dominant movements which give so profound a character to the thirteenth century as a whole, one begins naturally with the central movement of all — the Church. The thirteenth century was the era of the culmination, the over-straining, and then the shameful defeat of the claim made by the Church of Rome to a moral and spiritual autocracy in Christendom. There are at least five Popes in that one hundred years — Innocent HI., Gregory ix., Innocent iv., Gregory x., and Boniface vm.—whose characters impress us with a sense of power or of astounding desire of power, whose lives are romances and dreams, and whose careers are amongst the most instructive in history. He who would understand the Middle Ages must study from beginning to end the long and crowded Pontificate of Innocent HI. In genius, in commanding nature, in intensity of character, in universal energy, in aspiring designs, Innocent HI. has few rivals in the fourteenth centuries of the Roman Pontiffs, and few superiors in any age on any throne in the world.

His eighteen years of rule, from 1198 to 1216, were one long effort, for the moment successful, and in part deserving success, to enforce on the kings and peoples of Europe a higher morality, respect for the spiritual mission of the Church, and a sense of their common civilisation. We feel that he is truly a great man with a noble cause, when the Pope forces Philip Augustus to take back the wife he had so insolently cast off, when the Pope forces John to respect the rights of all his subjects, laymen or churchmen, when the Pope gives to England the best of her Primates, Stephen Langton, the principal author of our Great Charter, when the Pope accepts the potent enthusiasm of the New Friars and sends them forth on their mission of revivalism.

Abundantly open to the English reader

This most delightful of all story-books is abundantly open to the English reader. There are several translations, and for some purposes Herodotus, whose style is one of artless conversation, may be read in English almost as well as in the Greek. In the elaborate work of Canon Rawlinson we have a good translation, with abundant historical and antiquarian illustrations by the Canon and by Sir Henry Rawlinson, with maps, plans, and many drawings. Herodotus preserves to us the earliest consecutive account that the West has recorded of the ancient empires of the East. And, although his record is both casual and vague, it serves as a basis round which the researches of recent Orientalists may be conveniently grouped, just as Blackstone and Coke form the text of so many manuals of law, in spite of the fact that both are so largely obsolete. To use Herodotus with profit we need such a systematic Manual of Ancient History as that of Heeren.

This book, originally published in 1799, and continued and corrected by the author down to the year 1828, although now in many respects rendered obsolete by subsequent discoveries, remains an admirable model of the historical summary. Unfortunately it requires so many corrections and additions that it can hardly be taken as the current text-book, all the more that the English translation itself, published in 1829 at Oxford, is not very easily procured. For all practical purposes, the book is now superseded by Canon Rawlinson’s Manual of Ancient History, Oxford, 1878, which follows the plan of Heeren, covers nearly the same period, and treats of the same nations. It is, in fact, the Manual of Heeren corrected, rewritten, supplemented, and brought up to that date, somewhat overburdened with the masses of detail, wanting in the masterly conciseness of the great Professor of Gottingen, but embodying the learning and discoveries of three later generations private tour istanbul.

Egyptology and Assyriology

But Egyptology and Assyriology are unstable quicksands in which every few years the authorities become obsolete by the discovery of fresh records and relics. Professor Sayce, the principal exponent of the untrustworthiness of Herodotus, assures us that Canon Raw- linson and his coadjutors have now become obsolete themselves, and that the history of the plains of the Nile and the Euphrates must again be rewritten. But the tendency to-day is, perhaps, inclined to treat the discoveries on which Professor Sayce relies as neither so certain nor so important as he was once disposed to think. For the general reader it may be enough to rely on Max Dunker’s History of Antiquity (6 vols., translated 1878; see vols. i. and ii. for Egypt and Assyria).

