Chapter III: Part 3

There are three accepted ways of passing up and down the Bosphorus. There is the common market-boat of the country--a huge, lumbering, fiat-bottomed affair, about the size of a Thames lighter, but with high bows and stern. It is propelled by six or eight boatmen, each pulling a huge oar some eighteen feet long. They pull a long, steady stroke, each man stepping up on to the thwart in front of him at the beginning of his stroke, and throwing himself back till his weight has dragged his oar through, and he finds himself back on his own seat, from which he at once springs up and steps forward again for a fresh stroke. It must be splendid training exercise, and they make a steady four miles an hour against the stream;--no bad pace, for the boats are loaded with fruit-baskets and packages and passengers--the veiled women sitting in a group apart in the stern. Then there are the steamers, which ply every hour up and down, the express boats touching at one or two principal piers, and doing the twelve miles from the bridge at Stamboul to Bajukdere in an hour and a quarter, the others stopping at every pier, and taking two hours or more. They are Government boats, for passengers only, and the fares are somewhat higher than those of our Thames steamers. They have a long glazed cabin on the after-deck for the first-class male passengers, and a small portion screened off further aft, where the veiled women are crowded together. Until lately, all women were accustomed to travel behind this screen, but the unveiled are beginning to break the rule, and to intrude into the cabin of the lords of creation. You see the Turks lift their eyebrows slightly as women in crinoline squeeze by them and take their seats, but it is too late for any further demonstration. An awning is spread over the whole deck, cabin and all, and under it the passengers, who are too late to get seats in the cabin, sit about on small low stools. Such a _colluvies gentium_ and Babel of tongues no man can see or hear anywhere else I should think. By your side, perhaps, sits a scrupulously clean old Turk, with his legs tucked up under him and his slippers on the floor beneath. He has the vacant hopeless look of an opium-eater, and you see him take out his little box from his belt, and feel with nervous fingers how large a pellet he may venture on in consideration of the bad company he is in. On the other side an English sailor boy, delighted to be able to talk broad Durham to somebody, is telling you how he has been down to the bazaars and has bought a “hooble booble,” and a bottle of attar of roses for the folk at home, and speculating how they would give £5, he knows, at Sunderland, to see one of those women who look as if they were done up in grave-clothes. Opposite you have a couple of silky-haired Persians, with their long soft eyes and clear olive skins, high head-dresses and sombre robes, and all about a motley crowd of Turks, Circassians, and Greeks, Europeans with muslin round their wideawakes, Maltese, English, and French skippers, soldiers in coarse zouave and other uniforms, most of them smoking, and the waiters (Italians generally), edging about amongst them all with little brazen coffee-trays. An artist wishing to draw the heads of all nations could find no richer field, and in the pursuit of his art would not of course object to the crush and heat and odour; but as we are more bent on comfort, we will go up the Bosphorus in the third conveyance indicated above, a caique--and a more fascinating one can scarcely be conceived. You may have your caique of any size, from one pair of sculls up to the splendid twelve-oared state affairs of ambassadors and pashas; but that with three caiquejees or rowers seems to be the most in use amongst the rich folk, so we can scarcely do wrong in selecting it.

