We landed at the _Fanar_. Bow-windows crowded with fair faces, in enormous pink turbans, naked shoulders (which I am already so orientalised as to think very indecent), puffed curls and pinched waists, reminded us at every step that we were in a Christian quarter of Constantinople. From this paltry and miserable suburb, spring the modern princes of Greece, the Mavrocordatos, and Ghikas, the Hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia, the subtle, insinuating, intriguing, but talented and ever-successful Fanariotes. One hears so much of them in Europe, and so much is made of a stray scion from the very far-traced root of Palæologus or some equally boasted blood of the Fanar (I met a Fanariote princess G—— at the baths of Lucca last year, whom I except from every disparaging remark), that he is a little disappointed with the dirty alleys and the stuffed windows shown him as hereditary homes of these very sounding names. There are a hundred families at least in the Fanar, that trace their origin back to no less than an imperial stock, and there is not a house in the whole quarter that would pass in our country for a respectable barn. In personal appearance they are certainly very inferior to any other race of their own nation. The Albanians and the Greeks I saw at Napoli and in the Morea, were (except the North American Indians) the finest people, physically, I have ever been among; while it would be difficult to find a more diminutive and degenerate-looking body of men and women, than swarm in this nest of Grecian princes.
We re-entered our little bark, and gliding along leisurely through the crowd of piades, kachambas, and caïques, landed at Stamboul, and walked on toward the bazaar. Always discovering new passages in that labyrinth of shops, we found ourselves, after an hour’s rambling, in a long street of booksellers. This is rather the oldest and narrowest part of the bazaar, and the light of heaven meets with the additional interruption of two rows of pillars with arched friezes standing in the middle of the street. On entering the literary twilight of the passage in the rear of these columns, the classic nostril detects instantly the genuine odour of manuscript, black-letter, and ancient binding; and the trained eye, accustomed to the dim niches of libraries, wanders over the well-piled shelves with their quaint rows of volumes in vellum, and appreciates at once their varied riches. Here is nothing of the complexion of a shelf at the Harpers’, or the Hendees’, or the Careys’—no fresh and uncut novel, no new-born poem, no political pamphlet or gay souvenir! And the priceless treasures of learning are not here doled out by a talkative publisher or dapper clerk, skilled only in the lettered backs of the volumes he barters. But in sombre and uneven rows, or laid in heaps, whose order is not in their similarity of binding, but in the correspondence of their contents, lie venerable and much-thumbed tomes of Arabic or Persian; while the venerable bibliopole, seated motionless on his hams, with his grey beard reaching to his crossed slippers, peruses an illuminated volume of Hafiz, lifting his eyes from the page only to revolve some sweet image in his mind, and murmur a low “pekke!” of approbation.