Buyuk Djarniya

From the Turkish BuyukDjarniya (15th century) — at the corner of Legue and Alexander Stamboliiski Blvd; Banya Bashi Djamiya (16th century), opposite the Central Supermarket; the Black Mosque (16th century), now the Seven Saints’ Church – at the comer of Graf Ignatiev and Tsar Shishman streets.

Small churches with interesting mural paintings: St Nikolai – Tsar Kaloyan St.; St Petka – in the courtyard of the building on the corner of Stamboliiski Blvd and Tsar Kaloyan Street; St Petka Samardjiiska — in the pedestrian sub-way on Lenin Square.

More recent monuments: Monument to the Liberators, Narodno Subranie Square, to the memory of the Russian liberators of Bulgaria from Ottoman mle, the work of the Italian sculptor Arnoldo Zocchi; Alexander Nevsky Memorial Church, on the square of the same name (in its basement the Crypt houses an original exhibition of icons); Monument to the Soviet Army — in the park between Rousski Blvd, Tolbukhin Blvd and Evlogi Georgiev Blvd; the Obelisk to those who fell in the antifascist struggle – on the common grave in Freedom Park; the Georgi Dimitrov Mausoleum – on the Ninth of September Square; Lenin’s Monument – on Lenin Square.

Museums: Archaeological Museum – Alexander Stamboliiski Blvd; Ethnographic Museum – The Ninth of September Square (in the former royal palace); Natural Science Museum, 1 Rousski Blvd; Museum of the Revolutionary Movement in Bulgaria, 14 Rousski Blvd; National Military History Museum, 23 Skobelev Blvd; Church History and Archaeological Museum, 19 Lenin Square; Museum of Bulgaro-Soviet Friendship, 4 Klement Gottwald Blvd; Museum of the History of Sofia, 27 Exarch Yossif Street ephesus sightseeing; Dimiter Blagoev Museum- House, Lajos Cossuth Street; Georgi Dimitrov Museum-House, 66 Opulchenska Street; Alexander Stamboliiski Museum- House, 44 Souhodol Street; Ivan Vazov Museum-House, 10 Ivan Vazov Street; Petko and Pencho Slaveikov Museum- House, 138 Rakovski Street; Peyo Yavorov Museum-House, 136 Rakovski Street; Hristo Smyrnenski Museum-House, 116 Emil Shekerdjiiski Street; Nikola Vaptsarov Museum-House, 37′ Angel Kunchev Street

National Art Gallery — Ninth of September Square, in the former royal palace.

The National Assembly

Interesting buildings: The National Assembly, the University of Sofia, the National Theatre, the Palace of Justice, the Central Home of the People’s Army, the Ministry of Defence, the Holy Synod Building, the Bulgarian National Bank, Universiade Hall, the Central Supermarket, etc.

Parks: Freedom Park, Hristo Smyrnenski Park (Western Park), Vladimir Zaimov Park, Park of the Doctors’ Monument, etc.

Major hotels: Park Hotel Moskva – tel. 45-51-21; Sofia, 4-Narodno Subranie Square — tel. 87-88-21; Balkan, 2 Lenin Square – tel. 87-65-43; Bulgaria, 4 Rousski Blvd —tel. 87-19-77; Pliska, 87 Lenin Blvd — tel. 72-37-21; Hemus, 31 Georgi Traikov Blvd – tel. 66-14-15; Slavia, Hippodrouma Housing Estate – tel. 52-55-51; Serdika, 2 Vladimir Zaimov Blvd – tel. 44-34-11; Slavyanska Besseda, 127 Rakovski Street tel. 88-36-91; Vitosha, 9 Isker Street- tel. 88-01-12; Sevastopol, 116 Rakovski Street – tel. 87-59-41; Preslav, 3 Triaditsa Street – tel. 87-65-86; Lyulin, 2 Triaditsa Street, tel. 88-56-42.

Well, the time has now come to get away from it all and go back to Mother Nature to take a breath of fresh air and mull over your impressions. Sofia is blessed in this respect, too, for its surroundings are of unique scenic beauty.So get your car ready and let’s go! The first place to go to, of course, is Mount Vitosha, the capital’s outstanding landmark and an integral part of its landscape. Moreover, on the way there is a little gem that you simply can’t afford to miss.