Our three-manned caique shall belong to an English merchant, the happy owner of a summer villa at Therapia or Bajukdere. He shall be waiting for us, and shall board the steamer as it drops anchor opposite Seraglio Point. While our portmanteau is being fished up from the hold, we have time to examine critically his turn-out. The caique is about the size of an old-fashioned four-oar, but more strongly built, with a high sharp bow and a capital flat floor, and lies on the water as lightly as a wild duck. The caiquejees’ seats are well forward. The stern is decked for some eight feet, and in this deck is a hole, so that you can stow your luggage away underneath. When the ladies use the caique, their _cavass_, with his red fez, blue braided coat and scimitar, sits grimly with his legs in the hole and gives their orders to the caiquejees. Comfortable cushions lying on a small Turkey carpet, between the little deck and the stretcher of the stroke oar, in the roomiest part of the boat, await you. You will lounge on them with your shoulders against the deck, a white umbrella over your head, and a cigarette in your mouth. In the climate of the Bosphorus, cigarettes of Turkish tobacco supersede all other forms of the weed. The caiquejees are wiry, bronzed Turks; their costume, the red fez, a loose coloured jacket, generally blue, which they strip off for work, and appear in Broussa shirts of camels’ hair fitting to the body, with loose sleeves reaching only to the elbow, and baggy white cotton drawers tied at the knee. The stroke wears stockings, which the others dispense with; each of them keeps his slippers under his own seat. They each pull a pair of straight sculls fastened to a single thole pin by a greased thong. You follow your friend and portmanteau down the gangway and start, and are at once delighted at the skill with which your crew steer through the crowds of Maltese boats and caiques, and under great steamers and merchant ships, and fall into their regular stroke, twenty-eight to the minute, which they never vary for the whole twelve miles. Their form, too, is all that can be desired, and would not discredit a London waterman. Turning up the Bosphorus you soon lose sight of the Golden Horn, and the old rickety bridge which spans it from Stamboul to Galata. You pull away at first under the European shore, past the magnificent palace of the present Sultan, gleaming white in the sun; and then come other huge piles, some tumbling to pieces, some used as barracks, and private houses of all sizes and colours, in their little gardens, and warehouses, coffee-shops, cemeteries, fruit-markets and mosques. Not a yard of the bank but is occupied with buildings, and the houses are piled far up the hillside behind. It is the same on the Asiatic side, except that there the houses next to the water are chiefly those of the rich Turks, as you may guess from the carefully barred and jalousied windows of the harems, and that the line of houses is not so deep. And so on for five miles you glide up the strait, half a mile or more wide, alive with small boats moving about, and men-of-war steamers riding at anchor, through one continuous street. Then comes the narrowest part, where the current runs like a mill-tail against you. On the European side stand the three towers, connected with battlemented walls, built by Mahomed’s orders in the winter before the taking of Stamboul and the extinction of the Western Empire. Roumelie Hissa the point is called now, and behind it rises the highest hill on the Bosphorus. If it is not too hot, your friend will land and walk up with you, and when you have reached the top you will see Olympus and the distant Nicomedian mountains over the Sea of Marmora to the south, and the whole line of the Bosphorus below you, and the Giants’ Mountain and the Black Sea away to the north. Behind you lie wild moorlands, covered with heather and gum cistus, and arbutus bushes, and a small oak shrub. Here and there in the hollows are small patches of vines and other culture, with occasional clumps of stone pine and Scotch fir, and chestnut and beech, amongst which scanty herds of buffaloes and goats wander, watched by melancholy, truculent-looking herdsmen, in great yellow capotes and belts, from which a brace of long, old-fashioned pistols and the hilt of a long straight dagger stick out. But, desolate as the European side is, it is a garden compared to the Asiatic. You look across there, and behind the little bright belt of life along the Bosphorus, there is nothing between you and the horizon but desert heathery hills, running away as far as the eye can reach, without a house, a tree, a beast, or the slightest sign of life upon them. I scarcely ever saw so lovely a view, and it is thrown out into the most vivid contrast by the life at your feet. You descend to your caique again, and now are aware of a towing-path which runs at intervals along in front of the houses. A lot of somewhat wretched-looking Turks here wait with ropes to tow the caiques and other boats up the rapids. Your stroke catches the end of the rope, and fastens it, exclaiming, “_Haidee babai_” (so it sounds), “Push on, my fathers; push on, my lambs”; and two little Turks, passing the rope over their shoulders, toil away for some hundred yards, when they are dismissed with a minute backsheesh. And now the Bosphorus widens out: on the Asiatic side comes the valley of the Sweet Waters of Asia, and the new kiosk of the Sultan, which I spoke of before, and afterwards only occasional villages and the palaces of one or two great pashas. On the European side the houses are still in continuous line, but begin to get more elbow-room, and only in the little creeks, where the villages lie, are the hillsides much built on. Now you begin to see the summer villas of the Europeans, and accordingly an esplanade faced with stone, and broad enough for carriages to pass, begins. This upper part of the Bosphorus has its own charm. The water is rougher, as there is generally a breeze from the Black Sea; and porpoises roll about, and flocks of sea-swallows (âmes damnées) flit for ever over the little restless waves. The banks between the houses and the wild common land of the hill tops are now often taken into the gardens and cultivated in terraces; and where this is not so they are clothed with fine Scotch fir and stone pine, and avenues of cypress of the height of forest trees, with magnificent old gray trunks, marking where paths run up the hillside or standing up alone like sombre sentinels. It is not until you get almost to Therapia that there is any break in the row of houses. Therapia, where Medea is said to have prepared her potions, is a Greek village, built round a little bay, the busiest and almost the prettiest place on the Bosphorus. There are always half a dozen merchantmen lying there, and a sprinkling of European sailors appear amongst the fezzes frequenting the quays formed by the esplanade, and there is a café restaurant, and a grog shop, where the British sailor can be refreshed with the strong liquors of his country. Behind the village is the little cemetery of the Naval Brigade, sadly neglected and overshadowed with beech and chestnut trees, where Captain Lyons and many another fine fellow lie, to whom their countrywomen have raised a large, simple white marble cross, which stands up mournfully amongst the tangled grass which creeps over the rows of nameless graves. One grieves that it is shoved away out of sight of the Bosphorus, up which the brave fellows all went with such stout hearts.

