Right interesting are these Armenians, of whom the men have all the riches, and the women all the beauty (at least unveiled and cognisable) of Turkey. They have lost all trace of the active spirit that in an age of iron kept them busy in the _melée_ of nations. Their gravest senior would stare unintelligent were you to speak to him of Tiridates, or the Romans: and with their thoughts of Persia no ideas of tyranny are mixed; no stirring of the ancient spirit that kept them faithful in an ocean of foes, and rendered their land a continued battle-field. They give no signs of intelligence if you challenge them on the subject of Eutychus, by whose arch heresy they suffered severance from Catholicity, and in whose dogmas they live. They are a quiet, matter-of-fact, business-like people--the bankers and capitalists of the kingdom. Their mode of existence under the shadow of the Sultan's mercy, but without national representation or protection, has subdued them to a condition of patient endurance, and killed the energy of their nature. They are quiet, fat, and lethargic, reserving their anxieties for money-getting.
There might be to fiery spirits something humiliating in the dress to which they are so anxious to acquire the right: the huge and ugly cap which bespeaks them to be under some particular foreign protection, as the case may be, which is their only safeguard against all sorts of oppression. But where nationality is a mere idea without embodiment, it soon becomes as a dream. The Armenian is content to be endured and protected. Meanwhile he is not without a sort of national ambition; but it is of a new kind for him. They believe themselves to be the most ancient of people, retaining the original language that was spoken before the dispersion of Babel, and by consequence the identical language that was spoken by Adam. An interesting excursion might be made on this subject, seemingly so far at variance with the conclusions of learned ethnographers. Their deductions are from undoubted facts, and tend to their conclusion with a force that some philologists at least have considered irresistible.
Through the Armenian quarter our road lay onward for a short distance by the banks of Miles. It is but an insignificant stream, of scarcely sufficient tide to turn a mill; but in no better case are Ilissus and Cephissus found to be in the present day. The shade of Socrates still seems to linger over the Attic streamlet, swelling its puny tide to the capacity of the loftiest musings of the humanized; and the memory of Homer is wedded to these waters of Meles. The critics who would disprove the existence of the bard, and assign the different members of his compositions to numerous anonymous authors, or to indefinite traditions, would find this no vantage ground. The influences of the place would abash their contumacy. There is something poetical even now about the locality. The stream flows through the Armenian quarter, passing by a short course to the well-known Caravan-bridge, and thence into the open country. At pretty well all hours of the day, groups of nymphs may be seen washing clothes in the waters, exhibiting _tableaux vivans_ of Nausicaa and her maidens. No vulgar washerwomen are these with corrugated hands at reeking tubs, but such as painters and poets might celebrate. Washing is with them a pastime, and an elegance: their laundry a studio of art. They go right into the water, and splash about their things like naiads sporting; and anon returning to the bank, put forth their little strength in beating out the clothes. It would be rash to say that the process is so effectual as our more homely method; but it is at least pretty to look at. At evening the banks of the stream assume another appearance. Gay crowds promenade, and cavalcades linger; people of many nations congregate to unbend the brow laden with the cares of the day. Fathers muse, maidens gambol, and matrons chide.