There is another mode, besides that of books, whereby much of the general character of Oriental civilisation may be learned. That is, by pictures, illustrations, models, monuments, and the varied collections to be found in our own Museum, in the Louvre at Paris, and other collections of Oriental antiquities. Thousands of holiday-makers saunter through these galleries, and gaze at the figures in a vacant stare. But this is not to learn at all. The monuments and cases, wall-paintings and relics, require patient and careful study with appropriate books. The excellent handbooks of our Museum will make a good beginning, but the monuments of Egypt and Assyria are hardly intelligible without complete illustrated explanation. These are, for Egypt, the dissertations, notes, and wood- cuts by various Egyptologists in Canon Rawlinson’s English Herodohis; in Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s great work on the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, 1837; and his Handbook for Egypt, 1858.

Our earliest teachers

We have done much towards understanding the past when we have learned to value and to honour such men.

It is almost better to know nothing of history than to know with the narrow coldness of a pedant a record which ought to fill us with emotion and reverence. Our closest friends, our earliest teachers, our parents themselves, are not more truly our benefactors than they. To them we owe what we prize most — country, freedom, peace, knowledge, art, thought, and higher sense of right and wrong. What a tale of patience, courage, sacrifice, and martyrdom is the history of human progress! It affects us as if we were reading in the diary of a parent the record of his struggles for his children. For us they toiled, endured, bled, and died ; that we by their labour might have rest, by their thoughts might know, by their death might live happily. For whom did these men work, if not for us ? Not for themselves, when they gave up peace guided tour ephesus, honour, life, reputation itself—as when the great French republican exclaimed, ‘May my name be accursed, so that France be free!’ not for themselves they worked, but for their cause, for their fellows, for us. Not that they might have fame, but that they might leave the world better than they found it. This supported Milton in his old age, blind, poor, and dishonoured, when he poured out his spirit in solitude, full of grace, tenderness, and hope, amidst the ruin of all he loved and the obscene triumph of all he despised.

It supported Dante, the poet of Florence, when an outlaw and an exile he was cast off by friends and countrymen, and wandered about begging his bread from city to city, pondering the great thoughts which live throughout all Europe. This spirit, too, was in one, the noblest victim of the French Revolution, the philosopher Condorcet; who, condemned, hunted to death, devoted the last few days of his life to serene thought of the past, and, whilst the pursuers were on his track, wrote in his hiding-place that noble sketch of the progress of the human race.

THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY

Let us now try to sketch the outline of this story, link century to century, continent to continent, and judge the share each has in the common work of civilisation. To do so, we must go back to ages long before records began. It is but of the latter and the shorter portion of the duration of progress, that any record has been made or preserved. Yet for a general view, sufficient materials of certain knowledge exist. If we write the biography of a man we do not begin with the year of his life in which his diary opens; we seek to know his parentage, education, and early association. To understand him we must do so. So, too, the biography of mankind must not confine itself to the eras of chronological tables, and of recorded events.

In all large instances the civilisation of an epoch or a people has a certain unity in it — their philosophy, their policy, their habits, and their religion must more or less accord, and all depend at last upon the special habit of their minds. It is this central form of belief which determines all the rest. Separately no item which makes up their civilisation as a whole, can be long or seriously changed. It is what a man believes, which makes him act as he does. Thus shall we see that, as their reasoning powers develop, all else develops likewise; their science, their art break up or take new forms ; their system of society expands ; their life, their morality, and their religion gradually are dissolved and reconstructed.

Let us, then, place ourselves back in imagination at a period when the whole surface of the earth was quite unlike what it is now. Let us suppose it as it was after the last great geologic change — the greater portion of its area covered with primeval forests, vast swamps, dense jungles, moors, prairies, and arid deserts. We must not suppose that the earth had always the same face as now. Such as it is, it has been made by man ; the rich pasturages and open plains have all been created by his toil — even the grain, and fruits, and flowers that grow upon its soil have been made what they are by his care. Their originals were what we now should regard as small, valueless, insipid berries or weeds. As yet the now teeming valleys of the great rivers, such as the Nile, or the Euphrates, or the Po, were wildernesses or swamps.

