Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 416, June 1850

Books of travel in the region which modern tourists particularly designate as "the East," and which may be considered to comprise Turkey, Syria, and Egypt, do not, as a class, very forcibly challenge our sympathy and criticism. The best horse may be ridden to death; and no country, however rich in associations and peculiar in its characteristics, however remarkable in configuration and interesting by its traditions, can yield continual fresh pastures to literary travellers, when they descend upon it like a swarm of locusts instead of dropping in at reasonable intervals. Time must be allowed for change and reproduction, or repetition and exhaustion will be the inevitable result. The East, moreover, as a theme for book-wrights, has not only been overdone, but, in many instances, very badly done. People have gone thither with the preconceived idea of publishing, on the strain for the marvellous, the romantic, and the picturesque; and, disdaining the common-sense course of setting down what they saw and giving their real and natural impressions, they have gilt and embellished, like a coach-painter at a sheriff's carriage, till they forced upon us the conviction that they cared more for glitter than for truth. Some, piquing themselves on diplomatic acumen, have filled their volumes with politics, and settled all manner of Eastern questions much to their own satisfaction, and greatly to the weariness of their readers; and these form perhaps the most intolerable of the many classes into which Oriental travellers are subdivisible, but which we shall not here further enumerate, preferring to turn to the examination of the latest Eastern tour that has issued from the English press and found its way to our critical sanctum.

Mr Albert Smith's name, well known within sound of Bow-bells, is far from unfamiliar to a large circle of dwellers without that populous circumference. We cannot affirm that we have read all his numerous works, but with some of them we are acquainted, and we are disposed to think him one of the most amiable and praiseworthy of the school of popular humorists to which he belongs. His jokes are invariably good-humoured and inoffensive – without being on that account deficient in point. He does not wrap radicalism up in fun, as cunning grandmothers envelop sickly drugs with marmalade; nor has his flow of gaiety a sour and mischievous under-current. Neither does he belong to the gang of facetious philanthropists whose sympathies are so exclusively granted to the indigent and miserable, that they have nothing left but gall and bitterness for those of their fellow-creatures who wear a decent coat, and have the price of a dinner in its pocket. A gentleman of most versatile ability, he is by turns dramatist, journalist, essayist, naturalist, novelist, correspondent of a London paper, critic of the ballet, a writer of songs and a manufacturer of burlesque. Such a host of occupations naturally entails the necessity of a little relaxation; and accordingly, in the summer of last year, Mr Smith laid down his pen, shook the sawdust from his buskins, and started for the Mediterranean. As far as Malta we have not ascertained how it fared with him, but of his subsequent proceedings he has informed us in a volume which we had little idea of reviewing when first we learned its expected appearance, but whose perusal has convinced us that it deserves such brief notice as the crowded state of our pages in these busy days will permit us to bestow upon it. We have already implied our opinion that it takes a skilful hand to write an amusing book on so hackneyed a text as a visit to Constantinople. Mr Smith has surmounted the difficulty in an easy and natural manner; and, whilst telling things just as they appeared to him, without affectation or adornment, he has contrived to give an agreeable freshness and originality to a subject which we really deemed threadbare and exhausted.

It was on board the Scamandre, French Mediterranean mail-steamer, that Mr Albert Smith left Malta on an August evening of the year 1849, bound for Constantinople. The weather was fine and the sea smooth as a lake, and there could be no reasonable apprehension of shipwreck even for the crazy French vessel, whose last voyage, save on rivers or along coast, this was intended to be. But although somewhat rickety, of very moderate speed, and not particularly clean externally, the interior accommodations of the Scamandre were by no means bad. And the cabin passengers presented an amusing medley of nations and characters. There were French milliners, striving to pass themselves off as governesses, an elderly French actress from the St James's theatre, a brace of Marseilles bagmen, an enterprising Englishman bent upon smuggling muskets into Hungary, a young Irish officer who had thrown up his commission in the British service to campaign with Bem and Kossuth, and who must have arrived at his destination just as the war reached its end. There was also Mr Sophocles, an intelligent Greek professor from an American university, on his way home after twenty years' absence, and sundry persons unnamed, making about twenty in all, and Mr Smith himself, who, we venture to say, was not the least active and efficient in beguiling the tedium of a week's voyage in a slow steamboat, and who gives us an extremely amusing account of his fellow-passengers and their proceedings. Travelling quite as a citizen of the world, without pretension or care for luxuries, now footing it across the Alps with knapsack on shoulder, then a deck passenger from Genoa to Naples, availing himself of the smooth when it offered, but taking the rough readily when it came, sleeping sometimes on boards for want of a bed, with the knapsack aforesaid for a pillow – Mr Smith seems to have carried through the whole of his ramble those best of travelling companions, imperturbable good humour, and a determination to be pleased with everything and everybody. It is accordingly with all possible indulgence that he views the little foibles of his fellow-passengers per Scamandre, and there is not an atom of acid in the dry humour with which he parades them for the entertainment of his readers. Indeed, before the week's voyage is over, we begin to feel quite intimate with the motley company – to view with indulgence Mademoiselle Virginie's barefaced flirtations with the French commissary, and to sympathise with the good-tempered American, who, having had the misfortune to engage his berth in the first-class cabin – a sort of extra-magnificent place, whose chief distinction from the second class consists, as on German railways, in a heavy additional charge – preferred now and then dining with the less aristocratic inmates of the second cabin, "to know what was going on." There is no place like shipboard for betraying people's habits and peculiarities: everybody is more or less in deshabille; and such a group as that on the Scamandre is a mine to a shrewd observer. Mr Smith kept his eyes and ears wide open, as is his wont, and little escaped him. We select the following specimen of his strictures on foreign habits.