You pass more handsome villas and the summer residences of the English and French ambassadors just above Therapia, and then comes the Bay of Bajukdere, the broadest part of the Bosphorus, with the village of the same name on its north shore, the last and handsomest of the suburbs of Constantinople, where are the other embassies and the palaces of the richest merchants. It was the place where Godfrey of Bouillon encamped with his Crusaders. Beyond, the strait narrows again, and runs between steep cliffs with a sharp turn into the Black Sea, and close to the mouth are the storm-lashed Symplegades.

You must fill up the picture with ships of all sorts under the flags of all the nations of the earth passing up and down, and people the banks with figures in all the quaint and picturesque costumes of the East; but no effort of imagination, I fear, can realise the frame in which the whole is set, the water of the Bosphorus, and the unfathomable Eastern sky. I never had an idea of real depth before. I doubt if it be possible to imagine it. I am sure it is impossible to forget it.

Athens, 4th October 1862.

We left Constantinople for the Piraeus in a French packet. The sun set behind Pera just before we started, and at the same moment a priest came out into the little balcony which runs round each dizzy minaret some three parts of the way up, and called the faithful to prayer. The poor faithful! summoned there still at sunrise and sunset to turn towards Mecca, and fall down before Him who gave that great city, and the fair European countries behind it, to their fathers:--they must pray and work hard too if they mean to stay there much longer. We steamed slowly out from the Golden Horn, round Seraglio Point, and into night on the Sea of Marmora. I was up early the next morning, and saw the sun rise over the islands just as we were entering the Dardanelles. We stopped between Lesbos and Abydos to take in cargo, time enough to charter one of the fruit boats and pull off for a good swim in that romantic water. By ten o’clock we were opening the Ægean Sea, with the road close under our larboard bow and Tenedos in front of us. We saw the mounds on the shore, known as the tombs of Achilles and Ajax, and so passed on wondering. There were half a dozen young Englishmen on board, carrying amongst them a Homer, a _Childe Harold_, and other classics. We had much debate as we passed point after point as to the possible localities, but I am not sure that we came to any conclusions which are worth repeating. About noon, after we had become familiar with island after island, well remembered as names from school and college days, but now living realities, a faint peak was discovered in the far north-west. What could it be? We applied to an officer, and found it was Athos. You may fancy what the atmosphere was, sir, for Athos must have been at least sixty miles from us at the time.

Night came on before any of us were tired of the Ægean. Next morning at daybreak we were off the southern point of Euboea, with the coast of Attica in sight over the bows. By breakfast-time we were rounding Sunium, with the fair columns of a temple crowning the height, the bay of Salamis before us, and “Morea’s Hills” for a background; and presently the cliffs on the Attic coast gave way to low ground, and one of our company, who had been in these parts before, startled us with “There is the Acropolis!” “Where?” Operaglasses were handed about, and eager looks cast over the plain, till we were aware of a little rocky hill rising up some three miles from the shore, and a town lying round the foot of it. The buildings of the town gleamed white enough in the sun, but the ruins on the Acropolis we could scarcely make out. They were of a deep yellow, not easily distinguishable on this side, and at this distance from the rock below. The first sensation was one of disappointment--we were all candid enough to admit it. We had seen barren coasts enough, but none so bare as this of Attica. Hymettus lay on the right, and Pentelicus further away on the north, behind Athens and the Acropolis; and from their feet right down to the Piraeus, no tree or shrub or sign of cultivation was visible, except a strip of sombre green, a mile or so broad, which ran along the middle of the plain marking the course of the Ilyssus. In the early spring and summer they do get crops off portions of the plain, but by the end of September it is as dry, dusty, and bare as the road to Epsom Downs on a Derby Day.

The little arid amphitheatre, not larger than a moderatesized English county, with its capital and Acropolis, looked so insignificant, and but for the bright sunshine would have been so dreary, that to keep from turning away and not taking a second look at it, one was obliged to keep mentally repeating, “It is Attica, after all!” Matters improved a little as we got nearer, and before the Acropolis was hidden from our view by the steep little hill crowned with windmills which rises up between the Piraeus and Munychia, we could clearly make out the shape of the Parthenon, and confessed that the rock on which it stood was for its size a remarkable one, and in a commanding position.

You see nothing of the Piraeus till you round this hill and open the mouth of the harbour, narrowed to this day by the old Athenian moles, so that there is scarcely room for two large vessels to pass in it. It is a lively little harbour enough. Three men-of-war, English, French, and Greek, were lying there when we entered, and an Austrian Lloyd steamer and a dozen or two merchantmen. We were surrounded by dozens of boats, the boatmen dressed in the white cotton petticoats and long red fezzes, not mere scull-caps like those of the Turks--a picturesque dress enough, but not to be named for convenience or beauty with that of the Bosphorus boatmen.

