and against Richard, against Charles and against
James; so let us not now, snug in port, sit on
the pier-head, sneering and laughing at the poor
fishing-boat still battling and writhing under the
storm?

But one feeling, on that day of the disclosure,
filled the stores of Galata and the cafés of Pera,
and that was, deep regret that so wise, just, and
temperate a conspiracy had not been successful.
The wisest men among the Turks had been heard
to say so, within the very precincts of the Porte
itself. Everybody had long felt that the country
was rushing to ruin, and preferred the first throw
out into the red ditch to the crush and smash
against the stone wall or the turnpike-gate.

I believe that the day the news had come of
the using the bowstring, not a hand would have
shaken or a face turned pale in the shops or
banking-houses of Galata and Pera. I am sure
the sun would not have hid his face or the moon
put a cloudy handkerchief to her eyes. Lonely
as Pompey on the sea-shore, that poor, dead
debauchee would have been thrown on gilded
cushions, the courtier flies kept from him only,
perhaps, by the loving hand of some poor
wronged and forgotten exile of Circassia. But
let him take care; there are bowstrings yet in
Turkey, and hands to use them, if the galling
chain be not soon broken and the pasha dogs
whipped back to their Stamboul barrack
kennels!

But let me not talk of the conspiracy as
crushed and unsuccessful; it was rather
repressed than crushed, its failure was almost
a victory. There have been conspiracies so
wide spread, so vast, so dangerous, so indicative
of decay and national ruin, that kings have not
dared to punish them. This was one of those—
no head has yet fallen, no blood has yet been
spilt; banishment to Greece, or beautiful free
green Zante, is no great punishment; it is like
the penalty you pay at forfeits, when you have
to kiss a lady's hand, or eat a rose-leaf salad.
Men thought they had found a rat-hole in the
floor of the house built on the sand (which is
the Turkish Empire), and when they lifted
planks, lo! it widened to an old pit-mouth
full of black and yawning destruction. The man
who goes down into his Sicilian cellar for the
Blue Seal, and finds it turned since yesterday into
the crater of a volcano, could not have been
more frightened than the imbecile Sultan. How
pale the gilded fool turned when on the long
roll of hateful names he read his own brother's
first.

Quick as murderers' shovels over the gashed
corpse, went the vizirs' spades to cover up the
hateful thing, and conceal it from the light
of day. The editor of the Pera paper was
silenced; he dare tell nothing; no one knew
anything; cautious lying reports were sent to
foreign courts; even our great Times itself came
out with miserable scantlings of the plot, its
dangers pared away.

The Sultan's brother had been confronted
with the conspirators and had come reasonably
well out of the ordeal; yet, mud will stick;
and it is an unpleasant thing to think, you
live with a brother who has been even tacitly
cognisant of a conspiracy. A man may not say
"yes," but he may nod his head, and that
generally means assent. Crime there could be none,
for to slay the Sultan would have only been
zeal for the Koran. Then, the thousands of
soldiers clamouring for their right, were they to
be mowed down like the old Janissaries, or paid,
and so confessed to be the Sultan's pretorian
masters? A small, strong man, regardless of a
thousand yelling turbans, would have felled the
growing hydra; the small, weak man patted it
on the head, and threw it sops to stay its
hundred mouths: willing to wound, the Sultan
was afraid to strike. This Augustulus
instantly threw the soldiers their eight months'
pay, and began to grant the very reforms that
this conspiracy was organised to obtain. Let a
dog bite you once with impunity, and it takes
no prophet to know what reception you will
meet with from that dog the next time you pass
the dangerous door. But fools learn nothing, and
forget nothing, as Napoleon said of the wretched,
worn-out Bourbons. It will yet be seen if this
weak man will stop his selfish vice and reckless
palace-building; probably he will, but only
for a time. Palace-building is his one idea, his
one amusement, his one taste, his special
extravagance. What can the most blue-devilled,
yawning potentate in the world, do without his
palace-building? It is his one exertion, to
watch the builders: his one excitement, to
arrange matters with his European upholsterers:
his one intellectual amusement, to be earwigged
by the castle in Spain architect: his one financial
bit of business, to look over his architect's
bills: his one great change for the year, to move
from the last but one river palace to the very
last—the bran new one. Besides, pray pity the
sorrows of the poor weak man, who, having lost
his own religion and got no better, is obliged to
fill up the vacancy with the inevitable substitute,
superstition. The Sultan is superstitious,
and is said to believe, as tenaciously as he can
believe anything, that Allah will not let him die
as long as he has a palace in a state of
incompletion; so on he goes building, and his bills
grow faster than his buildings.

This superstition, like most others, I imagine
is very old, it is just a fossil bit of Paganism,
like our English witch creed, our amulets, and
our charms. In Spain they seldom (for
instance) finish a church, partly from want of
funds, and partly from a belief that this
incompletion checks the devil's envy, and chokes
off the evil eye. The dread of exciting the bad
spirit's envy, is as old as the Ionian Greeks, vide
the ring of Polycrates, and the story of Crœsus
and Solon, in Herodotus. In Greece, too, I have
heard legends of a certain mad French Duchess,
who kept building houses under the same belief,
but who died at last, in spite of her recipe, her
truthful doctor's assurances, Ninon de l'Enclos
cosmetic, and everything.

So at least the Sultan has precedent for
his folly—was there ever folly without precedents?