"I should be very sorry to class foreigners, generally, as a dirty set of people when left to themselves; but I fear there is too much reason to suppose that (in how many cases out of ten I will refrain from saying) a disrelish for a good honest plunging wash is one of their chief attributes. It requires but very little experience, in even their best hotels, to come to this conclusion. I do not mean in those houses where an influx of English has imposed the necessity of providing large jugs, baths, and basins; but in the equally leading establishments patronised chiefly by themselves. In these, one still perceives the little pie-dish and milk-jug, the scanty doily-looking towel, and the absence of a soap dish; whilst it would be perfectly futile to ask for anything further. So, on board the Scamandre, this opinion was not weakened. They dipped a corner of a little towel, not in the basin, but in the stream that trickled from the cistern as slowly as vinegar from any oyster-shop cruet, and dabbed their face about with it. Then they messed about a little with their hands; and then, having given a long time to brushing their hair, they had a cigarette instead of a tooth brush, and their toilet was complete. This description does not only apply to the Scamandre passengers, but to the majority of their race, whom I afterwards encountered about the Mediterranean."

We have a vivid recollection of the consternation of an amiable and numerous French family, in whose house a friend of ours once was domiciled, on finding that he each morning required, for his personal use, more fresh water than sufficed for their entire daily consumption, internal and external. Doubtless the worthy people indulged, every eight days or so, in a warm bath; but they had no notion of such a thing as diurnal ablutions above the waist or below the chin, and they shrugged and grinned monstrously at the eccentricity of the Englishman who commenced the day by a general sluice, whereas they rarely thought of washing even their fingers till they dressed for their ante-prandial promenade. And when our friend was laid up, some time later, with a smart twinge of gout, provoked by too liberal use of a very different liquid from water, the entire family, from the elderly father down to the youngest of the precocious juveniles, gave it as their unqualified opinion, that the ailment proceeded from their inmate's rash and obstinate indulgence in the ungenial and, in their opinion, extremely superfluous element.

"Athens in six hours," Mr Smith observes, is rather quick work; but he nevertheless found he could see in that time nearly as much of it as he wished. The Scamandre allowed but a day, and certainly he made good use of the brief halt. At Athens, as in Switzerland and on the Rhine, he found the ubiquitous Murray's Handbook the great authority and certificate of the native competitors for custom. A skirmish with clubs and boat-hooks – the former brought evidently in anticipation of the contest – took place amongst the fancy-ball-looking boatmen, in white petticoats and scarlet leggings, who crowded in light skiffs round the foot of the steamer's ladder. In the intervals of the fight a dialogue was carried on in English, more or less broken.

"'I say, sir! here, sir! Hotel d'Orient is the best. Here's the card, sir – old palace – Murray says ver good,' cried one of the costumes.

"'Hi!' screamed another; 'don't go with him, master – too dear! Come with me?'

"The parties were immediately engaged in single combat.

"'Hotel d'Angleterre à Athènes, tenu par Elias Polichronopulos et Yani Adamopulos,' shouted another, all in a breath. I copy the names from the card he gave me, for they were such as no one could remember.

"'Yes, sir; good hotel,' said his companion. 'Look in Murray, sir – page 24 – there, sir; here, sir; look, sir!'

"'Who believes Murray?' asked a fellow in plain clothes, with a strong Irish accent.

"'You would, if he put your house in the Handbook,' replied another."

By considerable display of mental and physical energy, a few of the passengers at last got into a boat and gained the quay of the Piræus. Grog's-shop was written on the shutter of a petty coffee-house, and a smart-looking Albanian stepped up, and proffered his services in excellent English. He had lived in London, he said: was a subject of Queen Victoria, and had the honour of being set down in Murray, page 25. With such recommendations, who could refuse the guidance of Demetri Pomorn? Not Mr Smith and his party, evidently, for they immediately engaged him for the day, hired a shabby vehicle from an adjacent cab-stand, and started on their hot and dusty road to Athens, thence about five miles distant. There they killed the lions, ate quince ices, bought Latakia tobacco, dined at the Hotel d'Orient à l'Anglaise, with Harvey sauce and pale ale, off English plates and dishes, and pulled on board again at night, to the tune of Jim Crow, played by an Anglified violin in one of the "grog's-shops" aforesaid. At five in the morning sleep was at an end, thanks to the clanking, stamping, and bawling upon the steamer's deck, and Mr Smith left the cabin, to reconnoitre and breathe fresh air. Some deck passengers had come on board at Athens; amongst others, a poor Albanian family, bound to Smyrna to pack figs. They were miserable, broken-spirited looking people, but picturesque in spite of their poverty; a melon or two and some coarse bread composed their entire stores for the voyage. This, however, was of no great duration, for at daybreak the next morning the passengers per Scamandre were told they were off Smyrna.

