ardanelles, make up his book as he travelled overland from
Constantinople to Jannina, _en route_ to Tower Stairs. This is the
approved track, or, perhaps, it may be up the Danube in the Austrian
steamer. Such an expedition is capital fun, no doubt, and to be
recommended to any of our friends with a little loose cash, and some six
weeks' holiday. It introduces to many notabilities, first-rate in their
way, but not to that singular notability, the genuine old Osmanli. He is
a branch of the ethnographical tree that will not flourish in European
atmosphere: though the same exuberance of vigour that first sent forth
the mighty shoot from central Asia, has prevailed to pass through the
feeble defences of the West. It is as an overgrown weakling that he
exists in our quarter of the world. His eyes are without fire, his
manners without the stamp of originality. He succumbs beneath the
presence of the Frank,--the hated and despised, and yet the feared and
the envied. The better feelings of his nature suffer from the constant
presence of those whose superiority he is forced to admire, but whose
personal character he naturally detests. Such conflict of feeling cannot
but be with detriment to the spirit, which, so fettered, refuses the
generous offices of brotherhood, and yields the debt of civility only
from policy or by constraint. How different is this man in his proper
country! where the usages and language, and ideas are unmixedly those
which have been his father's before him; where the leading idea of
_gaoors_ is, that they are infidel dogs, who eat pork and are
unenlightened of Islam; and where every one firmly believes that the
whole set of Franks are allowed to occupy and rule only by the clemency
of their high and mighty lord the Padishah! Here the Turk may
condescend, and here he can be truly generous and hospitable. The Frank
comes as a wanderer from his own remote, settlement (somewhere or other
at the world's end,) to see the lords of the earth, the true believers.
He is a poor ignorant stranger who cannot speak a word of intelligible
language. It is kind, and gratifying to self-esteem, to receive such an
one, and show him those good things that shall make him sigh to return
to his own forlorn fatherland. Besides all this, the outward
modifications affecting the European Turk spoil his nationality. The
reforms of Mahmoud, and of the present sultan, have wofully cut up the
appearance of their subjects; and, of course, su