Most of our party started at once for Athens, but I and a companion, resolved on enjoying the Mediterranean as long as we could, crossed the hill, and descended to the Munychia for a bath, which we achieved in the saltest and most buoyant water I have ever been in. The rocks (volcanic, apparently), on which we dressed and were nearly grilled, were all covered with incrustations of salt, looking as if there had been a tremendous frost the night before. After our bath we strolled through the little port town, hugely amused with the Greek inscriptions over the shop-doors, and with the lively, somewhat rowdy look and ways of the place; and, resisting the solicitations of many of the dustiest kind of cab-drivers, who were hanging about with their vehicles on the look-out for a fare to Athens, struck across the low marsh land, where the Ilissus must run when he can find any water to bring down from the hills, and were soon in amongst the olive groves. Here we were delivered from the dust at any rate, and in a few minutes met a Greek with a basket of grapes on his head, from whom, for half a franc, we purchased six or seven magnificent bunches, and went on our way mightily refreshed. We had made up our minds to be disappointed with the place, and so were not sorry to be out of sight of it, and the olive groves were quite new to us. Some of the old trees were very striking. They were quite hollow, but bearing crops of fruit still quite merrily, as if it were all right, and what was left of the trunk was all divided into grisly old fretwork, as if each root had just run up independently into a branch, and had never really formed part of the tree. They looked as if they might be any age--could Plato have sat or walked under some of them?

Vines grow under the olives, just as currant and gooseberry bushes under the fruit-trees in our market gardens. They were loaded with fine grapes, and the vintage was going lazily on here and there. There were pomegranates too scattered about, the fruit splitting with ripeness. It was tremendously hot, but the air so light and fresh that walking was very pleasant. Presently we came to an open space, and caught a glimpse of the Acropolis; and now that we were getting round to the front of it, and could catch the outline of the Parthenon against the sky, it began to occur to us that we had been somewhat too hasty.

In among the olive groves again, and then out on another and another opening, till at last, when we came upon the _Via sacra_, we could stand it no longer. The ruins had become so beautiful, and had such an attraction, that giving up the grove of the Academy and Colonus, which were not half a mile ahead of us, and which we had meant to visit, we turned short to the right, and walked straight for the town at a pace which excited the laughter of merry groups dawdling round the little sheds where the winepresses were working. The town through which we had to pass is ugly, dusty, and glaring. There are one or two broad streets, with locust-trees planted along the sides of them, but not old enough yet to give shade; and in the place before the palace, on which our hotel looked, there are a few shrubs and plenty of prickly pears, which seem to be popular with the Athenians, and are the most misshapen hot-looking affairs which I have yet met with in the vegetable world. But shade, shade--one longs for it, and there is none; and the glare and heat are almost too much, even at the beginning of October--in summer it must be unendurable. If the Athenians would only take one leaf out of the book of their old enemies, and stain and paint their houses as the Turks of the Bosphorus do! But though the houses are as ugly as those of a London suburb, and there are no tolerable public buildings except one church, the modern town is a very remarkable one, when one comes to remember that thirty years ago there were only ten or twelve hovels here. But you may suppose that one scarcely looks at or thinks of the modern town; but pushing straight through it, makes for the Acropolis. A fine broad carriage-road runs round the back of the hill, and so up with a long sweep to the bottom of the western face, the one which we had seen from the olive groves. You can manage to pass the stadium and the columns of Jupiter on your left, as you ascend, without diverging, but even to reach the Parthenon you cannot go by the theatre of Dionysus, lying on your right against the northern face of the Acropolis, without stopping. They are excavating and clearing away the rubbish every day from new lines of seats; you can trace tier above tier now, right up the face of the hill, till you get to precipitous cliff; and down below, in the dress circle, the * marble seats are almost as fresh as the day they were made; and most comfortable stalls they are, though uncushioned, with the rank of their old occupants still fresh on them. You could take your choice and sit in the stall of a [Greek phrase] as you fancied. Below was the actual stage on which the tragedies of Sophocles and Æschylus were played to audiences who understood even the toughest chorus; and, for a background, Hymettus across the plain, and the sea and islands! We passed yet another theatre as we went up the hill, but nothing now could turn us from the Parthenon, and certainly it very far exceeded anything I had ever dreamt of. Every one is familiar with the shape and position and colour of the ruins from photographs and paintings. We look at them and admire, and suppose they grew there, or at any rate scarcely give a thought to how they did get there.