"It was very pleasant to hear this – to be told that the land I saw close to us was Asia, and that the distant slender spires that rose from the thickly clustered houses were minarets – that I should have twelve hours to go on shore, and see real camels, fig-trees, scheiks, and veiled women! And yet I could scarcely persuade myself that such was the case – that the distant Smyrna – of which I had only heard, in the Levant mail, as a remote place, burnt down once a-year, where figs came from – was actually within a good stone's throw of the steamer."

The travellers' expectations were more than realised. "I do not believe," says Mr Smith, "that throughout the future journey any impressions were conveyed more vivid than those we experienced during our first half hour in the bazaars of the sunny, bustling, beauty-teeming Smyrna." The appearance of a party of foreigners, and of the well-known face of the valet-de-place, caused a stir amongst the dealers, one of whom accosted Mr Smith in good English.

"'How d'ye do, sir; very well? that's right. Look here, sir; beautiful musk purse; very fine smell. Ten piastres.'

"A piastre is worth twopence and a fraction.

"'How did you learn to speak English so well?' I asked.

"'All English gentlemen come to me, sir,' he said, 'and I learn it from the ships, and from the Americans. Shake hands, sir; that's right. Buy the purse, sir?

"'How much is it?' asked one of our party.

"'Six piastres,' replied the brother of the merchant, who also spoke English, but had not heard the first price.

"'And you asked me ten!' I said to the other.

"'So I did, sir,' he replied with a laugh; 'then, if I get the other four, that's my profit – eh? But what's four piastres to an English gentleman? – nothing. It's too little for him to know about. Come – buy the purse. What will you give?'

"'Five piastres,' I answered.

"'It is yours,' he added directly, with a hearty laugh, throwing it to me.

"'What a merry fellow you are!' I observed.

"'Yes, sir; I laugh always; very good to laugh. English gentlemen like to laugh, I know; laugh very well. Look at his turban – laugh at that.'

"He directed our attention to an old Turk, who was going by with a most ludicrous and towering head-dress. It was diverting to find him making fun of his compatriot."

The mode of dealing, which in Christian Europe is stigmatised as Jewish – the system, namely, of asking thrice the value and twice what the seller means to take – is received, and by no means discreditable, in Turkish bazaars. The only way to purchase in such places, without being imposed upon, is at once to offer half the price demanded. This is met with a refusal; you walk away, the merchant calls you back, and you then offer him twenty per cent less than before. This plan Mr Smith, having picked up experience at Smyrna, put in practice at Constantinople, and generally found to answer.

Fig-packing, camels, and the slave-market are the three things which at Smyrna first attract the curiosity of the traveller from the West. Of the first-named, Mr Smith gives us a picturesque account. In the shade of a long alley of acacia and fig trees the packers were seated – Greeks by nation, and the women very handsome. "They first brought the figs from the warehouses, on the floor of which I saw hundreds of bushels, brought in on camels from the country. They were then pulled into shape, this task being confided to females; and after that sent on to the men who packed them. They gathered six or seven, one after the other, in their hand, and then wedged them into the drum, putting a few superior ones on the top, as we have seen done with strawberries." We have already mentioned that our sharp-sighted and lively traveller is somewhat of a naturalist, and here he favours us with the result of his observations upon the camel. That uncouth, but useful hunchback has been belauded and vaunted in prose and verse to such an exaggerated extent that we are quite tired of hearing of his virtues, and feel much indebted to the author of A Month at Constantinople for exhibiting his failings after the following fashion: —

"Your camel is a great obtainer of pity, under false pretence. He can be as self-willed and vicious as you please; and his bite is particularly severe: when once his powerful teeth have fastened, it is with the greatest difficulty that he is made to relinquish his hold. The pitiful noise too, which he makes, as small natural historians remark, upon being overladen, is all sham. It proceeds from sheer idleness, rather than a sense of oppression. With many camels, if you make pretence to put a small object on their back – a tile or a stone, for instance – whilst they are kneeling down, they begin mechanically to bellow, and blink their eyes, and assume such a dismal appearance of suffering and anguish, that it is perfectly painful for susceptible natures to regard them. And yet, when their load is well distributed and packed, they can move along under seven hundredweight."

