transparent than the stream, and intimates the seductions of the gay, idle, insouciant, dissipated, and, if truth must be told, wicked capital of Wallachia.

Even in our luxurious day, wanderers beyond railways, and into regions little trodden, occasionally find ample cause for complaint of miscalled houses of entertainment. The inns about the Lower Danube are rather of a savage sort, and those at Giurgevo and Galatz, especially at the former place, are decidedly bad; a Spanish posada is not exactly the kind of hostelry one would select for a long sojourn; even in comfortable Germany, when one gets off the main tracks, one often finds rough commons and hard quarters in the small towns and village gasthauser. But I suppose there is no inn in the world, ranking as the first in a capital city, from which a person of ordinary palate, patience, and purse, feels more rejoiced to escape than from the n.uch-trumpeted Hôtel d'Angleterre, at Pera, Constantinople. Doubt less the author of Eothen little thought, when vaunting the activity, resources, and polyglot accomplishments of his travelling attendant, that he was providing future fame and custom for one of the most detestable caravanserais to which, for want of a better, Englishmen ever thronged. Missiri's hotel, the best in Pera, is one of the worst and dearest in Europe. Small rooms, bad wines, unwholesome dinners of a bastard French description, enormous charges, and gross impertinence, constitute the programme of an establishment which, during the war, was so overwhelmed with custom that it frequently rejected, in one morning, as many guests as would have filled it from cellar to garret. The notion had got abroad that it was the only possible inn in Pera; that at all the others you were poisoned, and plundered, and flea-bitten to an unendurable extent; in short, that it was the correct house of resort. When an idea of this kind takes root amongst Englishmen, argument and proof are alike in vain to eradicate it. The truth is that there were other hotels, very little, if at all worse, than that of Angle

terre, and where, if the dizing-room was rather smaller, the civility was cerainly much greater. But this was not credited; and the English flocked to Missiri's, until no Englishman who could possibly find roomthough it were but a shakedown in a subterranean suite, to which lastcomers were consigned-would go elsewhere, because at Missiri's alone was he sure to find his acquaintances and countrymen. So that the hotel had literally the pick of the innumerable English passing to and from the Crimea, or abiding for a time in Constantinople. It was in the position of a dealer who finds ten times as many buyers as his stock will supply, and who sells at his own price, delivering his goods with a grumble and a snarl, as if he reproached himself at the last moment with not having been more extortionate. The cool insolence with which this great crowded, noisy, comfortless tavern rejected every species of complaint, however well founded, bidding malcontents to go farther and fare worse, the unblushing assurance with which the most exorbitant charges were defended and maintained, the grudging surliness with which the merest trifle was conceded when out of the established routine of the house, the impertinent opposition frequently made to the private arrangements of guests, caused one to sigh for the comforts and civility of an English village inn or French provincial hostelry-each fifth-rate in its own country; but oh! how superior in all essentials to the best hotel at Pera!

From this, most joyfully, on a morning early in May, did I turn my steps, followed by two porters bearing my moderate baggage, and descend that precipitous and perilous street which, its surface agreeably varied by loose paving-stones, dead rats, and deep holes, is the most direct route to the Bosphorus. The journey is not fifteen minutes long, but one passes through much variety. The upper part of the street is rather busy. First comes the Russian embassy, then scraping and cleaning preparatory to the reception of a new ambassador. was used, during the war, as a hospital for French officers. A little lower down are the English post

It

office and the French army post; also some French buvettes or wineshops, with inscriptions on their windows, and walls, such as one sees at the barriers and in the faubourgs of Paris, announcing the excellence and price of the wine and absinthe vended within. A hotel succeeds to the English post, and just opposite to it are some tottering uninhabited houses, such as there are many of in Pera, uselessly encumbering ground of immense building value, and threatening to fall into the balconies over the way. Below this the street gets narrow, and assumes a solitary and mysterious aspect. Armenian families dwell here; and here, as may be known by the close latticeshutters that defend every opening, are the houses of Mussulmans. No sign of life at door or window, and few passengers in the street. You meet perhaps a porter toiling up with one of those tremendous loads, which Turks alone have the power and knack of bearing; his sinewy brown legs bare, and the sweat raining from his shaggy eyebrows; further on, you come upon a group of British cavalry officers, just across from Scutari, upon luncheon and lounging intent; lower down you overtake a commissariat official in blue uniform, with velvet facings, rosy, and inclined to corpulence, as commissaries should be, and not unfrequently are. He is in command of a small party of soldiers, escorting a string of Turks, laden with specie for the Crimea. Then you are in your turn overtaken by one in staff uniform, mounted on a handsome Arab, too good to be knocked about amongst these abominable pavements and holey places, and followed by an interpreter in cap of red and gold. It is the gallant and popular Major B one of Charles James Napier's Scinde lambs, who reigns supreme over the depot of the Turkish Contingent on the Bosphorus, and is on his way to Stamboul to smoke the pipe of peace and hold converse of grave import with the worthy Seraskier Mehemet Rushdi Pasha-one of the few honest and disinterested statesmen, be it said en passant, of whom Turkey at the present day can boast, And now a short turn to the left and another to the right take us through a series of

