and other structures bordered the Hippodrome, opening by a monumental gateway into the Augustæum, now the square of St. Sophia. To Constantine also was attributed the magnificent hall of the Magnaura, which Ebersolt places a little south and west of the present Ministry of Justice. Here was the throne of Solomon, imitated from the one described in the Book of Kings, whose fame has come down in the memoirs of more than one amazed ambassador. It was guarded by golden lions which, during audiences of state, rose to their feet, beat their tails on the floor, and roared, while golden birds in a tree behind the throne began to chirp and flutter among the golden boughs. Still another construction attributed to Constantine was the Porphyra, the little porphyry palace near the sea where the imperial children were born. I cannot attempt even to catalogue the other splendours of this unparalleled enclosure or the names of those who continued, during six hundred years, to add palace to palace, one richer than another in jewelled furniture, in the new jewelry of mosaic, in the spoils of ancient art. Nicephorus Phocas was the last emperor to do so, when he enlarged and fortified the waterside Palace of Bucoleon. By the eleventh century the emperors had begun to prefer the Palace of Blacherne. But Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, found the great ladies of the court assembled in the Bucoleon when the crusaders occupied the city in 1204, and after the restoration of 1261 Michael Palæologus lived there until Blacherne could be put in order. From that time on the Great Palace fell rapidly into decay. When the Florentine Buondelmonte visited it early in the fifteenth century it was already a ruin. Its condition in 1453 suggested to the Turkish conqueror the Persian distich which has been so often requoted: “The spider has woven his web in the palace of kings, and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab.” By the sixteenth century little was left of it but a few columns and the ruins of the Bucoleon. The colossal group of a lion and a bull, which gave the smaller palace its name, still stood on the old quay of the imperial galleys in 1532, when it was turned around by an earthquake. Is it impossible that that marble might yet be recovered from the sand of the shore? The westernmost of the palaces composing the Bucoleon, the one associated with the name of the Persian prince Hormisdas, who came as an exile to the court of Constantine the Great, was pulled down as late as 1871, when the Roumelian railway was built. Two lions from a balcony of its sea façade now flank the east staircase of the Imperial Museum. The ruins of the eastern palace, the so-called House of Justinian, where the great emperor may very well have lived before he came to the throne, were barely saved by the Friends of Stamboul when the railway was double-tracked in 1912. To-day this pile of ancient brickwork, rising