from his purpose. He will stand, if surrounded and overmastered, unshrinking, like an Indian chief among his tormentors, leaving no recanting word or look to dim his stern memory.

Not only will the tyranny that weighs him down, be shaken off, but with it must pass the onerous chain of ecclesiastical authority. The sanctions and obligations of his religion are indissolubly connected with temporal power; this is the root from which they derive their life. This power has never existed but in an absolute form; it can accommodate itself to no other mode of being; its very genius is to be supreme and irresponsible; so that the same effort which lifts the Mussulman above the broken fetters of his despotism, will place him on the ruins of his religion. The sceptre and crescent, altar and throne, will sink together. It would not, perhaps, be a matter of regret, were this catastrophe to occur without delay. For out of this chaos some new system might perhaps emerge, in which the rights of human nature would be respected, and the precepts of Christianity not wholly forgotten. Islamism is the grave of inspired truth and liberty.

16

CHAPTER XIII.

Departure from Constantinople-Plain of Troy-Ancient remains Opinion of travellers-Arguments of a lady-Vigils of a night on the plain-Visit to Helen's Fount-Ruins of Alexandria TroasA gloomy Greek-Mental tortures.

THE reader will, perhaps, be a little surprised to find me so suddenly at this distance from Constantinople. It is natural for us, on leaving a place to which we may never return, to pay a farewell visit to those objects that have struck most deeply into the heart; and to experience, at the parting moment, some of those feelings, so tenderly told, of the poor criminal who gave his wife and children a last embrace

Then fitted the halter, then traversed the cart,
And often look'd back, as if loth to depart.

But never went a dismayed culprit from his cottage, under the stern mandates of law, so hurriedly as we left the shapeless city of our short residence. We had scarcely time to catch a glance of its minarets, as they sunk behind us in the bosom of the Marmora. A case of the plague had occurred in the very house in which a portion of us were residing. We had been, for some time, narrowly and nervously dodg

ing death; and we now determined on flight, notwithstanding the admonition of Horace,

Mors et fugacem persequitur virum.

Casting our effects, and a few such edibles as the nearest huckster's shop could furnish, into a little Levantine brig that lay idle at Galata, we jumped on board ourselves, and made all sail to a stiff breeze, fortunately prevailing from the north; our passage through the Propontis, and down the Dardanelles, was too quick and palpitating for note or comment. It was like the speed of the flying fish, striking from wave to wave, in its escape from the pursuing dolphin. But as the most violent grief is usually the shortest, so the most sudden and paling panic is generally of the least duration. The sight of Achilles' tomb, Ida, and the plain of Ilium, seemed to make us forget the fatal contagion which we had just been shaking from the suspected folds of our garments. No one examined again the state of his pulse, felt under his arms for the frightful bubo, or sought the fuming antidotes of the sulphur match. Our consternation was changed into an antiquarian rapture; and I really believe, if the Scamander had been a solid stream of plague, we should, nevertheless, have tracked it to its source. Such is the spell cast on the soul by that dim spirit of romance which wings its way through the voiceless twilight of ages.

Think me not, reader, threading my way along

the reedy banks of this classic stream, with the vain purpose of locating anew the city of Priam, or of giving reasonableness and force to the localities assigned to it by the conjecturing fancy of others. I would as soon follow up the course of the Euphrates, with the expectation of determining the site of Eden. That garden of innocence smiled forth, the fairest feature of the infant world, and then with the hopes of man passed away. At half the mighty interval which stretches between that primal hour and this, the towers of Ilium rose and fell; the splendors of their perished pride have been embalmed in the verse of Homer; but the harp of a holier inspiration hath hymned the fragrant beauties of man's first abode.

There is not now to be found on the plain of Troy a single relic of art that can be satisfactorily identified with the ancient city; not the fragment of a column, arch, or frieze of its architecture: not a hewn block of marble or granite, that has any evidence of so high an antiquity. How, indeed, can we expect to find what was utterly lost to the learned more than two thousand years ago? The imperial Roman sought in vain for the slightest vestige of the Trojan city. He could subdue the world, bend the strong and intractable things of earth to his purpose, but he could not detect, with certainty, one stone that once reposed in the walls of the Phrygian capital. The victor of Macedon could drive his triumphal car from Balbec to the Rhine, and survey, with self

appropriating pride, the monuments of Egyptian strength and Grecian skill; but in his devoted pilgrimage to the reputed tomb of Achilles, was forced to doubt if ever rested here the ashes of that heroic Greek. The learning and curiosity of that acute, inquiring age, were exhausted in a futile search after one relic of all the objects over which the blind minstrel had cast such a bewildering charm. Troy was then, what it now is, and what it ever will be, a splendid uncertainty.

The island of Tenedos, the mount of Ida, and the waters of the Scamander, may narrow down the range of the localizing conjecture, but they cannot designate the exact positions. The curious traveller will never be able to certify himself that his present footstep presses the consecrated spot; that here stood the palace of Priam, and there rose the impregnable wall. A self-confident La Chevalier may, perhaps, be able for a time to pursuade himself, and many others, that Bournabashi has actually usurped the site of the ancient citadel, that the fount which springs near it is the same in which Helen was wont to gaze upon her fair image, that the mound which he burglariously entered, is the very one that entombed the bones of him who drew Hector, chained in death, to his chariot wheel. But then some less credulous Bryant, or investigating Hobhouse, will spring up to dissipate this satisfactory illusion, and restore objects to a more reasonable ambiguity. Or perhaps a Lady