BEAUTIES OF THE BOSPHORUS       5

Nor is even this all; for the march of expediency has been so rapid, and the mania for reform so active during the reign of the present Sultan, that the most extraordinary changes are constantly taken place, not only in the habits and feelings of the people, but in the very aspect of their city. The beautiful remains of Moorish architecture, so essentially Oriental in their character, are giving place to European innovation; the heavy, drooping, convoluted roofs of the fountains are disappearing, to make room for light iron railings; and the bright frescoes and painted screens of the wooden palaces are superseded by columns of sculptured marble; an anomaly sufficiently startling to convince the traveller that it is only a first step toward the total extinction of that peculiar and fairylike species of architecture which renders the vicinity of the Bosphorus so unlike every other locality, that it appears to be rather the embodyment of a "Midsummer night's dream", than a mere earthly landscape.

If it be indeed desirable to

"Catch the living manners as they rise,"

it can be no less so to preserve a record of the past. there is a fine moral in the representation of things that have passed away, if it be read aright. We gaze on the pictured glories of Tyre and Sidon, of Niniveh and Carthage, and the lesson is a salutary one. In after-years, in like manner, when the Constantinople of to-day shall have become changed, (as it surely will,) into a mere city of European palaces, and marts, and manufactories, it will be a reposing place for the spirit to dwell upon the semblance of that which it once was, while Turkey was yet (ostensibly at least,) an independent Empire, with a distinct faith, and feeling, and principle of existence; ere the progress of events, political as well as moral, swept away, with the unsparing besom of reform, the web which the spider of antiquity had woven about "the palaces of the Caliphs."