But we must get on to Constantinople. Often as the magnificent spectacle has been described that bursts upon the view as you round Seraglio Point and glide into the Golden Horn, it yet would seem affected or eccentric of a traveller who writes about Constantinople were he to neglect recording the impression made upon him by that singularly lovely panorama. Mr Albert Smith's description is to the purpose, and we like it the better for the complete absence of that magniloquence in which so many tourists have indulged when discoursing upon the beauties of Stamboul. Probably no city in the world presents so great a contrast as Constantinople, when seen from a short distance and when examined in detail. Floating on the blue waters of the Bosphorus, the wondering stranger gazes upon a fairy spectacle of domes, and minarets, and cypress groves, of graceful palaces and stately mosques, gilded wherries and gaily-attired crowds. A few minutes elapse: the grave custom-house officials in their handsome barge have received the sixpenny bribe which exempts his luggage from examination; he lands at the Tophanné Stairs, and enters the steep lane that leads up to Pera, and in an instant the illusion is dissipated: —

"I felt," says Mr Smith, who readily avails himself, and in this instance very happily, of a theatrical comparison, "that I had been taken behind the scenes of a great 'effect.' The Constantinople of Vauxhall Gardens, a few years ago, did not differ more, when viewed in front from the gallery and behind from the dirty little alleys bordering the river. The miserable, narrow, ill-paved thoroughfare did not present one redeeming feature – even of picturesque dreariness. The roadway was paved with all sorts of ragged stones, jammed down together without any regard to level surface; and encumbered with dead rats, melon-rinds, dogs, rags, brickbats, and rubbish, that had fallen through the mules' baskets, as they toiled along it. The houses were of wood – old and rotten; and bearing traces of having been once painted red. There was, evidently, never any attempt made to clean them, or their windows or doorways. Here and there, where a building had been burnt, or had tumbled down, all the ruins remained as they had fallen. Even the better class of houses had an uncared-for, mouldy, plague-imbued, decaying look about them; with grimy lattices instead of windows, on the upper stories, and dilapidated shutters and doors on the ground-floors."

It will have occurred to many, acquainted with the scenes portrayed, to exclaim, when gazing upon the bright pictures of a David Roberts, a Leopold Robert, or a Villamil, "What a deal of dirt is hidden under all that gay colouring!" It will not do for the artist to look too closely into the details of southern cleanliness and domestic economy; he must elevate his subject and wash off the dirt, or at least paint over it. Constantinople must be viewed as a panorama, not investigated as if for sale. If he would preserve the enchantment unbroken, the spectator must keep his distance, as from a picture painted for distant effect. If he will not do this, if curiosity impels him onwards, let him make up his eyes and olfactories to a cruel disappointment. A minute ago, fairyland was spread before him; he lands, and stumbles over a dead dog. Touching dogs, by the bye, we have a word to say. Mr Smith has numerous passages relating to that quadruped, esteemed in Christendom, abominable in Constantinople. Having once, he informs us, been severely bitten by a hound, and having, moreover, seen several persons die of hydrophobia, he entertains a very justifiable mistrust of the canine race, or at least of such of its specimens as present themselves with slavering mouths, inflamed eyes, guttural yells, and hides ragged and bloody. Now, this being the habitual appearance and bearing of the eighty-thousand pugnacious and starving curs that infest the streets of the Turkish capital, Mr Smith, had he been a nervous person, would have passed rather an agreeable "month in Constantinople." With a paper lantern in one hand, however, and a jagged stone in the other – the usual weapons of defence – he prosecuted his wanderings most courageously, at almost any hour of the night, through the filth-strewn and dog-haunted streets. His first introduction to these pleasant animals was auricular; and truly, compared to their uproar, a German frog-swamp or a strong party of Christmas waits, jangling a negro melody in defiance of time and tune, must be considered a delightful réveil-matin.

"To say that if all the sheep-dogs going to Smithfield on a market-day had been kept on the constant bark, and pitted against the yelping curs upon all the carts in London, they could have given any idea of the canine uproar that now first astonished me, would be to make the feeblest of images. The whole city rung with one vast riot. Down below me at Tophanné – over at Stamboul – far away at Scutari – the whole eighty thousand dogs that are said to overrun Constantinople appeared engaged in the most active extermination of each other, without a moment's cessation. The yelping, howling, barking, growling, and snarling, were all merged into one uniform and continuous even sound, as the noise of frogs becomes when heard at a distance. For hours there was no lull. I went to sleep, and woke again; and still, with my windows open, I heard the same tumult going on; nor was it until daybreak that anything like tranquillity was restored."

The traces of these nocturnal combats are plainly discernible the next morning. There is not a whole skin in the entire canine legion; some have lost eyes, others ears, some a collop of the little flesh that remains on their unfortunate bones, and all bear the scars of desperate conflicts. They keep an active look-out for dead horses and camels, and are even said to devour their defunct comrades; but there is no authenticated account of their making a meal of a human being, although a story is current in Galata of their having one night torn down a tipsy English sailor, and left nothing but his bones to tell the tale in the morning. Drunkards, however, must expect to go to the dogs. Mr Smith kept sober, and carried a lantern. Solely to these two precautions, perhaps, are we to-day indebted for the pleasure of reading his book, instead of mourning his interment in the ravenous stomachs of Mahomedan mongrels.

