Doctor Johnson affirmed it to be the "common
mon sewer of Paris and of Rome." Dirt,
dead dogs, oyster-shells, dust; no pavement
nor lamps, no gutters, no sewers. Houses
that would have rejoiced the heart of that
Chinese sage, who invented roast-pig, for they
are delightfully easy to be burnt down, and
are being burnt continually. Such are the
plain clothes of Pera. Land at Galata,
Mr. Moole; you come across more dogs, live
and dead, more dirt, oyster-shells, dust and
leprous houses. Land at Scutari, and ask for
sewers, lamps, or gutters, and you shall find
none. Instead of them you shall find unwholesome
streets; or, rather, alleys resembling the
worst parts of Church Lane, Saint Giles's,
dovetailed on to the Rue-aux Fèves in Paris,
and the Coomb in Dublin. Ask for horrible
smells, infected hovels—where the great
adjuster of the population, the plague, hides
from year to year, every now and then
leaping from his hole to take the census with
a sword: ask for these and they will start
up by hundreds. Ask for the stately Moslem,
and you shall be shown a fat man with a
sleepy expression of countenance, and looking
remarkably uncomfortable in an ill-made
European coat and a red skull cap. Ask for
the Bezesteen, and you shall elbow your way
through a labyrinth of covered lanes, giving
not a bad idea of Rag Fair, the Temple in
Paris, and the Soho Bazaar, squeezed into
Newgate Market. Ask for the dancing
Dervishes, you shall see a set of dirty old
ragamuffins executing lewd gambadoes for
copper paras. Ask for Saint Sophia, and you
will be enabled to speculate on the white-
washed mosaics, and the tawdry gimcrack
lamps and carpets, and eggs strung on strings.
Ask for the lights of the harem, and you
shall meet a succession of black silk pillow-
cases, capped with white ditto, shod with
yellow shoes down at heel, shuffling through
the lanes, or jolting about in crazy carts
drawn by bullocks. Ask for the janissaries,
and you will be told that they were all
massacred on the plain of the Atmeidan
twenty-seven years ago, and in their stead,
are slouching louts of peasants in uncouth
and mongrel European costume. Peep slyly
into a harem (which you will not succeed in
doing, my friend), and you will see fat women
with coarse features lolling wearily on carpets,
in rooms with bare walls, and the principal
furniture of which is composed of French
clocks. Ask for Stamboul the romantic, the
beautiful, the glorious, the Constantinople of
the last of the Paleologi, the Byzantium of
the Romans, the Istambol of Bajazet and
Mahomet the conqueror, and you shall be told
that this dirty, swarming, break-neck city is
it. You are a young man of a strongly
imaginative temperament, Mr. Moole, I therefore
advise you to go on board the Peninsular and
Oriental Company's steamer again as fast as
you can; from whose deck you may again
survey the enchanting and superb prospect of
the city, and solace yourself with engravings
after Messrs Allom and Lewis. These will
be a great consolation to you when you are
frying in quarantine on your road home, and
you may conjure up quite a splendid court-
suit for Constantinople, and forget all about its
plain clothes.

"Lives there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself has said"—

Venice ? Beautiful Venice? Ah! Mr.
Moole, says Imagination, if you had gone
there, you would not have been
disappointed. Realism can't sneer away the
Campanile, the Grand Canal, the Ducal
Palace, the Dogana, and the Bridge of Sighs.
Madam Imagination, if you please, let me
peep at Venice, at the commencement, let
me say, of the last century. Forthwith
Imagination calls from the ends of the earth
fourscore poets, twelve score sentimental tourists,
a bevy of blooming young ladies, far too
numerous for me to count, and the editors of
six defunct landscape annuals. "Venice, if
you please, ladies and gentlemen," she says to
them. "Marble halls," they answer in a
breath. "Landscapes, or, rather, water-scapes,
with crimson, green and gold skies, orange
waves, and blue palaces (see Turner); or
gondolas with pea-green hulls, and feluccas
with crimson velvet sails (see Holland). The
Doge, a venerable old man, with a white
beard and a high cap, constantly occupied
with dandling the lion of St. Mark, curry-
combing the winged horses, spending his
afternoons with his ear close to the "Lion's
mouth," jotting down mems. of conspiracies
hot and hot, and going out twice a week in
a gilded galley to wed the Adriatic; varying
occasionally these pursuits, by putting his
sons to the torture, pursuing with fire and
sword people who wrote impertinent things
about his wife on the back of his chair, and
making fierce last dying speeches to the people
from the top of the giant's staircase. The
Council of Ten, meeting every day, masked
every man jack of them; [Gentlemen! says
Imagination, expostulatingly] no; not masked,
but dressed in crimson velvet cloaks, each
councillor sitting under his own portrait by
Titian, who died some time before; but never
mind that. A carnival all the year round,
and such a carnival; the Piazza San Marco
thronged with masquers in every variety and
shade of splendour of costume. All the
canals (all bordered by palaces decorated by
Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo) studded
with gondolas, painted with fanciful
arabesques, hung with splendid tapestry, filled
with purple velvet lovers and white satin
angels (see Lake Price), making love and
eating ices beneath a moon certainly twice as
large as any French, German, or English one.
The gondolier, in his picturesque striped
silken sash, guides his frail bark, standing
gracefully on one leg, and warbling a hymn
to Our Lady of the Sea. But ah! little