old-clothes shops, in and outside of which is exhibited the most extraordinary collection of cast-off garments and ancient rags that the eccentric fancy of a crazy painter ever threw together. Houndsditch would stare aghast at the motley museum of toggery, to which all the nations of the earth have contributed. Then we got into Pipe Street; so christened from the occupation of its inhabitants, who are seen sitting in their open shops, which are exactly like wooden boxes with one side taken out, kneading and moulding red clay, and gilding and carving it with much cunning, and fashioning cherry and jasmin sticks, and fitting mouthpieces of glass and amber, and so composing the tchibouk-instrument well beloved by Turks, and well enough suited to a sedate people, sedentary in habits and composed in motions, but ill adapted to Western vivacity and briskness, and a very sorry exchange for the commodious cigar. After passing Pipe Street, one gets into the region of strong scents. We will give a wide berth, if you please, to that butcher's shop which forms the corner; but wide though it be, it suffices not, and we are nearly knocked down by the whiff that overtakes us. We pass a block of grimy, tumbledown houses, at whose open windows and doors are seen what we at first take to be a party of boys in gaudy masquerade dresses. They are Armenian women, tawdrily attired, for the most part in jackets and loose trousers, having upon their heads fantastical caps of gaudy embroidered cloth, and in their mouths large paper cigars. This street is known amongst the British, and particularly the maritime portion of the population of Pera, Galata, and Tophaneh, as Kummupjonni Street, a name on whose etymology we are pondering when we are enveloped and assailed by such a diabolical and horrible stench that all reflection and reasoning are at once expelled from our head. It is like passing Death's laboratory, just as a bottle of Concentrated Essence of Cholera is broken. How anybody can live for a day within a thousand yards of this dreadful exhalation appears miraculous. Yet the neighbourhood is

densely peopled, and the author of the perfume, a fabricator of a mess of faded vegetables soaked in fetid vinegar a preparation much approved and consumed by the Turks stands in his shop looking healthy and comely, and seemingly unaffected by the miasma he evokes from a sort of sewer into which the superfluous acids and steaming residue of his cauldron flow through a greasy grating. We fly with a shudder, the effluvia pursuing us, and it is hours before the reminiscence entirely leaves our nostrils, chased thence by the fresh breezes of the Euxine.

The Ferdinando Primo, Austrian Lloyds' steamer, advertised to sail at noon that day, was smoking at her anchorage hard by Seraglio Point when I pushed off from the dilapidated jetty of Tophaneh. As my caïque neared her I saw there was no need for hurry, or chance of her sailing at the appointed time. She was environed, besieged, blockaded, by a flotilla of the miscellaneous craft that swarm in the Golden Horn. Of all places in the world, I believe Constantinople, its harbour and environs, to be that which affords most studies for the painter, whether his taste be for landscape, groups, physiognomy, or buildings, and there were a thousand to be found here in the congregation of boats and miscellany of races that pressed, splashed, rub bed, ground, screamed, scolded, and swore against the sides of the slovenly Austrian craft, whose decks were a chaos of lumber and a hive of humanity. My two athletic and picturesque Greeks, in their red skull-caps, loose shirts, and short trousers of striped muslin, their berry-brown breasts and magnificent legs bare, their splendid mustaches-which a British Guardsman would have thought cheap at a twelvemonth's pay - twisting out, like the tendrils of a vine, on either side of their classical countenances, drove the nozzle of their slender skiff into a narrow opening in the outer line of boats and lighters, which were five or six deep around the steamer, following up the intrusion by a volley of those colloquial amenities common amongst the boatmen, porters, robbers, beggars, and canaille of Constantinople that is to say, amongst

nine-tenths of the entire population of that most disreputable capital and its suburbs. The Billingsgate of the Bosphorus must be heard and understood for its richness to be appreciated; its furious vehemence makes every stranger wonder that it so rarely leads to blows. In the case of my oarsmen it did not even lead to a passage to the vessel's gangway. Turkish women, looking like bundles of particoloured rags cast into the bottom of boats, scarcely vouchsafed a glance of their calm serious dark eyes at the noisy intruders; lightermen opposed to us the passive resistance of their heavy-laden barges; three dirty-faced English merchant sailors, extricating themselves from the press, brought their heavy broadbottomed ship's-boat against the bows of our caïque, making her lose what little vantage she had gained, at which I thought my Greeks would have torn out their mustaches, or committed suicide on the spot, or done some other desperate deed in the excess of their frantic fury. And here, before quitting Constantinople, perhaps, and I hope, forever (for Stamboul, which in Turkish estimation is but one remove from Paradise, is a most detestable residence to a civilised Christian), I will just destroy a popular delusion, originating, I believe, with Byron, with respect to the convenience and agreeableness of the "light caïque,” that description of boat being about the most uncomfortable I am acquainted with. I do not here refer, to fine, roomy, eight-oared caïques, in which you sit on well-cushioned benches, and with perfect convenience, six or eight persons if you please, whilst in front of you are your eight or ten rowers, and in rear, on an elevated poop, the helmsman with an umbrella, at sight of which parasol, and of the multitudinous oars, and at the general aspect of the whole, the guards turn out wherever you pass, and arms are presented to you all the way up the Bosphorus, no matter who or what you are, because you might be a pasha, punctilious in matters of etiquette, in which case the soldiers might get the stick for omitting the proper forms. But to keep up a craft of this sort, with its numerous