ART. VII.-1. A Residence at Constantinople during a period including the Commencement, Progress, and Termination of the Greek and Turkish Revolutions. By the Rev. R. WALSH, L.L.D. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1836. 2. Neuf Années à Constantinople. Par A. BRAYER, D.M.P. 2 tomes 8vo. Paris: 1836, of these authors is doubtless known to many of our Treaders as a lively and entertaining writer, who has seen a good deal of some countries little visited, and tells rambling stories with considerable success. We are at some loss to understand the motives which have at last induced him to give to the publica narrative of events which he witnessed so many years ago, when those events have lost much of that interest which once attached to them; nor does he afford us in his preface any very intelligible account of his design. Many of the details of his residence in Constantinople were already anticipated in a volume published eight years ago, containing the account of his journey overland from that city among which we have particularly noticed the curious account of its ruins of ancient aqueducts, and several of his anecdotes respecting the Greek Revolution. Some of his narratives also, which are the most highly wrought into romantic shapes - for example, the earthquake at Zante in the first volume, and the fire at Pera in the second-we have seen already, if we are not mistaken, in the pages of some periodical publications. Allowing, however, for these little traits of professional authorship, his present work, although swelled to a very inconvenieut and unnecessary bulk, contains much to interest the general reader. It has powerfully recalled our attention to times and occurrences, which had been well nigh effaced from our immediate remembrance by the rapid succession of events in Turkish history;-occurrences of which the memory is painful and revolting in the extreme, but which must not be lost sight of; especially when the great political question of the East, and the character of the Ottoman nation and empire in connexion with it, are provoking so much of daily discussion amongst us. Dr Walsh's present publication contains, moreover, a variety of miscellaneous information about the manners and customs of the various nations inhabiting Constantinople. As far as his own experience as an eyewitness extends, he may be depended upon as a quick and curious observer, with considerable powers of description. But we have not the same reliance on his hearsay information; which he seems to have collected and retailed without taking much pains to sift the true or even the probable from the general mass. Witness his extraordinary story of a nation of half a million Nestorian Christians-living by themselves in a sort of happy valley on the banks of the Tigris-whom the Turcs invaded in the beginning of the present century, and were repulsed with the loss of 100,000 men and five pachas! all which he gravely reports on the authority of a Chaldean Bishop' passing through Constantinople. Much of his information is of a similar character-answers obtained to enquiries evidently directed at random, and from sources on which no credit could be safely reposed. We have compared De Walsh's volumes with those of Dr Brayer, whose work appears second at the head of our article.* This writer had the advantage of that more intimate acquaintance with the habits and opinions of a people which the character of a physician affords, especially in the East, where that character still retains some of the mysterious respect paid it in the dark ages among ourselves. Dr Brayer's medical observations, and especially those on the treatment of the plague, which occupy the whole of his second volume, are, we have no doubt, extremely valuable. For the rest, his book has disappointed us. With the exception of a few good stories, there is little of that knowledge of the interior of Oriental life which we are led to anticipate from the opportunities of the writer. His general view of the Turkish character, both in its virtues and its defects, is picturesque, but evidently exaggerated. Their apathy and want of instruction, their fatalism, their religious fervour, their benevolence, their *The value of the statistical information to be derived from such works as those before us may be conjectured from comparing the two following accounts of the raya population of Constantinople-the one by a writer who has resided four, the other nine years in that city ;— Walsh's estimate comprises, it must be said, the villages on the Bosphorus. The extraordinary difference between him and Brayer on the subject of the Armenians may be partly accounted for by the fact, that the English writer takes his information without scruple from an Armenian Schismatic bishop. honesty, and purity of life are all too highly coloured; as if the whole Ottoman population of Constantinople and its neighbourhood was fashioned exactly after that beau ideal of a Turk, which poets and romancers have been pleased to portray. This is a common characteristic of French travellers, although by no means confined exclusively to them. Whether a Frenchman has resided nine days or nine years among a foreign people, the result of his observations is sure to assume the shape of a system. His lively imagination proceeds all at once to generalize the first facts which he may collect; and all his subsequent experience tends only to assist him in shaping and polishing more carefully the original creature of his brain. One thing we learn from Dr Brayer's personal narrative: his experience of practice at Constantinople, and especially among the Turks, presents no very comfortable prospect to poor and aspiring Frank physicians, The Turk is fond of medical visitors: the state of his pulse, the health of his own and his neighbours' families, are agreeable subjects of gossip to shorten the wearisome day of an Oriental. And nowhere has a physician less reproach or discredit to undergo in case of failure. It was the will of Allah that the means employed should not succeed and no fault of the mortal who administered them. But on the other hand, he has neither thanks nor praise to expect for a cure; for that too was predestined, and he is only the appointed instrument. Formerly the provoking apathy of the Turk was redeemed by his readiness and liberality in point of remuneration. But he is now grown poor; and being just as fond as ever of chatting with his physicians, his poverty has made him as ingenious as a Frank in the art of inveigling