cannot be pronounced to be financially exhausted as long as she offers such a virgin field to a puzzled chancellor of the Ottoman Exchequer. Nor would the advantage be merely financial. — The property thus locked up in the mosques, apparently for religious but really entailed for private purposes, would, after its disengagement from obligation to support the mosques and the Ulema, compel the State to pay salaries to this body. They would thus become servants of the State and more amenable to its power. If the independence of this Ecclesiastical Corporation were, as in some European states, a check on the despotism of the Civil Government, one would not propose the change. But it so happens that this body (in modern times destitute of erudition and activity) is really a drag on all the improving tendencies of the Government, and lends its momentum only to a retrograde and fanatical policy.-But good may come out of evil; out of the present decay of the Ottoman finances may spring reforms replete with vital sap for the coming generation, however beset they may be with discouraging difficulties for the present. More land too would come into the Market, and the tourniquet of this compound of lay and ecclesiastical liens being removed, the life's blood of economical existence would beat with a freer pulse. A general civilization of the Turks, in the European sense of the word, I hold to be impossible. If the obstacles to reform are in the traditions and principles of the Ulema, and not in the written word of the Koran, the indisposition to science is in the Mongol race, and not in the Moslem religion. The Koran, if inferior to the New Testament in essentials-is equal to the works of the Stoic Philosophers in dogmatic morality, and immeasurably superior to them in fervour of eloquence and religious sentiment. The cause of the present discredit of Islamism is its hold on an Ugrian race that is dominant over so large a territory; for the Arab period of self-government in Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Andalusia, was dis tinguished by erudition, science and architecture. Fortunately for the Germanic and Romano-Celtic races, Christianity forstalled Islamism in the West of Europe. But if by some mysterious dispensation of Providence the Koran, preceding the New Testament, had taken possession of the higher races, the preponderance of Islamism would have been greater than it now is. In spite of this indisposition towards European science, education and civilization, on the part of the Turks, I hold that it would be unwise to disturb Ottoman supremacy, even if present treaties did not exist for there is no race in the land fit to take their place.-Certainly not the Bulgarians, who are so numerous and who extend all through Macedonia and almost touch the gulf of Saloniki, - they being utterly deficient in the courage and capacity to carry on the business of an Empire. The Greeks are equally unfit to take the place of the Turks,-forthey have a very feeble numerical basis in Turkey, except in Thessaly and Epirus, and even there have easily been put down; their rule moreover would be utterly unacceptable to the Slaavic population forming the great majority of Turkey in Europe. As to most of the schemes for putting Christians and Moslems on a footing of equality, I hold them to be illusory. Equality before the law must certainly be pushed through, not only nominally but virtually. But in the social and political sphere either Ottoman supremacy must remain or anarchy must ensue. Europe can make up exotically the science and material civilization which Turkey wants, but Europe cannot infuse into the good natured Bulgarian the confidence and energy required to rule a state or lead armies. Europe, even in the interests of Turkey, ought to give Greece a better boundary; but in the great moral quality of sincerity, the intelligent and mercantile Greek is certainly very far from being equal to the Turk. I now took leave of Constantinople, and with reference to all the above mentioned interesting topics it is im possible for me sufficiently to acknowledge the valuable information which I have, during many years, received from that most accomplished Orientalist, Mr. C. Alison, now Her Britannic Majesty's Minister Plenipotentiary in Persia. CHAPTER XV. RETURN HOME BY BERLIN. Having now recovered some strength, I embarked for Trieste in the Austrian steamer with an interesting variety of passengers, High Church and Low Church, sane and insane-Turcophile and Philhellene. One was the learned and pious Bishop of Malta and Gibraltar on a tour through his diocese, to which Constantinople and Trieste both belong. Another passenger was a French maniac, but quite harmless. His face streaming with perspiration in the torrid heat of a Mediterranean Midsummer, and rolling his eyes like Bocage in a Boulevard melodrame,-he related how his father and mother had been frightfully murdered and how Providence had spared him for the express purpose of sending to the Emperor of China a sure plan for the suppression of the rebellion that is afflicting that part of the world. He whispered mysteriously to me that the whole art of diplomacy is to ask for blue when you want red. — “Voulez-vous du bleu? demandez du rouge. Voulez-vous du rouge? demandez du bleu." We had also a popular dissenting preacher whose oily address, and pulpit intonation gave a pleasant zest to the breakfast table. One morning he asked us if - but one he had the look of an Italian revolutionist, gentleman declared that his rosy countenance was very unlike the bilious complexion of those choleric innovators, and for myself I thought his aldermanly rotundity of contour savoured more of roastbeef and plum-pudding, than of meagre macaroni and olives. "Would you believe", said he, wiping his expansive brow with his handkerchief, and speaking with a clerical suavity of inflection that was delectable to hear, "that I have lately come out of jail?" We were all still incredulous, declaring that it was impossible, for he was most unlike a jail bird. "Perfectly true", said he;-"I had a taste of a Neapolitan prison in consequence of a revolutionary cockade having been found in my writing desk." This revolutionary emblem was straightway produced to the passengers amidst considerable laughter, and proved to be a two penny penwiper of red and blue cloth. "Well, Doctor, and what did you say to this serious charge?-what answer did you give?" -- "The answer that a Briton ought to give.-I boldly avowed that I was a revolutionist,-on which the shirro said: "Aye, aye! I thought so, the truth is coming out." -"Yes" continued the gallant and reverend Doctor"I told him I was not the man to shrink from my profession, but that the only profession I practised, and the only revolution I contemplated, was to turn the thoughts of the sons and daughters of vanity to the kingdom to come;-but my appeals were vain-so I was sent off to Naples-a martyr, not to my colours, political or religious, but to those of my penwiper.-It soon appeared however that the police authorities of Naples were ashamed of their provincial subordinates, and here I am, as great a revolutionist as ever in the sense of my profession." I took a glance at Vienna and Berlin on my way home, and saw the principal political persons in each capital, being anxious to have some idea of the condition of Austria and Prussia in relation to the Oriental crisis. Arrived at the former capital, I found some pleasant English people, conspicuous among whom was our fellowcountry-woman Mrs. Norton; for it must be confessed that the aristocracy of beauty and genius united in one person, with the impulses of a noble and generous nature, form a pluralism of not an every-day order. If Corinne and Recamier rolled into one do not constitute the salt of the earth, what does? It was to the Paradies Garten that a choice spirit or two adjourned from her charming family circle, to enjoy the beauties of nature, the wide view of the suburbs, and the wooded slopes of the Kahlenberg; while the strains of distant music harmonized with the softening glow of a sunset in June and formed a symphony to delicious converse on art and poesy. But the momentous military and political crisis also occupied the thoughts of those accomplished persons, and I could not avoid remembering that nearly fifty years before Madame de Stael had sat on this very bastion, enjoying the glorious material prospect, and with the moral eye looked through the spectacles of August Wilhelm Schlegel on the rapid and solid elevation of the literature of Germany simultaneously with the crumbling ruins of her political fortunes; for Goethe and Schiller were the contemporaries of a Mack, and it was the lyre of the bard rather than the trumpet of the triumph that heralded the return of Germany to the consciousness of a national existence. But alas! the vain attempt to fill the tubs of Tantalus is the moral of the history of this restless lower world. After all the struggles are ended -after nations meet in congress to partition Europe anew; after the victorious and the fortunate have entered on possession, and the conquered and curtailed have resigned themselves to their fate-the world, after a brief season, again awakes to the blast of the trumpet and the roll of the drum, and the once light-hearted British or French subaltern, who wooed the black eyes of Andalusia and slashed his way through the Peninsula, but now well |