By the scholar and the man of taste the volumes will be read with no little delight, as they abound much more with reflections and sensible observations, than with the commonplace incidents of travel.  Indeed, the author has left but small space for his accidents at sea and his hardships on shore, since all the chapters but four are devoted to Athens, Delphi, and Constantinople.  The classical reader will prefer the chapters on the two first-named places; the general reader will find perhaps more interesting his sketches of the city of the Sultan, and an anecdote which he gives of the present Sultan, and which declares him to possess more of decision, and firmness of character, and good sense, than the world gives him credit for.  His description of the Bosphorus will create in many a desire to see what he has seen, and to look upon some, at least, of the fifty-seven palaces which the sultans have raised upon its banks; and upon the hundreds of others, which, while the Commander of the Faithful permits it, are the property of his subjects.

It argued far more of a wild spirit of adventure than of a sober understanding in Aubrey de Vere, to go with that clever Frenchman to the Turk’s house, and to play off all those tricks in the presence of its master and his ten unvailed wives.  Rarely indeed, if ever before, has an Englishman passed an hour so comfortably with the whole of a rich man’s harem, and seen them as de Vere saw them in all their artlessness and beauty.  We live, indeed, in strange times, when the once scorned and loathed Giaours contrive to possess themselves of such extraordinary privileges, and to escape unharmed from such hitherto unheard-of enjoyments.

Where one thought was given to Constantinople a hundred years since from the west of the Dalmatian coast, ten thousand eyes are now constantly directed to it, and with continually increasing anxiety.  The importance of that city is now understood by all the European powers, and its future fate has become a subject of deep interest to all the western states, in consequence of the determined set made upon it by its powerful northern neighbor.  With the Cossacks at Istamboul instead of Turks, we should be very ill satisfied, and the whole charm of this city on its seven hills would have departed:  already is it on the wane.  Sultan Mahmoud’s hostility to beards and to flowing robes, to the turban and the jherid, has deprived his capital city of much of its picturesqueness and peculiarity; but still enough remains of eastern manners and costumes to make it one of the most interesting cities in the world to visit and roam over.  Such as, like ourselves, may not hope to sport a caique on the Bosphorus, will do well to acquaint themselves with the information Aubrey de Vere can give them, and to suffer their imagination to transport them to scenes among the fairest and the loveliest on the earth’s surface, and which are presented to them in these volumes as graphically as words can paint them.