Moslem boatmen, porters, barbers, &c. serve Christians and all and sundry.  But in addition to these, there is a sort of bazaar in the Turkish quarter, occupied by tradespeople, who subsist almost exclusively by the wants of their co-religionists living in the quarter, as well as of the Turkish garrison in the fortress.  The only one of this class who frequented me, was the public writer, who had several assistants; he was not a native of Belgrade, but a Bulgarian Turk from Ternovo.  He drew up petitions to the Pasha in due form, and, moreover, engraved seals very neatly.  His assistants, when not engaged in either of these occupations, copied Korans for sale.  His own handwriting was excellent, and he knew all the styles, Arab, Deewanee, Persian, Reka, &c.  What keeps him mostly in my mind, was the delight with which he entered into, and illustrated, the proverbs at the end of M. Joubert’s grammar, which the secretary of the Russian Consul-general had lent him.  Some of the proverbs are so applicable to Oriental manners, that I hope the reader will excuse the digression.

“Kiss the hand thou hast not been able to cut.”

“Hide thy friend’s name from thine enemy.”

“Eat and drink with thy friend; never buy and sell with him.”

“This is a fast day, said the cat, seeing the liver she could not get at.”

“Of three things one—­Power, gold, or quit the town.”

“The candle does not light its base.”

“The orphan cuts his own navel-string,” &c.

The rural population of Servia must necessarily advance slowly, but each five years, for a generation to come, will,—­I have little doubt,—­alter the aspect of the town population, as much relatively as the five that are by-gone.  Let the lines of railway now in progress from Belgium to Hungary be completed, and Belgrade may again become a stage in the high road to the East.  A line by the valleys of the Morava and the Maritsa, with its large towns, Philippopoli and Adrianople, is certainly not more chimerical and absurd than many that are now projected.  Who can doubt of its ultimate accomplishment, in spite of the alternate precipitancy and prostration of enterprise?  Meanwhile imagination loses itself in attempting to picture the altered face of affairs in these secluded regions, when subjected to the operation of a revolution, which posterity will pronounce to be greater than those which made the fifteenth century the morning of the just terminated period of civilization.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Poetry.—­Journalism.—­The Fine Arts.—­The Lyceum.—­Mineralogical cabinet.—­Museum.—­Servian Education.

In the whole range of the Slaavic family there is no nation possessing so extensive a collection of excellent popular poetry.  The romantic beauty of the region which they inhabit, the relics of a wild mythology, which, in its general features, has some resemblance to that of Greece and Scandinavia,—­the adventurous character of the population, the vicissitudes of guerilla warfare, and a hundred picturesque incidents which are lost to the muses when war is carried on on a large scale by standing armies, are all given in a dialect, which, for musical sweetness, is to other Slavonic tongues what the Italian is to the languages of Western Europe.[21]