The rich meadows of our own island were marshes ; where its cornfields stand now, were trackless forests or salt fens. Such countries as Holland were swept over by every tide of the sea, and such countries as Switzerland, and Norway, and large parts of America, or Russia, were submerged beneath endless pine-woods. And through these forests and wastes ranged countless races of animals, many, doubtless, long extinct, in variety and numbers more than we can even conceive.

Constantinople the literary centre of the whole region

Having an authorized printing office, the printer may print neither book, newspaper, nor picture, without the signed approval of the censors of the press. These two rules force men to make Constantinople the literary centre of the whole region of its influence. For in provincial towns officials shrink from responsibility, and refer the would-be printer or author to Constantinople for the final decision upon the merits of his petition. Difference of language makes Beyrout a centre for printing in Arabic, and the American Mission and the Bible Societies print there large numbers of books in that language. There are also newspaper presses at Smyrna and Salonica. But in all the vast interior provinces of Turkey printing presses are found in the Government headquarters alone. For this reason the people of all that great region where the Turkish and Armenian and Greek languages are used look to Constantinople for their books, if they have any.

If Turkish or Greek or Armenian men and women in Turkey are ever to be stirred in any large sense to intellectual or spiritual life, the impulse must come through books issued at Constantinople by people who know intellectual and spiritual life. If the view already given is true, of the lacks in both these directions seen among the people of the city, a burden of responsibility falls upon missionaries as educated Christian men and women private tours balkan. The Missionary Societies should concentrate at this one point all necessary means and forces for making the press instruct and help the people of this Empire. Excuse for failure to do this can only be found in ungreediness of the people to be reached by the press, or in the effectiveness of a native press already thoroughly occupying the ground, or in some obstacle of the local laws.

The press laws of Turkey

The press laws of Turkey do not form such an obstacle as one might expect. They limit the field and the style of literature produced under the censor’s care. But they are not obstacles on the whole to the missionary, unless he wishes to write controversial books. And these arc commonly best unwritten. As to the preparedness of the people, all classes of the population of Turkey offer a living example of the punishment which neglect of reading brings upon itself. After a time, talkers who do not read have travelled so far from their original starting point, that their language is quite apart from that of those who meanwhile have been shut up with their books. Then comes the punishment of the people who have neglected reading. Any one of them who now tardily decides that he would like to read, cannot do it. The language of the books is a strange language to him, although it is the one which his ancestors deserted when they stopped reading.

This calamity fell upon all the peoples of Turkey after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Up to that time the Greeks still had preserved the essential grammatical forms of the magnificent Greek literature which is still schoolmaster to the civilized world in literary expression. Now, they can only read their ancient writings by patient study with grammar and dictionary.

Until the middle of the 15th century the Armenians too, had a literature. But in the catastrophes of the Turkish invasion, they, too, lost the power of using it. Until the fourteenth century, the Turks themselves had beginnings of a literature written with Arabic letters, and making much use of Arabic and Persian expressions.

But, having devoted themselves, like a good many other people of the Middle Ages, to war rather than to study, long before the end of the eighteenth century common Turks could not understand the book language any more than they could understand the Arabic in which their religious books are written.

Necessarily exceptions to such broad statements

There are necessarily exceptions to such broad statements. In Constantinople one does not fail to meet Greeks and Armenians who are bright and entertaining and obliging, or Mohammedans who are noble and courteous, and thoughtful enough to make their acquaintance an acquisition. But every study of the people in mass is a revelation of arrested development, absence of initiative, and general uselessness by reason of narrow selfishness. The city, and with it the millions to whom the city is model seem hostile to what is best in the world’s work. High-sounding phrases of lofty principle are heard in the city. Custom provides for this much of concession to the sensibilities of others. But the centuries seem to have frayed off the last semblance of meaning from the words. To quote a remark of a sage official in India which applies to the whole of Asia “ Whilst the mouth is proclaiming its enlightenment and progress, the body is waddling backward as fast as the nature of the ground will permit.” The bane of Constantinople is not solely poverty of resources. It is poverty of ideals.