the practitioner into a consultation gratis; while he assumes to himself an unlimited latitude in taxing the infidel's bills when he deigns to pay them. : To return to Dr Walsh, with whom we are at present chiefly concerned. Among all the graces which befit an Oriental traveller, he is particularly ambitious of exhibiting his proficiency as a scholar and an antiquarian. His pages are crowded with Greek and Latin quotations; and he would fain persuade us that his time and labour were ardently devoted to the pursuit of objects of classical research, whenever he had an opportunity of escaping from the immediate duties of his situation. He apologizes, in his preface, for the extremely incorrect manner in which his book is printed we will not therefore run the hazard of unjust accusation, by charging him with all the classical slip-slop which defaces his work. But when we found our scholar, nearly in the outset of his Oriental rambles, informing us that the works AKAMANTIC ENIKA on the frieze of Demosthenes's Lantern at Athens, prove that monument to have been erected 'to some 'man of this name who was a conqueror in the games,' we began to think that his anxiety to render services to the world of letters, in the way of lapidary research, was a little thrown away. Thus far, however, our clerical author might still have passed muster, as well as ninety in a hundred of his brethren of either University, who amuse themselves with summer tours in the regions of their classical recollections. But when we came to such passages as the following- Parthenius, a Neapolitan poet, represents them (the Sciotes) as gaining the affection of strangers by their pleasing manners, kind services, and agreeable wine, "Necnon et placidi mores et amica vinum vis Docta 'animos capere officio," (vol i. p, 399.) 'Genuine Chian wine, 'made on the Arvisian plains, where, according to Virgil, vina 'novum fundavit calathis Arvisia nectar,' (vol. ii. p. 76)—we began to suspect that the press might have been rather conveniently left without correction; and the printer's devil thus rendered responsible, as is sometimes the case, by a general salvo, for errors of all descriptions. Yet this is the writer who in a preceding work, if we recollect rightly, details to us how he astonished a Transylvanian innkeeper, by the smart application of an epigram in Martial! This unfortunate taste for pretence and display often throws a suspicion on the general credibility of the authors who indulge in it. Dr Walsh left England in November, 1820, in the suite of Lord Strangford, who was then proceeding as ambassador to the Porte. He passed by Gibraltar, Malta, Corfu, and Zante, in the latter of which places it was his fortune to witness the terrible earthquake of December in that year. From the Ionian Islands the party proceeded to Milo, Athens, Naxia, and visited the celebrated grotto of Antiparos. Our author, in pursuing his voyage, landed on the Plain of Troy, and again at Gallipoli, where he left the embassy, and travelled by land to Constantinople through Rodosto. All these adventures occupy the greater part of his first volume; but as our present purpose is chiefly with the more important contents of his work,-those which describe the state of Constantinople during the period of the Greek insurrection, we must pass them by without further comment. For some time after the arrival of the embassy, Constantinople presented its usual appearance of dull tranquillity. But in the spring of 1821, the more experienced Frank residents began to observe a change in the demeanour of the Turks, which raised the most boding apprehensions in their minds. The news of Ypsilante's insurrection in Moldavia, the first outbreak of Greek revolt, had transpired. The vast plan of rebellion, conceived by the ardent and enterprising leaders of the Greeks, had been hitherto so carefully concealed, that not a suspicion of it appears to have arisen either among Turks or Franks until the hour of its accomplishment. Ypsilante's proclamation, in which he appealed to the Emperor Alexander for support, and at the same time vaunted the approaching elevation of the Cross above the Crescent, was almost the first circumstance which roused the Ottoman Government and population from its apathy. Alexander replied to it, as the Russian Government has always replied to the instances of those whom its intrigues have seduced into rebellion -he formally disavowed Ypsilante's enterprise, and struck his name off the list of his army. The Sultan answered it, by appealing to the religion and loyalty of his Mussulman subjects, and exhorting every man to provide himself with arms. One hundred thousand armed Turks, from boys of ten years and upwards, were now let loose against the Christians in the streets of Constantinople. They began with insult, from which they speedily proceeded to wanton murder and mutilation. The yataghans of the Turkish desperadoes were exercised indiscriminately on the persons of the trembling Greeks, who only ventured into the streets at the hazard of their lives; and the poor Armenians, the most peaceful and timid people in the world, came in for their share of the persecution, although most innocent of its cause. 6 A fellow of the new levies went into the shop of an Armenian merchant, and chose some cloth for a pelisse he was dissatisfied with the price, and went away. Next day he returned, said he would pay what was asked, and the shop'keeper stood over the cloth to measure it. The Armenians wear ' a tall cap called a calpac, which is like an inverted sugar-loaf, 'the head being put into the small end. Their capotes have no capes, and a long naked neck always appears when they stoop. 'This presented an object too tempting for the discontented 'Turk: he drew his yataghan, and with one blow severed his 'head from his body. It fell into the piece of cloth he was pur'chasing; so he wrapt it up and carried it off!' So accustomed are these industrious and unresisting people to the cruelties of the Government under which they live, that to have perished by the hand of the executioner is a kind of title to hereditary respect among them. They engrave the figures of their relations on their tombs, suspended from gibbets, or with their heads between their legs! No Armenian, they say, ever suffers for a crime; but when a Turkish grandee is deposed and slain, his Armenian bankers and agents are involved in his calamity, and are quietly made away with as a preliminary to the confiscation of their pro VOL. LXIV. NO. CXXIX. 1 |