It can hardly have escaped the observation of any one who has travelled at all, that the presence of even a very few English settlers in a town or district, speedily entails the establishment of "the English shop." The keeper of this is not necessarily an Englishman; he may be of any nation – Pole, Jew, Frenchman, German; the essential is, that he should have a smattering of English and a trader's knowledge of the heterogeneous articles which, in foreign estimation, are indispensable to the existence of Englishmen. Foremost amongst these are beer and pickles, mustard and cayenne, Warren's blacking and Windsor soap, the pills of Professor Holloway, the kalydor of the world-renowned Rowland. Thanks to the extraordinary power of puffing, we dare to say that the paletot of Sheriff Nicoll by this time finds its nook in "the English shop." The growth of these philanthropical depots for the consolation of exiled Britons is often miraculously mushroom-like. Land an English regiment to occupy a menaced point on some distant foreign shore, and within the week "the shop" appears, though it be but a booth with a hamper of porter and a dozen pickle pots for sole stock in trade. In Constantinople, where English abound, either as residents or birds of passage, Stampa is a celebrity. The admirable establishment of Galignani is not more famed for books and newspapers – and especially for that far-famed Messenger, which reaches to the uttermost ends of the earth – than is the shop of Stampa as a rendezvous and receptacle for men and things English. There you may buy everything, from a Stilton to a cake of soap, from a solar lamp to a steel pen; and there obtain all manner of information, from the address of a Galata[4 - The names of the various districts of Constantinople, sometimes rather indiscriminately used in travellers' narratives, are apt to puzzle those readers unfamiliar with the divisions of the city. The following note puts its distribution clearly before them: – "Stamboul may be termed Constantinople proper, inhabited by the Turks, and containing the Seraglio, chief mosques, great public offices, bazaars, and places of Government and general business. It is the most ancient and most important part, par excellence. Galata is the Wapping of the city: here we find dirty shops for ships' stores; merchants' counting-houses, and tipsy sailors. Tophanné is so called from the large gun-factory close at hand. Both these suburbs are situated at the base of a very steep hill; the upper part of which is Pera, the district allotted to the Franks, or foreigners, and containing the palaces of the ambassadors, the hotels, the European shops, and the most motley population under the sun. Scutari is to Stamboul as Birkenhead to Liverpool, and is in Asia. It is important in its way, as being the starting-place of all the caravans going inland. There are some other districts of less interest to the average tourist." —A Month at Constantinople, p. 46.] merchant to the sailing hour of a steamer. Nay, should you be weary of kebobs and craving for a beefsteak, Stampa will provide it you. He did so at least for Mr Smith; but perhaps that gentleman was a favoured customer, as he seems indeed to have found means of rendering himself at more than one place during his ramble.

At Constantinople, as at Smyrna, Mr Smith visited the slave market. There is a volume in the word, and we all know the sort of phantasmagoria it summons up for the benefit of English ladies and gentlemen, as they sit at home at ease, dandling their fancies by the chimney corner. Exeter Hall and the picture shops have made slave-markets of their own, compared to which the reality is a tame and spiritless affair. We are all familiar, at a proper distance, with that group of young ladies, more or less nude, and of every tint – from the pale Georgian to the sable Ethiop – huddled together in great alarm and the most graceful attitudes, whilst a shawled and jewelled Turk scans their perfections with licentious eye, and counts gold into the palm of a truculent dealer in human flesh. None of us but have been painfully affected by representations, both printed and pictorial, of whips and manacles, fettered hands and striped shoulders, kneeling negroes and barbarous taskmasters, whereby tender-hearted gentlemen are moved to unbutton their pockets, and philanthropical ladies of excitable nerve, overlooking the misery that is often close to their doors, are set sewing flannels for remote blacks. We have all seen this sort of thing, and have been interested and touched accordingly. But Mr Smith, in the most unfeeling manner, robs us of our illusions, so far, at least, as Smyrna or Constantinople are concerned. In the slave-market at the latter place – where blacks only are exposed, the Circassian and Georgian beauties being secluded in the dealers' houses – he arrived at the conclusion that the creatures he saw wrapped in their blankets and crouching in corners, and in whom sense and feeling were evidently at the very lowest ebb, had much better chance of such happiness as they were capable of enjoying, if sold as slaves than if left to their own savage resources.

"I should be very sorry," he says, "to run against any proper feelings on the subject, but I do honestly believe that if any person of average propriety and right-mindedness were shown these creatures, and told that their lot was to become the property of others, and work in return for food and lodging, he would come to the conclusion it was all they were fit for… The truth is, that the 'virtuous indignation' side of the question holds out grander opportunities to an author for fine writing than the practical fact. But this style of composition should not always be implicitly relied upon. I knew a man who was said, by certain reviews and literary cliques, to be 'a creature of large sympathies for the poor and oppressed,' because he wrote touching things about them; but who would abuse his wife, and brutally treat his children, and harass his family, and then go and drink until his large heart was sufficiently full to take up the 'man-and-brother' line of literary business, and suggest that a tipsy Chartist was as good as quiet gentleman."

