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EOTHEN; OR, TRACES OF TRAVEL BROUGHT HOME FROM THE EAST. ”
The Osmanlees speak well. In countries civ-
ilized according to the European plan, the work
of trying to persuade tribunals is almost all per-
formed by”a set of men, the great body of whom
very seldom do anything else; but in Turkey,
this division of labor has never taken place, and
every man is his own advocate. ‘The importance
of the rhetorical art is immense, for a bad speech
may endanger the property of the speaker, as well
as the soles of his feet and the free enjoyment
of his throat. So it results that the most of the
Turks whom one sees have a lawyer-like habit
of speaking connectedly, and at length. | The
_ treaties continually going on in the bazaar for the
buying and selling of the merest trifles are car-
ried on by speechifying rather than by mere col-
loquies, and the eternal uncertainty as to the
market value of things in constant sale gives
room for endless discussion. The seller is for-
ever demanding a price immensely beyond that
for which he sells at last, and so occasions un-
speakable disgust to many Englishmen, who can-
not see why an honest dealer should ask more
for his goods than he will really take: the truth
is, however, that an ordinary tradesman of Con-
stantinople has no other way of finding out the
‘fair market value of his property. .The.difficul-
ty under which he labors is easily shown by com-
paring the mechanism of the commercial system
in Turkey with that of our own country. In
England, or in any other great mercantile coun-
try, the bulk of the things which are bought and
sold goes through the hands of a wholesale deal-
er, and it is he who higgles and bargains with an
entire nation of purchasers, by entering into trea-
ty with retail sellers. The labor of making a few
Jarge contracts is sufficient to give a clew for find-
ing the fair market value of the things sold
throughout the country ; but in Turkey, from the
primitive habits of the people, and partly from the
absence of great capital and great credit, the im-
porting merchant, the warehouseman, the whole-
sale dealer, the retail dealer, and the shopman,
are all one person, Old Moostapha, or Abdallah,
or Hadgi Mohamed, waddles up from the water’s
edge with a small packet of merchandise, which he
has bought out of a Greek brigantine, and when
at last he has reached his nook in the bazaar,
he puts his goods before the counter, and himself
upon it; then, laying fire to his chibouque, he
**sits in permanence,” and patiently waits to ob-
tain ‘‘the best price that can be got in an open
market.” This is his fair right as a seller, but
he has no means of finding out what that best
price is, except by actual experiment. He can-
not know the intensity of the demand, or the
abundance of the supply, otherwise than by the
offers which may be made for his little bundle of
goods; so he begins by asking a perfectly hope-
Jess price, and thence descends the ladder until
he meets a purchaser, forever
“Striving to attain
By shadowing out the unattainable.”
This is the struggle which creates the continual
occasion for debate. The vendor, perceiving that
the unfolded merchandise has caught the eye of
a possible purchaser, commences his ‘opening
speech. . He covers his bristling broadcloths and
his meagre silks with the golden broidery of Ori-
ental praises, and as he talks, along with the slow
and graceful waving of his arms, he lifts his un-
dulating periods, upholds and poises them well
till they have gathered their weight and their
strength, and then hurls them bodily forward with
grave, momentous swing. The possible pur-
chaser listens to the whole speech with deep and
serious attention; but when it is over, Ais turn
arrives ; he elaborately endeavors to show why
he ought not to buy the things at a price twenty
times more than their value ; by-standers, attract-
ed to the debate, take a part in it as independent
members—the vendor is heard in reply, and com-
ing down with his price, furnishes the materials
for anew debate. Sometimes, however, the deal-
er, if he is a very pious Mussulman, and sufficient-
ly rich to hold back his ware, will take a more
dignified part, maintaining a kind of judicial
gravity, and receiving the applicants who come
to his stall as if they were rather suitors than cus-
tomers. He will quictly hear to the end somelong
speech which concludes with an offer, and will
answer it all with the one monosyllable ‘‘ Yok,”
which means distinctly ‘* No.”
I caught one glimpse of the old heathen world.
My habits of studying military subjects had been
hardening my heart against poetry. Forever
staring at the flames of battle, I had blinded my-
self to the lesser and finer lights that are shed
from the imaginations of men. In my reading
at this time, I delighted to follow from out of
Arabian sands the feet of the armed believers,
and to stand in the broad, manifest storm-track
of Tartar devastation; and thus, though sur-
rounded at Constantinople by scenes of much in-
terest to the ‘‘ classical scholar,” I had cast aside
their associations like an old Greek grammar,
and turned my face to the ‘‘ shining Orient,” for-
getful of old Greece, and all the pure wealth she
has left to this matter-of-fact-ridden world. Butit
happened to me one day to mount the high grounds
overhanging the streets of Pera: I sated my eyes
with the pomps of the city, and its crowded waters,
and then I looked over where Scutari lay half
veiled in her mournful cypresses ; I looked yet
farther, and higher, and saw in the heavens a sil-
very cloud ‘that stood fast, and still against the
breeze ; it was pure, and dazzling white as might
be the veil of Cytherea, yet, touched with fire, as
though from beneath, the loving eyes of an im-
mortal were shining through and. through. I
knew the bearing, but had enormously misjudged
its distance and underrated its height, and so it
was as a sign and a testimony—almost as a call
from the neglected gods, that now I saw and ac-
knowledged the snowy crown of the Mysian
Olympus!
CHAPTER IV.
TUE TROAD,
Meru ey recovered almost suddenly, and we
determined to go through the Troad together.