But I’ll defy any man to walk up the Propylæa and about the Parthenon without being struck with wonder at the simple question, how it all got there. Can the stories we have all been taught be true? Leaving beauty altogether out of the question, here you are in the midst of the wreck of one of the largest buildings you ever were in. You see that it was built of blocks of white marble; that the columns are formed of these blocks, each some four feet high, and so beautifully fitted together that at the distance of two thousand years you very often cannot find the joints, except where the marble is chipped. You see that the whole of this building was originally surrounded by most elaborate sculpture; you see that the whole side of the hill up which you approach the great temple was converted into a magnificent broad staircase of white marble--in short, you see probably the greatest architectural feat that has ever been done in the world, and are told that it was done by a small tribe--not more numerous than the population of a big English town--who lived in that little barren corner of earth which you can overlook from end to end from your standing-place, in the lifetime of one generation; that Pericles thought the idea out, and the Athenians quarried the marble, carried it up there, carved it, and built it up, in his lifetime. Well, it _is_ hard to believe; but when one has sat down on one of the great blocks, and looked over Salamis and Ægina, and the Isthmus of Corinth, and then down at the groves of the Academy and the Pynx and the Areopagus, and remembered that at this very time the thoughts, and methods of thought, of that same small tribe are still living, and moulding the minds of all the most civilised and powerful nations of the earth, the physical wonder, as usual, dwarfs and gives way before the spiritual. We saw the sunset, of course, from the front of the Parthenon, and then descended to the Areopagus, and stood on, or at any rate within a few feet of, the place where the glorious old Hebrew of the Hebrews stood, and looking up at those marvellous temples made by man, spoke a strange story in the ears of the crowd, whose only pleasure was to hear or tell some new thing. It is the only place where I have ever come in my journeyings right across the Scripture narrative, and certainly the story shines out with new light after one has stood on the very rock, and felt how the scene before Paul’s eyes must have moved him.

We got to our inn after dark, and after dining went to a Greek play. Theatre and acting both decidedly second-rate, the audience consisting chiefly of officers--smart-looking young fellows enough. There were two murders in the first act, but I regret to say that we could none of us make out the story of the play. There were half a dozen young men, all with good brains, none of whom had left our Universities more than two years, at which the Greek language is all but the most prominent study, and yet they might as well have been hearing Arabic. As for myself--unluckily my ear is so bad that I can never catch words which are not familiar to me--on this occasion, indeed, I could almost have sworn the actors were using French words. But it really is a pity that we can’t take to the modern Greek pronunciation in England. One goes into Athens, and can read all the notices and signs, and even spell through a column of newspaper with a little trouble, and yet, though one would give one’s ears to be able to talk, cannot understand a word, or make oneself understood. We managed, however, to get a clear enough notion that something serious was going to happen; and from several persons, French, Italian, and Greek, learned positively that Prince Alfred was to be King of Greece shortly, which remarkable proposition has since spread widely over the world. We sailed from Athens, after a two days’ stay, in an Austrian Lloyd boat. The sailors were all Italians, and there were certainly not much more than half the number which we found on the French boat from Constantinople. And yet the Austrian Lloyd Company has not lost a boat since it was a company, and the Messageries Impériales have done nothing but lose theirs. Happily, the French are not natural sailors, or there would be no peace on sea or land.

The Run Home, October 1862.

We ran from Athens to Syra through the islands, in a bright moonlight, and half a gale of wind, the most enjoyable combination of circumstances in the world for those who are not given to sea-sickness. The island is a rock almost as bare as Hymettus, and that is the most barren simile I can think of--any hill in the Highlands would look like a garden beside it. But it has a first-rate small harbour, which has become the central packet-station of the Levant; and the town which has sprung up round the harbour is the most stirring place in the East, and the commercial capital of Greece. A very quaint place to look at, too, is Syra, for at the back of the lower town, which lies round the harbour, rises a conical hill, very steep, right up to the top of which a second town is piled, with the Bishop’s palace on the highest point. This second, or pyramidal, town is built on terraces, and is only accessible to foot passengers, who ascend by a broad stone staircase, running from the lower town up to the Bishop’s palace, and so bisecting the pyramid. As restless a place as ever I was in, in which nothing seems to be produced, but everything in the world exchanged--a very temple of the Trade Goddess, of whom I should say there are few more devout or successful worshippers than the Greeks. Here we waited through a long broiling day for the steamer, which was to take us westward--homewards.