Mr Albert Smith is evidently a hard-hearted person, and we begin to repent of noticing his book. In the same pitiless matter-of-fact manner he continues to tilt at the several articles of our Eastern creed, pressing into his service as a witness Demetri the Second, (not him of Athens, but a Constantinople cicerone,) a terrible fellow for rubbing the romantic lacquer off Turkish manners and customs. After the slaves, the sack and scimitar are disposed of. "Not many executions now," quoth Demetri, – "only English subjects. Here's where they cut the heads off; just here, where these two streets meet, and the body is left here a day or two, and sometimes the dogs get at it." This was rather startling intelligence, until explained. The "English subjects" proved to be emigrants from Malta and the Ionian islands – the greatest scamps in Pera – which is saying no little, for Pera abounds with scamps. At that time, however, there had not been an execution for a whole year past.

"All English gentlemen," continued Demetri, "think they cut off heads every day in Stamboul, and put them, all of a row, on plates at the Seraglio gate. And they think people are always being drowned in the Bosphorus. Not true. I know a fellow who is a dragoman, and shows that wooden shoot which comes from the wall of the Seraglio Point, as the place they slide them down. It is only to get rid of the garden rubbish. Same with lots of other things."

Nothing like travel to dispel prejudice and romance. People are too apt to adopt Byron's notions of the East. To those who would have their eyes opened we recommend the Mediterranean steamers, or, if these would take them too far, they may stay at home and read Mr Smith.

"Travel," such is his advice to the seeker after truth, "with a determination to be only affected by things as they strike you. Swiss girls, St Bernard dogs, Portici fishermen, the Rhine, Nile travelling, and other objects of popular rhapsodies, fearfully deteriorate upon practical acquaintance. Few tourists have the courage to say that they have been 'bored,' or at least disappointed by some conventional lion. They find that Guide-books, Diaries, Notes, Journals, &c. &c., all copy one from the other in their enthusiasm about the same things; and they shrink from the charge of vulgarity, or lack of mind, did they dare to differ. Artists and writers will study effect rather than graphic truth. The florid description of some modern book of travel is as different to the actual impressions of ninety-nine people out of a hundred – allowing all these to possess average education, perception, and intellect – when painting in their minds the same subject, as the artfully tinted lithograph, or picturesque engraving of the portfolio or annual, is to the faithful photograph."

Mr Smith's concluding chapter, including his lazaretto experiences and departure for Egypt, is very amusing, and he shows up the abuses of the quarantine system, his own annoyances when in sickly durance, and the eccentricities of his Mahometan and Christian fellow-travellers, with spirit and humour. We have good will, but no space, to accompany him further in his peregrinations. An appendix, including estimates of expenses, and various remarks suggested by his recent travelling experience, will be found useful by persons contemplating a similar trip. The general texture of his book is certainly of the slightest; but, as already implied, it pretends not to solidity or to the discussion of grave topics. It is just such a volume as might be composed by the amalgamation of a series of epistles from a lively and fluent letter-writer to friends at home, during a few weeks' ramble and abode in Turkey. If it occasionally reminds us of Cockaigne, its author, we are sure, is too patriotic to be ashamed of his native village, and we have no mind to quarrel with him for the almost exclusively metropolitan character of his tropes and similes, for his frequent reminiscences of London streets and Surrey hills, or for his preference of the sunset seen from "The Cricketers" at Chertsey Bridge, to the same sight from "The little Burial-ground" at Pera. A good result – probably the one he aimed at – of the selection, as points of comparison, of localities more particularly familiar to Londoners, is that he thereby conveys, to those who will doubtless form a very large proportion of his readers, a clear idea of the places he visited and would describe. And his little volume affords evidence of good temper and feeling sufficient to cover a multitude of Cockneyisms.

When reviewing, about two years ago, a volume of rambles[5 - Ballantyne's Hudson's Bay.] in a very different region, we stated our opinion as to the style of illustration appropriate to books of this kind, in which cuts or engravings are most acceptable when they explain scenes and objects that written description, even at great length, would less accurately and clearly place before the reader. Mr Smith is evidently of the same way of thinking. "I have given," he says, "only those illustrations which appeared to be the most characteristic rather than the most imposing." In so doing he has shown judgment, and used to the best advantage the pencils and colour-box, which formed part of the heterogeneous contents of his well-stuffed knapsack. The reader will be more obliged to him for the appropriate and useful little sketches that thickly stud his pages, than for any drawings of greater pretensions, whose introduction the size and price of the volume would have permitted.

