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."