LETTER 45.

TO MRS. BYRON.

“Dear Mother,

“Mr. Hobhouse, who will forward or deliver this and is on his return to England, can inform you of our different movements, but I am very uncertain as to my own return.  He will probably be down in Notts, some time or other; but Fletcher, whom I send back as an incumbrance (English servants are sad travellers), will supply his place in the interim, and describe our travels, which have been tolerably extensive.

“I remember Mahmout Pacha, the grandson of Ali Pacha, at Yanina, (a little fellow of ten years of age, with large black eyes, which our ladies would purchase at any price, and those regular features which distinguish the Turks,) asked me how I came to travel so young, without anybody to take care of me.  This question was put by the little man with all the gravity of threescore.  I cannot now write copiously; I have only time to tell you that I have passed many a fatiguing, but never a tedious moment; and all that I am afraid of is that I shall contract a gipsylike wandering disposition, which will make home tiresome to me:  this, I am told, is very common with men in the habit of peregrination, and, indeed, I feel it so.  On the third of May I swam from Sestos to Abydos.  You know the story of Leander, but I had no Hero to receive me at landing.

“I have been in all the principal mosques by the virtue of a firman:  this is a favour rarely permitted to infidels, but the ambassador’s departure obtained it for us.  I have been up the Bosphorus into the Black Sea, round the walls of the city, and, indeed, I know more of it by sight than I do of London.  I hope to amuse you some winter’s evening with the details, but at present you must excuse me;—­I am not able to write long letters in June.  I return to spend my summer in Greece.

“F. is a poor creature, and requires comforts that I can dispense with.  He is very sick of his travels, but you must not believe his account of the country.  He sighs for ale, and idleness, and a wife, and the devil knows what besides.  I have not been disappointed or disgusted.  I have lived with the highest and the lowest.  I have been for days in a Pacha’s palace, and have passed many a night in a cowhouse, and I find the people inoffensive and kind.  I have also passed some time with the principal Greeks in the Morea and Livadia, and, though inferior to the Turks, they are better than the Spaniards, who, in their turn, excel the Portuguese.  Of Constantinople you will find many descriptions in different travels; but Lady Wortley errs strangely when she says, ’St. Paul’s would cut a strange figure by St. Sophia’s.’  I have been in both, surveyed them inside and out attentively.  St. Sophia’s is undoubtedly the most interesting from its immense antiquity, and the circumstance of all the Greek emperors, from Justinian, having been crowned there, and several murdered at the altar, besides the Turkish sultans who attend it regularly.  But it is inferior in beauty and size to some of the mosques, particularly ‘Soleyman,’ &c., and not to be mentioned in the same page with St. Paul’s (I speak like a Cockney).  However, I prefer the Gothic cathedral of Seville to St. Paul’s, St. Sophia’s, and any religious building I have ever seen.