Constantinople. By Edmond° de Amicis. Translated from the Seventh Italian
Edition, by Caroline Tilton. (Sampson Low and Co.) —This is a book full of vigorous and striking description, as well as of penetrating observation and sagacious thought, all, if we except one or two quite unintelligible passages (as on p. 144, 1. 14-18), worthily rendered by the translator. Among the lighter passages we may note the chapter on the "Bath," which has never been more graphically described, the brilliant picture of the "Great Bazaar," and then "The Arrival," giving what has so often been given before, but which never wearies, the first impression of Constantinople from the Bosphorus. Among the more serious we may mention the admirable estimate of Mohammed who has rendered to him justice, not the adulation which is half intended as a censure on Christianity ; and the powerful chapters in which the Turks, Armenians, and Greeks are appreciated. And what could be more powerful than the following ?— " He is the absolute sovereign of one of the vastest empires of the world, and there in his metropolis, at but a little distance from him, within great palaces that look down upon his seraglio, four or five ceremonious foreigners play the master in his house, and when they treat with him, hide under respectful language a perpetual menace at which be trembles. He has in his bands measureless power, the lives and fortunes of millions of subjects, the means of satisfying his wildest desires, and he cannot change the form of his head covering. He is surrounding by an army of courtiers and guards, who would kiss the print of his footstep, and he trembles for his own life and that of his children. He possesses a thousand of the most beautiful women in the world, and he alone, among all the Mussulmans of his empire, cannot call a free woman wife, his children must be born of slaves, and he himself is called 'son of a slave' by the same people who call him the shadow of God.' His name resounds with reverence and terror from the uttermost confines of Tartary to the uttermost confines of Maghreb, and in his own metropolis there is an innumerable and still increasing people, over whom he has not a shadow of power, and who laugh at him, his force, and his faith. Over the face of his immense empire, among the most miserable tribes of the more distant provinces, in mosques and solitary convents in savage lands, ardent prayers go up for his life and for his glory ; and he cannot take a step in his own states without finding himself in the midst of enemies, who execrate him and invoke the vengeance of heaven upon his head. For all that part of the world which lies in front of his realm, he is one of the most august and most formidable monarchs of the universe ; for that part that lies at his back, he is the weakest, the most pusillanimous, the most wretched man that wears a crown. An enormous current of ideas, of wills, of forces contrary to the nature and to the traditions of his power, flows around him, overturns, transforms, works in spite of him
and without his knowledge, at the destruction of laws, customs, man- ners. usages, beliefs, men, everything. And he is there, between Europe and Asia, in his great -palace washed by the sea, as in a ship ready to spread her sails, in the midst of an infinite confusion of ideas and things, surrounded by fabulous splendour and an immensity of misery, already ne due at uno, no more a true Mussulman, not yet a true European, reigning over a people in a state of mutation, barbarous in blood, civilised in aspect, two-fronted like Janus, served like a god, watched like a slave adored, envied, deceived, and meantime, every day that passes extinguishes a ray of his aureole and detaches a stone front his pedestal."
Such is the ruler of New Rome. Is there not something of a parallel between him and the spiritual potentate of the old city ? This is a book to be read, we may say, studied.
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