It would be interesting to know whether the Byzantine influence played any part in the gardens of the Renaissance, as it did in so many other arts. However, there is no doubt that the Italian influence came back to Constantinople after the Turkish period. It began to come most definitely, if by a roundabout road, when Sultan Ahmed III imitated the gardens of Versailles. It came again from the same quarter when the successor of Ahmed III sent the son of Twenty-eight Mehmed on another mission to Paris. And it came more definitely still, by a still more roundabout road, when a Russian ambassador brought to Constantinople, at the end of the eighteenth century, a painter named Melling. Like Van Mour, Melling has left most interesting records of the Bosphorus of his day. In the course of time it befell him to be recommended as landscape-gardener to a member of the imperial family, the celebrated Hadijeh _Soultan_. Through the good graces of this enlightened princess he later became architect to her brother, Sultan Selim III, the Reformer. I do not know whether it was the painter, in turn, who obtained for the Sultan the brother of the gardener of Schönbrunn. But altogether Melling must have done a good deal more for the gardens of the Bosphorus than to paint them. At the same time, no one has done more for them than the Bosphorus itself. A terrace ten feet long may be as enviable as an estate reaching from the water’s edge to the top of the hill, since it is the blue panorama of the strait, with its busy boats and its background of climbing green, that is the chief ornament of the garden. The Turks lean, accordingly, to the landscape school. Their gardens have, really, very little of an Italian air. The smallest patch of ground in Italy is more architectural than the largest Turkish estate. However much stone and mortar the Turks put together in retaining and enclosing walls, the result has little architectural effect. They do not trim terraces with marble balustrades, while the lack of garden sculpture is with them a matter into which religion enters. Nor do they often plant trees like the Italians—to balance each other, to frame a perspective, to make a background. Still less, I imagine, do they consciously make colour schemes of flowers. And Lady Mary Montagu noted a long time ago the absence of the trim parterres to which she was accustomed. It is perfectly in keeping with Oriental ideas of design, of course, for a Turkish garden not to have too much symmetry. Yet it does have more symmetry than an out-and-out landscaper would countenance, and definitely artificial features. I always wonder whether the natural look of so many paths and stone stairs and terraces is merely a result of time or whether it is an accidental effect of the kind striven for by a school of our own gardeners. [Illustration: In a Turkish garden]