My comrade was a capital Grecian ; it is true
that his singular mind so ordered and disposed
the classic lore which he had gained as to. im-
press it with something of an original and barba-
rous character —with an almost Gothic quaint-
ness, more properly belonging to a rich native
ballad than to the poetry of Hellas; there was
a certain impropriety in his knowing so much
Greek—an unfitness in the idea of marble fauns,
and satyrs, and even Olympian gods, lugged in
under the oaken roof and the painted light of an
odd old Norman hall. But Methley, abounding
in Homer, really loved him (as I believe) in all
truth, without whim or fancy ; moreover, he had
a good deal of the practical sagacity, or, sharp-
ness, or whatever you call it,
“Ofa Yorkshireman hippodamoio,”
and this enabled him to apply his knowledge
with much more tact than is usually shown by
people so learned as he,
I too loved Homer, but not with a scholar’s
love. The most humble and pious among wom-
en was yet so proud a mother that she could
teach her first-born son no Watts’s hymns—no
collects for the day; she could teach him in ear-
liest childhood no less than this—to find a home
in his saddle, and to love old Homer and all that
Homer sung. ‘True it is, that the Greek was in-
geniously rendered into English—the English of
Pope, even, but it is not such a mesh as that
that can screen an earnest child from the fire of
Homer's battles. .
I pored over the Odyssey as over a story-book,
hoping and fearing for the hero whom yet I part-
ly scorned, But the Iliad—line by line, I clasp-
ed it to my brain with reverence as well as with
love. As an old woman deeply trustful sits read-
ing her Bible because of the world to come, so,
as though it would fit me for the coming strife
of this temporal world, I read and read the Iliad.
Even outwardly it was not like other books; it
was. throned in towering folios. ‘There was a
preface or dissertation printed in type still more
majestic than the rest of the book ; this I read,
but not till my enthusiasm for the Iliad had al-
ready run high. ‘The writer, compiling the opin-
ions of many men, and chiefly of the ancients,
set forth, I know not' how quaintly, that the Iliad
was all in ‘all to the human race—that it was his-
tory, poetry, reyelation—that the works of men’s
hands were folly and vanity, and would pass away
like the dreams of a child; but that the kingdom
of Homer would endure for ever and ever.
LT assented with all my soul, I read, and still
read; I came to know Homer. A learned com-
mentator knows something of the Greeks, in the
same sense as an oil-and-color-man may be said *
to know something of painting; but take an
untamed child, and leave him alone for twelve
months with any translation of Homer, and he
will be nearer by twenty centuries to the spirit
of old Greece; he does not stop, in the ninth
year of the siege, to admire this or that group of
words—he has no books in his tent, but he shares
in vital counsels with the ‘* King of men,” and
knows the inmost souls of the impending gods.
How profanely he exults over the powers divine,
when they are taught to dread the prowess of
mortals! and, most of all, how he rejoices when
the god of war flies howling from the spear
of Diomed, and mounts into heaven for safety!
Then the beautiful episode of the Sixth Book:
the way to feel this is not to go casting about,
and learning from pastors, and masters, how best
to admire it; the impatient child is not grub-
bing for beauties, but pushing the siege; the
women vex him with their delays and their talk-
ing —the mention of the nurse is personal, and
little sympathy has he for the child that is young
enough to be frightened at the nodding plume
of a helmet; but all the while that he thus chafes
at the pausing of the action, the strong vertical
light of Homer's poetry is blazing so. full upon
the people and things of the Iliad, that soon to
the eyes of the child they grow familiar as his
mother’s shawl; yet of this great gain he is un-
conscious, and on he goes, vengefully thirsting
for the best blood of Troy, and never remitting
his fierceness till almost suddenly it is changed
for sorrow —the new and generous sorrow that
he learns to feel when the noblest of all his foes
lies sadly dying at the Scxan gate,
Heroic days were these, but the dark ages of
school-boy life came closing over them. I sup-
pose it’s all right in the end; yet, by Jove, at first
sight it does seem a sad intellectual fall from
your mother's dressing-room to a buzzing school.
You feel so keenly the delights of early knowl-
edge; you form strange mystic friendships with
the mere names of mountains, and seas, and con-
tinents, and mighty rivers; you learn the ways
of the planets, and transcend their narrow limits,
and ask for the end of space; you vex the elec-
tric cylinder till it yields you, for your toy to
play with, that subtle fire in which our earth was
forged; you. know of the nations that have tow-
ered high in the world, and the lives of the men
who have saved whole empires from oblivion.
What more will you ever learn? Yet the dismal
change is ordained, and then thin, meagre Latin
(the same for everybody), with small shreds and
patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper’s pall
over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowl-
edge, vile, monkish, doggerel grammars and gra-
duses, dictionaries. and lexicons, and horrible
odds and ends of dead languages, are given you
for your portion, and down you fall from Roman
story to a three-inch scrap of ‘‘Scriptores Ro-
mani” —from Greek poetry, down, down to the
cold rations of ‘*Poetx Gracci,” cut up by com-
mentators and served out by school-masters !
It was not the recollection of school, nor col-
lege learning, but the rapturous and earnest read-
ing of my childhood, which made me bend for-
ward so longingly to the plains of Troy.
Away from our people and-our horses, Meth-
ley and I went loitering along by the willowy
banks of a stream that crept in quietness through
the low, even plain. There was no stir of weath-
er overhead— no sound of rural labor—no sign
of life in the land; but all the earth was dead
and still, as though it had lain for thrice a thou-
sand years under the leaden gloom of one un-
broken Sabbath. :
Softly and sadly the poor, dumb, patient stream
went winding and winding along through its
shifting pathway ; in some places its waters were
parted, and then again, lower down, they would
mect once more. I could sce that the stream