It is quite impossible for one having any pretensions whatever to general good will toward men, to come in contact with the good and attractive qualities of these people, without wishing for some means of helping them to get rid of the bad. Such a benevolent bystander, questioning how the people of this city may be led to measure their real needs, may naturally incline to believe that contact with Western civilization is the speediest agency for waking them up. The contagious energy of the West must in time modify this sluggish content in what has been and in the belief that respect to the fathers demands that the children shall not expect to be better daily tours istanbul.

Principles of civilization

The main thing needed seems to be to isolate the principles of civilization from the religious principle somewhat persistently associated in the West with the advance of civilization. The way is prepared for this by the fact that in Constantinople a sort of compromise seems to have taken place between the claims of a medley of rival religions in order to permit commercial intercourse. The captain of a Turkish steamboat on the Bosphorus illustrated the feeling that undue assertion of religious prejudice alone disturbs the placidity of the business world. A small boy had found surreptitious access to the whistle of the boat, and made it give forth a blast both deafening and untimely. The captain, rushing from his post to seek the culprit, instead of asking who did this thing, voiced his disgust and his belief that religion was at the bottom of all ills by the shout “ Whose religion have I got to curse now?”

If civilization so isolated is the redemptive and elevating agency that will bring forth progress in Turkey, Constantinople is the place in which to watch the process.

For with all of its shrinking from adopting modern theories, Constantinople frankly and warmly admires their fruits in other nations. No Turk, Jew, nor Christian in all the city hesitates to tell the curious inquirer of his boundless affection for civilization. When talking of the problem of progress in his country every Turkish official naively gauges it by comparison with England, France, Germany, or America. It never occurs to him that, by choosing such types of the highest development of man, Asia and Islam are rendering an interesting and suggestive homage to Christianity and the West.

Subjected to the Beyrout quarantine

“Then shall we be subjected to the Beyrout quarantine, on arriving at Alexandria?”

“ Shouldn’t wonder at all, sir—unless they let the days of tho voyage count.”

I now saw that we wore trapped; and this did not tend to enliven the voyage that evening.

Our only other second cabin companion was a French priest — a thin grirn-looking fellow of five or six-and-twenty, so spare in form that he looked as if he had been allowed to grow up between two boards. He was constantly absorbed in a little dirty volume on Theology, moving his lips and muttering as he read. He was also affectedly humble — insisting upon pouring out wine for us at dinner, and abstaining from it himself, -with an unpleasant smile. In addition to this, he was remarkably grimy to look upon private guide turkey; and never undressed during the voyage. But he had groat faith. I could not bring him to understand that we wore to be put into quarantine at Alexandria; he said, it was impossible. I put the case as practically before him as I could, but he only smiled grimly, and said I should see. I brought the captain down at last, as it became a matter of personal principle that he should be convinced; but even this was unsuccessful. He said we were all wrong; and then returned to his thumbed volume.

She left the Archipelago

The next day, the 29th, there was a pretty stiff wind, and the boat began to toss, as she left the Archipelago. We passed many islands; all desolate-looking light reddish-brown rocks, impressing one with notions of great dreariness. It rained towards afternoon, and, at the first spit, all the Turks bundled up their carpets, crept under their long awning, and never appeared again for the rest of the journey. One or two of the Frank deck passengers made friends with the lieutenant, and came down into our cabin. These were an Italian physician, driven from Yerona by troubles, and going to practice in Alexandria; a young Hollander, travelling for an Amsterdam house of commerce; M. Abro, the Pasha’s dragoman, a very intelligent and communicative person, wearing the full Turkish costume; and the Count Stefano de, a young Ionian, speaking a little English, and first astonishing us by whistling “Patrick’s Hay” and “The girl I left behind me,” as he walked up and down the deck that morning. He had, however, learnt these tunes from the bands of our regiments at Corfu. He was very musical, with a beautiful tenor voice, and proved, both on board and in our subsequent quarantine, a capital fellow.