You’d hardly suspect that the little unassuming Boyana Church in a village in the foothills of Mount Vitosha, a mere six miles from the city centre, is one of Bulgaria’s foremost monuments of medieval art. But just go inside and you’ll have another ‘think’ coming for there you will find 13th-century murals that are veritable masterpieces of medieval art.

After leaving this little art treasure, you’ll be in the very heart of the mountain in less than half an hour. There you may visit Kopitoto (The Hoof),a modern hotel with restaurant built on a big rock projecting out into space, offering you a wonderful panoramic view of Sofia and the whole surrounding plain. If you drive on for another ten minutes, you will reach the famous Zlat- ni Mostove (Golden Bridges), a picturesque spot with a veritable

river of stones washed by the waters of a real river, and where you will find a very cosy Tyrolese-style restaurant.

Work of much anxious discrimination

Now the action and reaction of these two competing sets of impulses undoubtedly makes the protection of our ancient buildings a very complex and very difficult problem. Both sets are very powerful, both act in varying degrees, and the final compromise between the rival sets of claims is necessarily the work of much anxious discrimination. I venture to maintain that the complication and antagonism is such that no hard-and-fast doctrine can be laid down. Each case must stand on its merits. Each decision must be the laborious reconcilement of conflicting interests. Our cause has suffered from over-arbitrary dogmas and some affectation of contempt for the plain necessities of material existence. Every one outside the Tuileries laughed at Edmond About, when he told the Romans of to-day that the only thing left for them was ‘ to contemplate their ruins.’ I wish myself that they had contemplated their ruins a little longer, or had allowed us to contemplate them, instead of seeking to turn Rome into a third-rate Paris. But we shall be laughed at if we ever venture to tell the nineteenth century that it must con-template its ruins.

The trust imposed on the century is not to contemplate its ruins, but to protect its ancient buildings. Now that will be done if the century can learn to feel the true sacredness of ancient buildings, if it will admit that the building stands on the same footing with picture, statue, and poem, that it is unique, inimitable, irreplaceable; and, above all, has its own consecration of place, continuity, and record. Admit this first, and then we will consider the claims of the present, their convenience, and their means. But the burden of proof ought always to be pressed imperiously against those whose claim is to destroy, to convert, or to extend.

Ancient building

When every other means fail, when irresistible necessity is proved, it may be a sad duty to remove an ancient building, to add to it, or to incorporate it. But this can never justify what we now call restoring,’ a process which makes it as much like the original as Madame Tussaud’s figures are like the statesman or general they represent. It can never justify re-decoration — cutting out ancient art-work and replacing it by new work or machine work. It can never justify archaeological exercises — I mean the patching on to old buildings new pieces of our own invention, which we deliberately present as fabrications of the antique. These things are mere Wardour Street spurious bric-d-brac, no more like ancient buildings than a schoolboy’s iambics are like Yeschylus. How often do committees, dean and chapter, public offices, and even Parliament itself private turkey tours, treat our great national possessions as if they were mere copy books, on the face of which our modern architects were free to practise the art of composing imitations of the ancients. Such buildings become much like a Palimpsest manuscript; whereon, over a lost tragedy of Sophocles, some wretched monk has scribbled his barbarous prose. How often is the priceless original for ever lost beneath the later stuff!

In these remarks I have strictly confined myself to general principles: first, because I do not pretend to any special or technical knowledge which would entitle me to criticise particular works, but mainly because I believe our true part to be the maintenance of general principles. If we fall into discussions of detail we may lose hold of our main strength. We have to raise the discussion into a higher atmosphere than that of architectural anachronism. We cannot pitch our tone too high. It is not architectural anachronism which we have to check: it is the safety of our national records, our national self-respect, the spirit of religious reverence that we have to uphold. We have to do battle against forgery, irreverence, and desecration. Let us raise a voice against the idea that any work of art can ever, under any circumstances, be really ‘ restored; ’ against the idea that any ancient art-work can usefully be ‘imitated,’ against the idea that ancient monuments are a corpus vile whereon to practise antiquarian exercises; against the habit of forging spurious monuments, as the monks in the Middle Ages forged spurious charters; finally, against the idea that the convenience of to-day is always to outweigh the sacredness of the past.