In travelling there is only one pleasure which can be named with the start--that luxurious moment when one unstrings the bow, and leaving one’s common pursuits and everyday life, plunges into new scenes--and that is, the turning home. I had never been so far or so long away from England before, so that the sensation was proportionately keen as we settled into our places in the _Pluto_, one of the finest of the Austrian Lloyd boats, which was to take us to Trieste. And a glorious run we made of it. In the morning we were off the Lacedaemonian coast. Almost as bare, this home of the Spartans, as that of their old rivals in Attica; in fact, all the south of the Peloponnesus is barren rock. We might almost have thrown a stone on to Cape Matapan as we passed. Above, the western coast soon begins to change its character, and scanty pine forests on the mountains, and not unfrequent villages, with more or less of cultivated land round them, are visible. Towards evening we steam past the entrance of Navarino Bay, scarcely wider than that of Dartmouth harbour, but with room inside for four modern fleets to ride and fight; as likely a place for a corsair to haunt and swoop out of, in old days, as you could wish to see. Night fell, and we missed the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth; and Ithaca, alas! was also out of sight astern before we were on deck again. But we could not complain; the Albanian coast, under which we were running, was too beautiful to allow us a moment for regret--mountains as wild and barren, and twice as high, as those of Southern Greece, streaked with rich valleys, and well-clothed lower hills. By midday we were ashore at Corfu, driving through the old Venetian streets, and on, over English macadamised roads, through olive groves finer than those of Attica, up to the one-gun battery--the finest view in the fairest island of the world. Bathing, and lunching, and all but letting the steamer go on without us! Steaming away northward again, leaving the shade of the union-jack under which we had revelled for a few hours, and the delightful sound of the vernacular in the mouth of the British soldiers, for a twenty-four hours’ run up the Adriatic, and into Trieste harbour, just in time to baulk a fierce little storm which came tearing down from the Alps to meet us.

Trieste is the best paved town I was ever in, and otherwise internally attractive, while in the immediate neighbourhood, on the spurs of the great mountains and along the Adriatic shore, are matchless sites for country houses, and many most fascinating houses on them. For choice, the situation, to my mind, even beats the celebrated hills round Turin, for the view of the Adriatic turns the scale in favour of the former. But neither city nor neighbourhood held us, and we hurried on to Venice by rail, with the sea on our left, and the great Alpine range on our right--now close over us, now retiring--the giant peaks looking dreamily down on us through a hot shadowy haze all the day long. Poor Venice! we lingered there a few days amidst pictures and frescoes and marbles; at night drinking our coffee in the Place of St. Mark, on the Italian side, watching the white and blue uniforms on the other, and hearing the Austrian military band play, or gliding in a gondola along the moonlit grand canal. English speculators are getting a finger in house property at Venice. There were placards up in English on a dozen of the palaces, “To be let or sold,” with the direction of the vendors below. What does this portend? Let us hope not restoration on Camberwell or Pentonville principles of art.

Then we sped westward again, getting an hour in the Giotto chapel at Padua, a long day at Verona, amongst Roman ruins and Austrian fortifications, and the grand churches, houses, and tombs of the Scaligers. Over the frontier, then, into Italy. ‘While the Austrian officials diligently searched baggage and spelt out passports, I consoled myself with getting to a point close to the station, pointed out by a railway guard, and taking a long look at the heights of Solferino and the high tower--the watch-tower of Italy, a mile or two away to the south. To Milan, through mulberries and vines--rich beyond all fancy; the country looked as we passed as if peace and plenty had set up their tent there. But little enough of either was there in the people’s homes. The news of Garibaldi’s capture and wound was stirring men’s minds fearfully; and all the cotton mills, too, of which there are a good number scattered about, were just closing; wages, already fearfully low, were falling in other trades. I came across a Lancashire foreman, who had escaped the day before from the mill in which he had been employed for five years, and only just escaped with his life. Sixteen men had been stabbed and carried to the hospitals in the closing row. He was making the best of his way back. “What was the state of things in Lancashire to what he had just got out of,” he answered, when I spoke of our distress. “He had been standing for three hours and more in a dark corner, with two men within a few feet of him waiting to stab him.” I rejoice to say that in the streets of Milan we saw everywhere unmistakable signs that Italy is beginning to appreciate her faithful ally. Some of the best political caricatures were as good as could be--as Doyle’s or Leech’s--and bitter as distilled gall. At Turin we had time to see the monuments of the two Queens, the mother and wife of Victor Emmanuel, in a little out-of-the-way Church of Our Lady of Consolation, where they used constantly to worship in life; their statues are kneeling side by side in white marble--as touching a monument as I have ever seen. Murray does not mention it (his last edition was out before it was put up), so some stray reader of yours may perhaps thank me for the hint. Over the Mount Cenis, and down into Savoy, past the mouth of the tunnel which, in six years or so, is to take us under the Alps to the lovely little town of St. Michael, where the rail begins, we went, pitying the stout king from whom so beautiful a birthplace had been filched by the arch robber; and so day and night to Paris; and, after a day’s breathing, a drive along the trim new promenades of the Bois de Boulogne, and a look round the ever-multiplying new streets of the capital of cookery and gilded mirrors, in ten hours to London.

Poor dear old London! groaning under the last days of the Great Exhibition. After those bright, brave, foreign towns, how dingy, how unkempt and uncared for thou didst look! From London Bridge station we passed through a mile and a half of the most hideous part of Southwark to the west. Even in the west, London was out at elbows, the roads used up, the horses used up; the omnibus coachmen and cads,--the cabbies, the police, the public, all in an unmistakable state of chronic seediness and general debility. In spic-and-span Paris yesterday, and here to-day! Well, one could take thee a thought cleaner and more cheerful, and be thankful, Old London; but after all, as we plunge into thy fog and reek and roar, and settle into our working clothes again, we are surer than ever of one thing, which must reconcile any man worth his salt to making thee his home,--thou art unmistakably the very heart of the old world.