He had known Mademoiselle Angri, the contralto last year at our Royal Italian Opera, and told me many curious anecdotes connected with her early career—her father having been, as I understood, mess- man at Corfu, and keeper of the billiard tables. He said her popularity had been unbounded in the islands; and the greatest anxiety was evinced to know how she succeeded in London, when she had left them. lie added, they were all perfectly convinced that she was the greatest contralto in the world ; but then he had not heard Alboni, nor, indeed, had the report of her Venetian triumphs come down the Adriatic.

I have said that the engineer was an Englishman, as, indeed, the majority are, in the Levant boats. He had been on the stations between Cairo and Constantinople a long time ; and now knew no other world. One night, I was asking him about the capabilities of the transit boats on the Mahmoudieh Canal and the Nile, when he told me this anecdote, which I have put down as well as I can recollect, in his own words.

“ Lor’ bless you, sir,” he began—“the power of the boat hasn’t much to do with it! When Manned Ali started his boat on the Nile, Abbas I’acha started one as well, and tried to beat him ; and did it too, though this was not nigh such a good boat. When Manned Ali’s boat was on ahead, Abbas Pacha used to come down and say, ‘ Mr. Horton,’ he used to say, ‘ we must lick my uncle’s boat;’ (leastwise he did not say lick, but lie meant it in his tongue, as I might say), and then he used to go on and say, ‘ Mr. Horton,’he’d sar, ‘we’ll have a bottle of champagne together,’ says he. Now, they say the Mustapluis don’t drink, but, Lord bless us, I’ve had Abbas so overcome, as the saying is, down in the cabin, that we’ve often shut the doors to keep it a secret. Well, he’d send down the champagne, and then Abbas’ boat would creep up to Marmed’s, and then he’d send down another bottle, and then we’d get alongside ; and then another, and we’d go right ahead. I don’t mean to say that we used to put the champagne in the boiler; but, you may depend upon it, that it did more than the coals, and so it will, any day.”

Austrian dispatch

^ The man who had taken the letter into the Arsenal came back in a quarter of an hour, and told us that the eflendi was over at the Marine, a building adjacent. I sent it in by a messenger, who presently returned, and said that Sali Pacha wished to see me. I was accordingly ushered in, the ceremony of taking off my shoes being dispensed with, and found this gentleman, who has an important post in the Turkish navy, sitting on a divan at the end of a large room, looking on to the Golden Horn, and swinging the string of beads, to which 1 have before alluded. To my delight he spoke Bnglish perfectly, and was well acquainted with our metropolis. We had an agreeable chat for a few minutes, on comparison between London and Stamboul ; and then lie took charge of my hitter, telling me that the Effie was at Smyrna, but that lie would take my address, and I might calculate on its being safely delivered.

So the document was at last, to a certain extent, on its right mission; which, but for this gentleman’s courtesy, I do not suppose it would ever have been. The trouble I had in getting rid of it may show the difficulty of presenting a Turkish letter of introduction. Stampa subsequently told me that it was.a wonder how anything in the way of publicity or correspondence at Constantinople was managed at all, with streets having no names, and hundreds of people the same. lie said that a post delivery was unknown. If the people did not go after their letters they never got them; but that sometimes, even under these circumstances, they got somebody else’s, which appeared to answer just as well. Amongst the Franks this is all excellently managed. There is a letter-box, both for the Austrian and French mails; besides our own steamers. I believe the Austrian dispatch is the quickest, but the police in that empire have an ugly knack of opening all the letters that go through their hands.

