[p.98]or give a nobler idea of both founder and architect than that which bears Sultan Hasan’s name.  The stranger stands awe-struck before walls high towering without a single break, a hypaethral court severe in masculine beauty, a gateway that might suit the palace of the Titans, and a lofty minaret of massive grandeur.  This Mosque (finished about A.D. 1363), with its fortress aspect, owns no more relationship to the efforts of a later age than does Canterbury Cathedral to an Anglo-Indian “Gothic.”  For dignified beauty and refined taste, the Mosque and tomb of Kaid Bey and the other Mamluk kings are admirable.  Even in their present state, picturesqueness presides over decay, and the traveller has seldom seen aught more striking than the rich light of the stained glass pouring through the first shades of evening upon the marble floor.

The modern Mosques must be visited to see Egyptian architecture in its decline and fall.  That of Sittna Zaynab (our Lady Zaynab), founded by Murad Bey, the Mamluk, and interrupted by the French invasion, shows, even in its completion, some lingering traces of taste.  But nothing can be more offensive than the building which every tourist flogs donkey in his hurry to see-old Mohammed Ali’s “Folly” in the citadel.  Its Greek architect has toiled to caricature a Mosque to emulate the glories of our English “Oriental Pavilion.”  Outside, as Monckton Milnes sings,

“The shining minarets, thin and high,”

are so thin, so high above the lumpy domes, that they

[p.99]look like the spindles of crouching crones, and are placed in full sight of Sultan Hasan the Giant, so as to derive all the disadvantages of the contrast.  Is the pointed arch forgotten by man, that this hapless building should be disgraced by large and small parallelograms of glass and wood,[FN#15] so placed and so formed as to give its exterior the appearance of a European theatre coiffe with Oriental cupolas?  Outside as well as inside, money has been lavished upon alabaster full of flaws; round the bases of pillars run gilt bands; in places the walls are painted with streaks to resemble marble, and the wood-work is overlaid with tinsel gold.  After a glance at these abominations, one cannot be surprised to hear the old men of Egypt lament that, in spite of European education, and of prizes encouraging geometry and architecture, modern art offers a melancholy contrast to antiquity.  It is said that H. H. Abbas Pasha proposes to erect for himself a Mosque that shall far surpass the boast of the last generation.  I venture to hope that his architect will light the “sacred fire” from Sultan Hasan’s, not from Mohammed Ali’s, Turco-Grecian splendours.  The former is like the genuine Osmanli of past ages, fierce, cold, with a stalwart frame, index of a strong mind-there was a sullen grandeur about the man.  The latter is the pert and puny modern Turk in pantaloons, frock coat and Fez, ill-dressed, ill-conditioned, and ill-bred, body and soul.