MADAME SONTAG AND THE OPERA

It is now between three and four years since the town was startled by intelligence that the Opera House was divided against itself, and that melody and grace were about to take flight from the bottom of the Hay-market to the top of the Garden. In our quality of determined foes to unnecessary changes and theoretical reforms, we received the intelligence regretfully, and so, we have reason to believe, did that very considerable section of the London and provincial public into whose annual calculations of refined enjoyments the Italian Opera largely enters. Without going into the merits of the dispute, which up to this hour we have never heard clearly elucidated, we plainly discerned one thing – namely, that there was discord in the operatic camp; that harmony had abandoned its favourite abode; that managers, musicians, singers, and dancers, were drawing different ways: in short, that the Opera, taking the lead in a fashion that soon afterwards became disagreeably prevalent throughout Europe, was in a state of revolution. With whom the fault lay we knew not, and little cared: all that concerned us was the unpleasant fact that the pleasures of the music-loving multitude, quorum pars sumus, were seriously endangered. It is pretty notorious that, with very rare exceptions, professional votaries of the Muses are capricious, and difficult to deal with. Painters are accused of unpunctuality and improvidence; composers are often idle dogs, fretting impresarios into fevers, as Rossini did Barbaja, and fulfilling their engagements only at the last minute of the eleventh hour, with the polenta smoking on the table;[6 - Rossini's desperate idleness and habits of procrastination are proverbial. On more than one occasion personal restraint was resorted to, to compel the fulfilment of his engagements. Thus, at Milan, sentinels were placed at his door, and no exit allowed him, until he had completed an opera of which the two first acts were already in rehearsal. Barbaja, the celebrated impresario, kept him for some time prisoner in his palace on the Naples Toledo, refusing him liberty until he should have composed the long-promised opera of Otello. Remonstrances were disregarded by the inflexible manager, so Rossini set to work, and, with his usual facility, soon sent down a portion of the score, headed Introduzione. This was transmitted to the copyist; but the same evening Rossini applied for it again, on pretext of alteration. Next morning another MS. reached Barbaja, inscribed Caratina. It followed its predecessor to the copyist, and, in like manner, was re-demanded for correction. Barbaja gleefully rubbed his hands at finding that these revisions did not delay Rossini, who sent down page after page of copy, to the extent of an entire act. But the irritable manager was like to go distracted when, on applying to the copyist for the whole score, he found the introduction was all that had been composed. It had been travelling to and fro between Rossini and the theatre, and, at each journey, the incorrigible composer had headed it with a different title. The trait is characteristic, and strictly authentic. The same story is told, at greater length, and with some embellishments, in one of Alexander Dumas' volumes of Italian travelling sketches. Managers, however, found compensation in Rossini's rapidity for his provoking idleness. When he did set to work, he got over the paper at a gallop; and, when driven to the last minute, his fertility and invention were wonderful. Some of his finest things were composed on the spur of the moment, and in breathless haste. The celebrated air Di tanti Palpiti is one of these. His dinner hour was at hand, when, driven to the wall by urgent solicitations, he one day sat down to compose it. His cook, learning that the Maestro was really about to work – no very common occurrence – thrust his head in at the door, and ventured a supposition that he had "better not put the rice to boil." "On the contrary, boil it directly," replied Rossini, who was hungry. Before the rice, that indispensable preface to an Italian dinner, was fit for table, the air and its introduction were composed. Di tanti Palpiti is still familiarly known as the Aria dei rizzi.] even authors we have heard declared, upon no mean authority, to be queer cattle to guide; but, of all classes whose occupation derives from art and poetry, none, assuredly, are harder to manage and to please than actors and musicians. From those early days of Opera, when a Lully shivered Cremonas upon the heads of a refractory orchestra, to the recent ones when a Lumley in vain essayed to appease the petulance of a prima donna, and calm the choler of a conductor, the tribulations of managers have been countless as the pebbles on the shore. To judge, indeed, from their own account, few of the penalties so picturesquely set forth in Fox's martyr-book, but would be preferable to ten years' management of a large lyric theatre. Consult the comedians, and we are presented with the reverse of the medal. A manager, we shall be told, is a covetous and Heliogabalian tyrant, fattening upon the toil and talents of the artist; a sort of vampire in a black coat, sucking the blood of genius, faring sumptuously on the proceeds of a tenor, squeezing the cost of his stud out of a soprano, and making large annual investments on the strength of an underpaid barytone. These things may be true, but we shall more readily credit them when we less frequently see managers in the Gazette, and when we hear of singers putting down their carriages, retrenching their suburban villas, and contenting themselves with salaries less enormous than those they now unblushingly exact. Upon such matters, however, it is not our purpose to expatiate. Theatrical quarrels rarely excite much general interest in this country, except inasmuch as they may exercise an unfavourable influence on the pleasures of the public – which has not been the case, we are happy to say, in the most recent and important instance of disagreement between the lessee of the first London theatre and certain members of his company.