An honest English dinner

That evening, a few of my kind English friends, resident at Constantinople, collected in a snug little house, on the bold hill beyond the large burying ground at Peru, and gave me a dinner — an honest English dinner, of joint and pudding, and goodly beer. It was a pleasant meeting, so far from home. It was capital to hear make the headlands over the Holden Horn echo again, through the open windows, with a tine old English sea-ballad, and thaugh with such heartiness, at the latest London jokes, that his amiable wife told me afterwards she had never known him so inclined to leave the East and return again; so much had wo stirred up his old home feelings by songs and stories. Even “Jeannette and Jeannot,” and “When other lips,” came out bran spick-and-span new; and a scene from “Box and Cox,” played extempore, with dreadful interpolations and deficiencies, was pronounced so fine a thing, that L wonder, upon the strength of the applause, the performers did not, from that moment, renounce all other pursuits but the drama.

Then we had small speeches, and homely toasts; not dismal conventional affairs, but little heartfelt bits, that came well into such companionship; and be sure that there were many in England to whose health and happiness we drank that night, three thousand miles away. And when another guest arrived late, and told us daily ephesus tours, on diplomatic authority, that the Sultan had determined not give up the poor Hungarian people who had come to him for shelter, there was such a thorough-bred British cheer, that I think that if the Emperor of Russia had heard it, it would have knocked him completely over, powerful gentleman as he is.

Our lanterns glimmered along the street of Pera that evening at an unwonted hour, quite astonishing the -watchmen; and as wo crossed the great burying ground, the dogs were sleeping about it so thickly, that they looked collecting like a flock of sheep. But they did not annoy us; onH|ie contrary, one poor animal followed us, in a most humble manner, as far as the circus; when, probably reflecting that he would overpass hig own boundaries if he came further, he gave a dismal howl of parting salutation, and was immediately lost in the darkness.

Beards assumed a most venerable appearance

It was very hot, and the road was very dusty—indeed, the whole country about appeared parched up to the last degree of drought. We put up the windows, but the dust still got in, and, before long, our beards assumed a most venerable appearance. We stopped to bait at a little wine-shed, half-way on the road, where there was a well, and where one or two Albanians, lounging about under a rude trellis of grapes, made an effective “bit.” Here we had some iced lemonade, which appeared to be all the establishment afforded, with some lumps of Turkish sweetmeat; and then we dragged on again for another half-hour, in the heat and dust, until we were deposited at the door of the Hotel d’Qrient — a fine house, furnished in the English fashion, and formerly a palace, as the toutcr had informed us. Demetri now told us that he let horses, with English saddles, to travellers; and that, if wo wished to see all the “ lions,” we must hire some, otherwise there would not bo time to do so. So we had up some stumbling ponies from the town, for which we were to pay a dollar each; and then started to visit the wonders, and be back to dinner by five o’clock.

“ Athens in six hours” is rather quick work to be sure; however, after I had been taken the round of the usual sights, I should have been sorry to have remained there much longer. But the exceeding beauty of the ruins can scarcely be overpraised; albeit, the degree of enthusiasm, real or conventional, with which one regards them, must depend entirely upon such early classical training as the traveller may have been fortunate enough to have

undergone. Yet I doubt whether I could have gazed upon those of graceful remains with greater delight than I did on this occasion, had I gone through any further preparation to visit them, than had been afforded by an ordinary public school education. Apart from their histories and their associations — their lovely symmetry, the effect of their clean sandstone color against the bright blue sky, their admirable position, and the horizon of finely swelling purple hills almost surrounding them, broken to the south-west by the silver harbor of the Piraeus, were quite sufficient to call up the most vivid sensations of delight. Their beauty, also, was enhanced by the picturesque people who idled about them — all was so artistic, so sunny, so admirably thrown together, that whichever way the eye was turned, it appeared to rest on the reality of some exquisite drop-scene.

Elgin marbles

Guardians are stationed where there is anything to knock off and carry away more portable than the Elgin marbles. The interior of the temple of Theseus is used as a museum; and the fragments arc of greater interest, oven to the most ordinary traveller, than such as he may elsewhere encounter. Here we made a luncheon from some singularly fine grapes and fresh figs, with bread, spread on part of a column, and then proceeded to the Acropolis, which Demetri had properly kept for the last visit. From hence the view was most superb, but it wanted the relief of green. Everything, for miles round, was baked up.

