(chiefly with respect to Servia,) which chapter we shall avail ourselves
of his prefatory permission to pass unnoticed, as irrelevant to the main
subject of the book. Equally foreign to the objects announced in the
title-page are the contents of Chapter the Second, in which, before
taking ship for Trebizond, he gives a hundred pages to the Turkish
capital, promising, notwithstanding all that has of late years been
written concerning it, to tell us something new about Constantinople,
and bidding his readers not to fear that he is about to impose upon them
a compilation from the innumerable printed accounts of that city, which
have issued from female as well as male pens, “from the days of Lady
Montague down to Mrs Ida Pfeiffer the far-travelled, and Madame Ida Hahn
Hahn the devotee.” He fulfils his promise. His sketches from the
Bosphorus are not only amusingly written, but novel and original. Dr
Wagner, it must be observed, set out upon his Eastern wanderings well
provided with circular letters of recommendation from Lord Aberdeen and
M. Guizot to the various British and French agents in the countries he
anticipated visiting. From the Russian government he also obtained,
although with greater difficulty, similar documents. The natural
consequence was, that, at Constantinople, and elsewhere, he passed much
of his time in diplomatic and consular circles, and to such intercourse
was doubtless indebted for much useful information, as his readers
unquestionably are for many pungent anecdotes and entertaining
reminiscences.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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