humanists who took refuge in Italy from the invading Turk. [Illustration: St. Sophia From an etching by Frank Brangwyn Reproduced by permission of C. W. Kraushaar, N. Y.] Yet Constantinople has remained, comparatively to her two great rivals, an undiscovered country. The Russians are alone to maintain there such a centre of research as the schools of Rome and Athens, and excavaters take it for granted that Stamboul hides nothing worth their trouble. They would have more reason if the emperors had not collected so many of the masterpieces of antiquity. For about Athens will always linger some glamour of the Periclean age, and its sculpture, like its literature, remains the high-water mark of a certain artistic achievement. The case of Rome, however, is more complicated. Rome never created an art so original as Byzantine architecture or Byzantine mosaic; and Justinian it was, not Cæsar or Augustus, who carried Roman law to such a point that no principle has been added to it since. I think the old _odium theologicum_ must have something to do with the fact that the age of Justinian and one or two great periods that followed it enjoy so little general renown. The split between the churches originally destroyed the tradition of renown; and because we are of the West, because we are descended from the crusaders, because we derive our religious traditions from Rome, we still entertain some vague ancestral prejudice against Orthodoxy and its capital. The present masters of Constantinople have, of course, greatly encouraged this prejudice by taking no interest themselves in the history of the city or allowing others to do so. Then other details of accessibility enter into the matter, and of language, and a thousand subtleties of association. Rome, for instance, has long been a province of European literature. Keats and Shelley and Browning, to mention only later English poets, and I know not how many others, besides generations of novelists and playwrights and historians and travellers and painters and sculptors, have made a whole public that knows or cares very little about the Cæsars feel at home in Rome; whereas Gibbon and Byron and Lady Mary Montagu are the sole greater English names that attach themselves to the Bosphorus. It waters, to be sure, a much larger corner of French literature. And the immense learning of Gibbon has perhaps done more than any amount of ignorance and prejudice to weight the scale against Constantinople.