The channel of the Ilyssus was without water, and the barley which covers the undulating ground had all been cut, leaving only the naked hot reddish tracts of land rose festival tour. The guardians had a sort of habitation below the Propykea, and cultivated a few vegetables in small artificial gardens, the leaves of which looked quite refreshing. Amongst the masses of marble ruins which the Turks had tumbled down from the Parthenon, to make cannon-balls from, or grind up for mortar, several wild plants trailed and flourished. One of these bore a green fruit, which, being ripe, burst, into dust the instant it was touched, however gently, by the foot; and the guides appeared more anxious to call the attention of the visitors to this fact, than to the solemn glories of the Acropolis.

The superintendence of the monks

From the church, we traversed the court, in which were many fine goats; and a boy with a light iron collar round his neck—merely to show that he was a culprit—was at work, under the superintendence of the monks. This appeared to me to be a far better road to reform than the prison at Constantinople. Then we went up stairs and along an open gallery, into which the cells opened. One of these had a divan round three sides of it, with a wooden press on the other : and this was all the furniture. The walls and ceiling were of wood, and none of it was painted. The windows commanded beautiful views of the entire island, or nearly so—the sea of Marmora, and the opposite coast of Scutari; but it must have been a sad lonely and exposed place in winter.

We took our seats on the divan, concerning which article, by the way, I may just allude to an odd contradiction in our language. We call a couch to sit or lie upon, a sofa; and by a divan wc generally mean a room appropriated to smoking; now, by a sofa the Turks mean a particular room, and their divan is a long soft settle to recline on. In a little time an elderly woman brought up some rakee and preserved quince; and afterwards coffee. Pipes were also offered to the guests; and then, contributing a trifle each to the box of the convent, we took our leave.

Different to that of the scowling priests

I am sure these monks were good creatures. They were evidently very poor indeed; but there was a cheerful courtesy about them, very pleasing; and the mild intelligence of their faces was very different to that of the scowling priests who haunt the Italian cities. This convent was their world: they seldom left it, and the casual arrival of strangers was possibly their greatest excitement; for, in reality, their position was far more lonely than that of the Great St. Bernard monks, who see as much and as varied company, during the “ season,” as a Rhine hotel-keeper. Europe had been rent by convulsions, and was still in the throes of fresh troubles, hut Prince’s Island was too much out of the way for any one to disturb its tranquillity ; and so the inmates of the old convents lived on, calmly enough, waiting for death, and if they knew no great joys, they had but few sorrows.

We had great excitement all the way down the hill. The descent was on smooth grass, and our saddles were not of a first-rate description, but kept slipping on to the donkeys’ necks ; and then we all went down together. This happened to each of us three or four times. The stirrups also were fastened to the same strap, which played loosely through the saddle; so that if you made too great an inclination on one side, without counteracting it, you came over that way. I never tumbled about so much as on that short journey; hut the grass was soft, and it made fun enough city tours istanbul.

We went to another convent, close to which was a covered wooden platform, like a steward’s stand at the races, only much lower. Here three or four handsome girls were dancing a polka to their own voices, and an old monk was looking on. As they saw us approach, they stopped, and flew off, like startled deer, into the adjoining woods. We sat with the priest a little time, and made him a present of some sweetmeats, which a travelling vendor passed with at that minute. He told us that the girls had come up from the village, and that it did him good to see them dancing.

I do not wonder at this.

Calling back their pretty faces,

I do not think there are many who would not also have felt considerably better from a glimpse of them.

We spent a pleasant idle day in the woods, and got back to the village between four and five, when its most novel and characteristic feature presented itself. The whole population had turned out, to walk about in their finest clothes, up and down the promenade in front of the wooden coffee-houses. All the seats and narghiles were engaged, as well in the cafes as on the sea-view platform opposite. Some of the people had evidently taken up their positions at an early hour, to have a good place: others formed little groups in the porticos; others flitted and vended about from one party to the other.