civil
and criminal codes of law, these are unalterably fixed in the Koran.
Their habits require very little furniture; "the whole inventory of a
wealthy family," says Volney, "consists in a carpet, mats, cushions,
mattresses, some small cotton clothes, copper and wooden platters for
the table, a mortar, a portable mill, a little porcelain, and some
plates of copper tinned. All our apparatus of tapestry, wooden
bedsteads, chairs, stools, glasses, desks, bureaus, closets, buffets
with their plate and table services, all our cabinet and upholstery-work
are unknown." They have no clocks, though they have watches. In short,
they are hardly more than dismounted Tartars still; and, if pressed by
the Powers of Christendom, would be able, at very short warning, to pack
up and turn their faces northward to their paternal deserts. You find in
their cities barbers and mercers; saddlers and gunsmiths; bakers and
confectioners; sometimes butchers; whitesmiths and ironmongers; these
are pretty nearly all their trades. Their inheritance is their all;
their own acquisition is nought. Their stuffs are from the classical
Greeks; their dyes are the old Tyrian; their cement is of the age of the
Romans; and their locks may be traced back to Solomon. They do not
commonly engage either in agriculture or in commerce; of the cultivators
of the soil I have said quite enough in a foregoing Lecture, and their
commerce seems to be generally in the hands of Franks, Greeks, or
Armenians, as formerly in the hands of the Jews.[82]

The White Huns took to commerce and diplomacy in the course of a century
or two; the Saracens in a shorter time unlearned their barbarism, and
became philosophers and experimentalists; what have the Turks to show to
the human race for their long spell of prosperity and power?

As to their warfare, their impracticable and unprogressive temperament
showed itself even in the era of their military and political
ascendancy, and had much to do, as far as human causes are concerned,
with their defeat at Lepanto. "The signal for engaging was no sooner
given," says the writer in the "Universal History," "than the Turks with
a hideous cry fell on six galeasses, which lay at anchor near a mile
ahead of the confederate fleet." "With a hideous cry,"--this was the
true barbarian onset; we find it in the Red Indians and the New
Zealanders; and it is noticed of the Seljukians, the predecessors of the
Ottomans, in their celebrated engagement