bins: "One Abas Saul, a man of ten feet high, was digging
a grave, and happened to find the eye of Goliah, in which he thought
proper to bury himself, and so he did, all but his head, which the
Giant's eye was unfortunately not quite deep enough to receive." This, I
assure you, is the most modest lie of ten thousand. I have also read the
Turkish history which, excepting the religious part, is not fabulous,
though very possibly not true. For the Turks, having no notion of letters
and being, even by their religion, forbid the use of them, except for
reading and transcribing the Koran, they have no historians of their own,
nor any authentic records nor memorials for other historians to work
upon; so that what histories we have of that country are written by
foreigners; as Platina, Sir Paul Rycaut, Prince Cantimer, etc., or else
snatches only of particular and short periods, by some who happened to
reside there at those times; such as Busbequius, whom I have just
finished. I like him, as far as he goes, much the best of any of them:
but then his account is, properly, only an account of his own Embassy,
from the Emperor Charles the Fifth to Solyman the Magnificent. However,
there he gives, episodically, the best account I know of the customs and
manners of the Turks, and of the nature of that government, which is a
most extraordinary one. For, despotic as it always seems, and sometimes
is, it is in truth a military republic, and the real power resides in the
Janissaries; who sometimes order their Sultan to strangle his Vizir, and
sometimes the Vizir to depose or strangle his Sultan, according as they
happen to be angry at the one or the other. I own I am glad that the
capital strangler should, in his turn, be STRANGLE-ABLE, and now and then
strangled; for I know of no brute so fierce, nor no criminal so guilty,
as the creature called a Sovereign, whether King, Sultan, or Sophy, who
thinks himself, either by divine or human right, vested with an absolute
power of destroying his fellow-creatures; or who, without inquiring into
his right, lawlessly exerts that power. The most excusable of all those
human monsters are the Turks, whose religion teaches them inevitable
fatalism. A propos of the Turks, my Loyola, I pretend, is superior to
your Sultan. Perhaps you think this impossible, and wonder who this
Loyola is. Know then, that I have had a Barbet brought me from France, so
exactly like the Sultan that he has been mistaken for him