Dieppe, Sunday, 13th September 1863.

I have just come away from hearing a very remarkable sermon at the Protestant church here, of which I should like to give you some idea before it goes out of my head. The preacher was a M. Bevel, a native of Dieppe, now a minister at Amsterdam, where he has a high reputation. He is here visiting his mother, which visit I should say is likely to be cut short if he goes on preaching such sermons as he gave us to-day, or else a liberty is allowed in the pulpit in France which is not to be had elsewhere. The service began with a hymn. Then a layman read out the Commandments at a desk. Then we sang part of Psalm xxv.; one of the verses ran:

Qui craint Dieu, qui veut bien,

Jamais ne s’égarera,

Car au chemin qu’il doit suivre

Dieu même le conduira--

À son aise et sans ennui

Il verra le plus long âge,

Et ses enfans après lui

Auront la terre en partage.

Good healthy doctrine this, and an apt introduction to the sermon. While we were singing, M. Revel mounted the pulpit. He is a man of thirty-five or thereabouts; middlesized, bald, dark; with a broad brow, large gray eyes, and sharp, well-cut features. After two short extempore prayers--almost the only ones I have ever heard in which there was nothing offensive--he began his sermon on a text in Ecclesiastes. As it had little bearing on the argument, and was never alluded to again, I do not repeat it.

“There is much talk,” M. Revel began, “in our day about an order of nature. All acknowledge it; as science advances it is found more and more to be unchangeable. We ought to rejoice in this unchangeableness of the order of nature, for it is a proof of the existence of a God of order. Had we found the earth all in confusion it would have been a proof that there could be no such God. But this God has established a moral order for man as unchangeable as the order of nature. It was recognised by the heathen who worshipped Nemesis. The whole of history is one long witness to this moral order, but we need not go back far for examples. Look at Poland, partitioned by three great monarchs, and at what is happening and will happen there. Look at America, the land of equality, of freedom, of boundless plenty, and what has come on her for the one great sin of slavery. Look at home, at the story of the great man who ruled France at the beginning of our new era, the man of success--‘_qui éblouissait lui-même en éblouissant les autres_,’ who answered by victory upon victory those who maintained that principle had still something to say to the government of the world, and remember his end on the rock in mid-ocean.

“Be sure, then, that there is an unchangeable moral order, and this is the first law of it, ‘_Qui fait du mal fait du malheur_.’ The most noticeable fact in connection with this moral order which our time is bringing out is the _solidarité_ of the human race. The _solidarité_ of the family and the nation was recognised in old times. Now, commerce and intercourse are breaking down the barriers of nations. A rebellion in China, a war in America, is felt at once in France, and the full truth is dawning upon us that nothing but a universal brotherhood will satisfy men. But you may say that punishment follows misdoing so slowly that the moral order is virtually set aside. Do not believe it. ‘_Qui fait du mal fait du malheur_.’ The law is certain; but if punishment followed at once, and fully, on misdoing, mankind would be degraded. On the other hand, ‘_Qui fait du bon fait du bonheur_,’ and this law is equally fixed and unchangeable in the moral order of the world.

“You may wonder that I have scarcely used the name of Christ to you to-day; but what need? I have spoken of humanity; He is the Son of Man, of a universal brotherhood which has no existence without Him, of which He is the founder and the head.”