The Musie Dupuytren

This Conciergerie, with the hall of the Cordelier Club, the Musie Dupuytren, is the only extant building in Paris, which is closely associated with great scenes of the Revo-lution. The Bastille is gone, the Tuileries, the Hotel de Ville, the Hall of the Convention in the R. de Rivoli, the Jacobin Club, the prisons, the Temple, Abbaye, La Force, Chatelet, and the rest. So, too, the tombs of Mirabeau, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marat, Louis xvi., and Marie Antoinette no longer hold their bones, and cenotaphs record the spot where they were laid. Etiam periere sepulchra. New Haussmannic streets cover the soil, wherein the ashes of Danton and Vergniaud, Charlotte Corday and Madame Roland, moulder unknown. Of the Revolution no buildings remain but only sites; and the only edifices, which survive to speak to us of the September massacres and the Terror, are the dining-hall of the followers of St. Francis and the palace of St. Louis, the knight and crusader.

In spite of destruction and reconstruction, the history pf the great edifices of old Paris is wonderfully instructive, even that of the buildings which have wholly disappeared. But they must be studied in the learned and elaborate works, such as those of Dulaure, Piganiol, Viollet-le-Duc, Lacroix, Lenoir, Guilhermy, Fournier, Hoffbauer, Fergus- son, Hamerton, in the Histoire Generale, and in Paris a travers les Ages, in the splendid series of etchings and engravings of old Paris, which may be found in the library of the Carnavalet Museum, and in our British Museum. Bastille, Louvre, Hdtel de Ville, Tuileries, Luxembourg, the Citd, St. Germain, St. Genevilve, would each require an essay, or a volume with maps and plans and restorations, to make them intelligible private tours istanbul. But those who seek to know what Paris has been in the long succession of ages may still revive it in their minds, with the aid of the mass of literature that is open to them, and if they will study not only the extant churches, but such works of domestic art as the Hotel Cluny, and Hotel de Sens, Hotel la Valette, the house in the Corn’s la Reine, and the Hotel Carnavalet.

Ducerceau and M6ryon

A careful study of Silvestre, Ducerceau, and M6ryon will give some idea of old Paris, with its vast walls, gates, towers, castles, its crowded churches, its immense abbeys, its narrow winding streets, its fetid cemeteries, gloomy courts and impasses, its filthy lanes, and its bridges loaded with houses. We may linger about the old remnants of churches, the flotsam and jetsam of the Mediaeval Catholicism, such bits as the tower of St. Jacques, and the portals of the two St. Germains and of St. Nicolas des Champs, the old churches of St. Jnlien le Pauvre, and St. Martin des Champs, the church of St. Sdverin, and the chapel of the Chdteau de Vincennes.

Then let us study the tombs in St. Germain des Pris, of St. Denis, St. Etienne du Mont: and then we may go on to the tomb that all Englishmen visit — the tomb which I always feel to be the grandest of all sepulchral conceptions (to be set beside the tomb of Theod- oric at Ravenna, and the tomb of Cecilia Metella on the Appian way), almost the one work of modern art, which is at once colossal, noble, and pathetic — I mean the mighty vault beneath the dome of the Invalidcs, where the greatest soldier and the worst ruler of our age sleeps at last in peace, guarded by the veterans of France.

We need not deny to modern Paris the gift of charm; we may admit that her museums and libraries, her collections, and her treasures are inexhaustible to the fit student; but far more impressive is the history of this memorable city, with its vast range of time, of variety, of association — with its record of the dawn of Western civilisation, of Catholicism and Feudalism, of the Renascence, and the modern world, of the Revolution of the last century, and the Imperialism of this century — with its dust enriched with the bones of those who in things of the soul and in things of war, in the love of beauty, and in the passion for new life, have dared and done memorable deeds, from the days of Genevieve and Clotilda, the Louis and the Henrys, down to the two Napoleons, and the three Republics.

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.”