At no period, probably, since London has possessed an Italian Opera, was there more room and a better chance of success for two establishments of that description than just now. Indeed, even if the particular circumstances that have caused a second establishment to be formed had not occurred, it might not improbably have arisen out of the want of remunerative patronage for high musical talent upon the Continent, entailed by the revolutionary convulsions of the last two years. Another circumstance favourable to the Italians is to be found in the depressed state of the native stage – a depression which we maintain is to be attributed to bad management and bad acting, more than to any decline in the public taste for the drama. Second-rate talent, such as now occupies the high places on our principal theatres, will no more permanently attract full houses, than will the burlesque and tinsel that has monopolised the minor stage. It is our conviction that high tragedy and good comedy will still draw together discriminating and desirable audiences; but they must be well acted. Could you bring back Kemble and Siddons, Kean and Young, rely upon it that the taste for the theatre would revive, and Drury Lane might be opened with better than a bare chance of success. And although those masters of their art have disappeared from the scene, there still are actors who, if they would condescend to pull together, might do much to prop the declining national drama. In the provincial towns the Charles Keans, Miss Faucit, or Macready, always draw full houses; and it is our belief they would do so the year through at Drury Lane, if they all belonged to its company, under a judicious management. It is idle to say that the public has lost its taste for theatres, because it will not encourage mediocrity and bad taste; and the best proof of the contrary is, that anything really good in theatricals, no matter in what style, at once draws. We need not go far for examples. About three years ago, the little French theatre in St James's had a good working company, besides a constant flow of still better actors, succeeding each other by twos and threes from Paris. The consequence was, that the house was nightly crowded; not only, be it observed, in its more fashionable divisions, but in those cheaper regions of gallery, pit, and boxes, more accessible to moderate purses and to the general public. In short, the theatre was popular, because the performances were good; although it is, assuredly, but a very limited portion of the English middle classes that can fully enter into and enjoy the spirit of French plays. When the management injudiciously changed the system, which, one would think, must surely have answered its purpose as well as that of the public, and gave indifferently sung comic operas instead of well-acted vaudevilles, dramas, and petites comédies, popularity and audience dwindled. It was no longer good of its kind. People will not be persuaded, for any length of time, that a star and a bundle of sticks compose a theatrical company worth listening to. We may take another instance, still nearer home. Under the management of Vestris and Mathews, and in spite of a deplorable absence of ventilation, the Lyceum Theatre has for many months past been nightly full to the roof, whilst nearly every other London manager has been wofully grumbling at the state of his benches and treasury. It is not that the performances at the Lyceum have been of a very high class; but of their kind they have been good, the company pulls well together, and there is a certain spirit and originality in the conduct of the theatre. And here, whilst avoiding comparisons with any particular theatre to which they might be unfavourable, we are yet led to remark, that an utter want of originality is one of the chief and most lamentable present characteristics of the London stage. Such a monotonous set of imitators was surely never beheld. They all follow each other in a string, like the boors after Dummling's precious goose. Unfortunately the golden feathers become dross in their grasp. If one makes a hit, forthwith the others copy; without pausing to reflect whether the novelty was not the principal charm, which will evaporate on repetition. Thus, last Christmas, at the theatre already referred to, a fairy spectacle of extraordinary beauty was brought out, and "ran," as the phrase is, an unusual number of nights, long outliving most of the very middling pantomimes and holiday entertainments elsewhere produced. Easter came, and behold! half-a-dozen other theatres, taking their cue from the lucky Lyceum, came out in the same line. Ambitious scenery, gorgeous decoration, wholesale glitter, and many-coloured fires, dazzled the eye in all directions. "If your voice were as fine as your feathers," said the crafty fox to the cheese-bearing crow, "what a bird you would be!" Were your taste equal to your tinsel, managers of the London theatres, what an improvement there would be in your receipts! Your dress-boxes and your cash-boxes would alike be replenished; and you would no longer have a pretext to indulge in undignified wailings about want of encouragement to native talent, preference given to foreigners, and the other querulous commonplaces with which the public is periodically bored.

To return, however, to the Opera. As we have already observed, about four years ago its prospects were bad. Discord, the forerunner of dissolution, had squatted itself in the Green-room. With one or two exceptions, the artists who for some years had been the chief pillars of that stage abandoned it for a rival establishment. With the few hands who stuck by the old ship, it seemed scarcely possible to make a fight. But at the most gloomy moment, when all seemed desperate, a good genius came to the rescue. One Swede proved more than an equivalent for half-a-dozen Italians, and impending ruin was replaced by triumphant success. London presented the singular spectacle – unprecedented, we believe, in any capital – of two enormous theatres simultaneously open for the representation of Italian operas. How it fares with the more modern establishment, we have no positive knowledge. Not too well, we fear, judging from the balance-sheet of a recent lessee. Should the experiment succeed, the public will doubtless be the gainers. We shall be glad to learn that all thrive and flourish; but meanwhile we are particularly pleased to find that the more ancient temple of music and dance, endeared to us by long habit, old associations, and much enjoyment, has risen, at the very moment when ill-omened prophets predicted its fall, to as high a pitch of excellence as, within our recollection, it ever attained; and has escaped conversion to an equestrian circus, a shilling concert room, a Radical debating hall, or any other of the profane and degrading purposes to which of late years it has been too much the fashion to apply the large London theatres. When the enthusiasm excited by Jenny Lind, which at one time approached infatuation, began to subside, and that amiable and charitable, but – if rumour lie not – somewhat capricious lady, fluctuating between matrimony and fame, at last took a middle course, and decided to cross the Atlantic, Her Majesty's Theatre had another stroke of good fortune. The Swede disappeared, but Germany came to the rescue. A singer whose name recalls the most glorious days of the Opera, and who, for nearly twenty years, had exchanged the artist's laurel wreath for the coronet of a countess – the plaudits of Europe for the ease and elegance of a court – was induced to return to the profession of which, during the short time she in her youth had exercised it, she had been one of the brightest ornaments.