As we came out of church it was amusing to hear the comments of the audience, at least of the English portion. Some called it rank Socialism, others paganism, others good sound Christian teaching; but all seemed to agree that it was very stirring stuff, and that this would be the last time that M. Bevel would be allowed to address his old fellow-townsmen from the pulpit. Indeed, his sketch of Napoleon I. was much too true to be acceptable to Napoleon III., and though his doctrine of universal brotherhood may be overlooked, I should scarcely think that his historical views can be. I was utterly astonished myself to hear such a sermon in a French pulpit. I had never heard M. Bevel before; but his reputation, which seems to be very great, is thoroughly deserved. The sermon of which I have tried to give you a skeleton lasted for fifty minutes, and never flagged for a moment. Sometimes he was familiar and colloquial, sometimes impassioned, sometimes argumentative, but always eloquent. He spoke with his whole body as well as with his voice, which last organ was managed with rare skill; and, indeed, every faculty of the man was thoroughly trained for his work, and so well trained, that notwithstanding my English dislike to action or oratory in a pulpit, I never felt that it was overdone or in bad taste. In short, I never heard such scientific preaching, and came away disabused of the notion that extempore sermons must be either flat, or vulgar, or insincere. I only wish our young parsons would take the same pains in cultivating their natural gifts as M. Revel has done, and hope that any of them who may chance to read this will take an opportunity the next time they are at Amsterdam of going to hear M. Revel, and taking a lesson. I have been trying to satisfy myself for the last three days what it is which makes this town so wonderfully different from any English provincial town of the same size. I do not mean the watering-place end of it next the sea, which is composed of the crystal palace known as the _établissement des bains_, great hotels, and expensive lodging-houses,--this quarter is inhabited by strangers of all nations, and should be compared to Brighton or Scarborough,--but the quiet old town behind, which has nothing in common with the watering-place, and is as hum-drum a place as Peterborough. As far as I can make out, the difference lies in the enjoyment which these Dieppois seem to take in their daily business. We are called a nation of shopkeepers now by all the world, so I suppose there must be some truth in the nickname. But certainly the Englishman does his shopkeeping with a very bad grace, and not the least as if he liked it. He sits or stands at his counter with grim, anxious face, and it requires an effort, after one has entered his trap and asked a question as to any article, to retire without buying. The moment his closing time comes, up go the shutters, and he clears out of the shop, and takes himself off out of sight and hearing of it as fast as he can. But here in Dieppe (and the rule holds good, I think, in all French towns) the people seem really to delight in their shops, and by preference to live in them, and in the slice of street in front of them, rather than in any other place. In fact, the shops seem to be convenient places opened to enable their owners to _causer_ with the greatest possible number of their neighbours and other people, rather than places for the receipt of custom and serious making of money. I doubt if any man is a worse hand at shopping than I, and yet I can go boldly into any shop here, and turn over the articles, and chaffer over them, and then go out without buying, and yet feel that I have conferred a benefit rather than otherwise on the proprietor of the establishment. And as to closing time, there is no such thing. The only difference seems to be that after a certain hour, if you choose to walk into a shop, you will probably find yourself in a family party. No one turns off the gas until he goes to bed, so as you loiter along you have the advantage of seeing everything that is going on, and the inhabitants have what they clearly hold to be an equivalent, the opportunity of looking at and talking about you. The master of the shop sits at his ease, sometimes reading his journal, sometimes still working at his trade in an easygoing way, as if it were a pleasure to him, and chatting away as he works. His wife is either working with her needle or casting up the accounts of the day, but in either case is ready in a moment to look up and join in any talk that may be going on. The younger branches of the family disport themselves on the floor, or play dominoes on the counter, or flirt with some neighbour of the opposite sex who has dropped in, in the further corners. The pastrycooks’ seem favourite social haunts, and often you will find two or three of the nearest shops deserted, and the inmates gathered in a knot round the sleek, neatly-shaved citizens who preside in spotless white caps, jackets, and aprons, over these temples of good things. In short, the life of the Dieppe burgher is not cut into sharp lengths as it would be with us, one of which is religiously set apart for trade and nothing else. Business and pleasure seem with him to be run together, and he surrounds the whole with a halo of small-talk which seems to make life run off wonderfully easily and happily to him. Whether his method of carrying on trade results in as good articles as with us I cannot say, for the Dieppois is by no means guileless enough to part with his wares cheap, so that I have had very little experience of them. But certainly the general aspect of his daily life, so much more easy, so much more social than that of his compeer in England, has a good deal of fascination about it. On better acquaintance very possibly the charm might disappear, but at first one is inclined strongly to wish that we could take a leaf out of his book, and learn to take things more easily. The wisdom which has learnt that there are vastly few things in this world worth worrying about will, I fear, be a long time in leavening the British nation.

The people of Dieppe are a remarkably well-conducted and discreet folk in every way--wonderfully so when one considers their close neighbourhood to the richest and most fashionable crowd which frequents any French watering-place. Of these, and their amusements, and habits, and wonderful costumes in and out of the sea, I have no room to speak in this letter. They are now gone, or fast going, and this is the time for people of moderate means and quiet tastes, who wish to enjoy the deliciously exciting air and pretty scenery of this very charming old sea town, which furnished most of the ships for the invasion of England eight hundred years ago, and will well repay the costs of a counter invasion. Only let the English invader take care when he sets his foot on the Norman shore, unless he thinks it worth while to be fleeced for the honour and glory of being under the same roof with French dukes, Russian princes, and English milords, to give a wide berth to the Hotel Royal. I am happy to say I do not speak from personal experience, but only give voice to the universal outcry against the extortion of this huge hotel, the most fashionable in Dieppe. The last story is that an English nobleman travelling with a courier, who arrived late one evening, did not dine, and left early the next morning, had to pay a bill of 75 francs for his entertainment. The bill must have been a work of-high art.

I hope in another letter to give you some notions of the watering-place life, which is very quaint and amusing, and as unlike our seaside doings as the old town is unlike our ordinary towns.

Bathing at Dieppe, 17th September 1863.