Plato and Xenophon was revived and cultivated.

Innumerable politicians-some of them amongst the most sagacious and influential -have pointed to Constantinople as the Nature-designed seat of an universal empire. That prediction has not yet been verified; but, on two memorable occasions, the fate of Constantinople has been connected with the fall of nations and the opening of new political combinations in extensive regions of the earth. In the first instance, the rise of the Eastern empire sounded the knell of the more illustrious empire of the West, which it is absurd to say was resuscitated; for the system established by Charlemagne was more a German than a Roman one, and was soon broken up into many sovereignties, of which no more than three attained any permanent importance. In the second instance, the expulsion of the Greek emperors from Constantinople, and the extension of the Mussulman sway over some of the most fertile and beautiful countries in Europe, destroyed finally the traces of the old territorial arrangements of the Roman dominions. The same event reared up in Europe a power hostile to every other one, and whose hostility was only limited by its means of giving it practical effect. The power in question has perished, to all practical purposes of mischief, as certainly as it has been long since dead to every possible purpose of good. And the great world-question now at issue appears substantially to be, whether the extinction of an inert evil, the objectionable character of which consists not so much in active capacities of danger, as in powerlessness to improve, shall be attended by the growth of an evil and danger of infinitely greater magnitude? In the one case, there is the presence of a power, weak and merely nominal, which, no matter how ill-disposed it might be towards other Governments, is unable to give effect to ill dispositions. In the second case, there is the prospective fact of a power gigantic and active, armed with strength and will to work its own aggrandisement, utterly regardless of the dictates of justice, and of consideration for the injury which the realisation of its designs may inflict on its neighbours.

Our engraving of Constantinople vividly illustrates the truth of the observation, that with respect to that city, more emphatically,

perhaps, than to any other-"'tis distance lends enchantment to the view." Seen from the mid-stream of the Bosphorus, or from the Asiatic hills on the opposite side of the strait, it is a vision of glorious beauty

a city of gorgeous, glittering palaces. Once entered, the illusion vanishes, and the expectant stranger finds himself, not in his imaginary paradise, but groping painfully through a network of alleys redolent with execrable foulness, and of every noisome nuisance which fancy could conjure up in imaging the hateful and repulsive. These observations refer especially to Stamboul, the Mussulman quarter; the Frankish quarter, Pera, where dwell the diplomatists, the European merchants, and others whose means and habits exempt them from familiarity with the abominations of a wholly Turkish city, presents various gratifying contrasts, though inevitably affected to some extent by the attributes of its impure neighbour.

The second engraving, "A Scene in Albania," represents a landscape, which, whilst of a very different description from the other, is in its own class of equal beauty, and, alas! equally ideal in its relation to the effects produced by human vice or virtue. Pastoral simplicity, peacefulness, and unselfishness, are, unhappily, in all countries, the creatures of poets' dreams rather than the embodiments of matter of fact. The Huns, the Scythians, the Tartars, all the most terrible scourges of humanity that in different ages have devastated the world, have been pastoral races. The mountaineers of Albania divide their time between pasturing their flocks and herds and their more favoured occupation of rapine and murder. Nowhere are to be found a greater number and variety of spots, charming in secluded beauty, which seem expressly appointed by Nature to be retreats of innocent repose. Nowhere is human depravity in the plenitude of wickedness more unbridled in its excesses. The state of Albania has, for centuries, been one of chronic anarchy. The inhabitants are partly descended from the fierce and lawless tribes which, more than two thousand years ago, were the terror of the civilised districts of Greece. At the present time they are intermingled with the posterity of Mohammedan soldiers, who furnished their full proportion to the ranks of that Janissary force which, after being for ages the defence

and the plague of the Ottoman empire, was extirpated by a coup d'état eminently Oriental in the sanguinary treachery of its character. The most rude and fanatical of the Turkish military have been continually drafted from the Albanian mountains, and have exceeded even the wild levies of Asia Minor in truculence, rapacity, and thirst of blood. Their notions of military service consist in the perpetration, on every opportunity, of plunder, murder, and general outrage; and their proceedings are seldom controlled by any regard for the distinction between a friendly and a hostile territory; the only difference which they recognise in this respect manifesting itself in the peculiar alacrity exhibited by them when a Christian territory is to be laid waste, or a Christian population slaughtered. The massacre of Scio is one of the many records of monstrous crime with which the name of the Albanian mercenaries is connected in eternal infamy.

The short period that has elapsed since the commencement of the present war has already produced events in which the atrocious character of the inhabitants of the pastoral mountains of Albania furnished only too substantial grounds of sorrow to the Sultan's friends, and of secret gratification to his foes. With the view of suppressing insurrectionary movements and outrages which the Government of Greece was suspected of fomenting, the Ottoman authorities had the misfortune to call out the Leapides, one of the most savage of the Albanian tribes. These brigands were but too willing to respond to a requirement that promised them facilities for the gratification of their propensities; and the result

was a series of murderous and indiscriminate crimes in which the unarmed and innocent were, as in all such cases, the greatest sufferers, and which the feeble hands of the imperial representatives were unable to check or punish. This disastrous affair has proved the source of much, and, in great measure, unmerited, scandal and reproach to the cause of the Sultan, who has enemies in all quarters anxiously eager to seize every pretext for creating prejudice and misconception and for representing the Turkish polity of the present day as being as barbarous in morale as it is decrepit in physique as being, in ruthlessness, profligacy, and bloodthirstiness, not a whit advanced from the brutal realities of two centuries since. Not less deceptive than the far-off view of the glories of Stamboul, is the vision woven by the romance of uninstructed fancy, in contemplation of the pictured beauties of miserable Albania. And how emblematic of the deceptive anomalies of the Turkish empire as it has been! Civilised Europe has armed for ostensible objects which seem to assume that it were possible and desirable for an empire made up of such vices and anomalies to be maintained in its status in quo ante bellum. But the proper object of the present armaments should be, not the temporary prolongation of a vicious system, but to secure for the Turkish dominions a Government sufficiently pure and intelligent to foster internal improvements, and sufficiently vigorous to present externally an effectual resistance to the encroaching ambition which disturbs the peace and menaces the independence of other nations.

THE Nile is certainly a very remarkable river. Nor is the land through which it flows, or the people who dwell upon its banks, less worthy of remark than itself. In length this river may justly be ranked amongst the mightiest streams of our earth. In importance it is second to none. For 1,500 miles or half its length, its current rolls along in solitary majesty, without receiving a single tributary stream deserving of notice. It flows through a district that would be a wilderness but for its fertilising waters-a district that is thus rescued from the edge of

a desert tract of more than 3,000 miles in breadth.

The valley of the Nile, and therefore the land of Egypt, has an average breadth of only fifteen miles. Towards the mouth of the river the fertile land extends to a much greater breadth, because there the stream divides, and encloses an extensive tract of country between its two principal branches. This portion is called the Delta, and upon it nearly half the population of Egypt dwells. From time immemorial, this river has annually overflowed its banks, and converted the