sea façade of Tekfour Seraï. The question lies so near the fantastic, however, and so far from any track of sober archæology where I have happened to browse, that I merely ask it and hurry on, leaving for some happy expert, with means to excavate and knowledge to compare, to state the true affiliations of the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus. * * * * * The richest remains of old Constantinople are its churches. Little as they are generally known, almost every one knows something about the greatest of them. There seems to me a peculiar fitness in the name of Justinian’s cathedral, which is not exactly rendered by its current vocable. It was not dedicated to any saint, but to the Divine Wisdom; and the Turks still call it _Aya Sofya_. The cross no longer surmounts that old cathedral, it is true, nor are Christian forms of worship permitted within its walls. In the divine wisdom, however, there is room for more than one form of worship. And St. Sophia, whose marbles, borrowed from half the temples of antiquity, have beautified the rites not only of Mohammed and of Christ, but of Apollo, of Pallas, of Asiatic Cybele, of Egyptian Isis and Osiris and how many older divinities of the pagan world, seems to me more than any other temple to express what is universal in religion, stripped of all pettinesses of creed. I shall make no attempt to analyse the elements of so supreme an expression. One is silenced, too, in the face of so many human associations. A thousand years before St. Peter’s that great dome swung in the Byzantine air, and under it one is bewildered by a cloud of ghosts. Yet impressions detach themselves—of space, of light, of an immense distinction. All the little Turkish rearrangements are swallowed up in it, as must have been the glitter of the Greek ritual. Decoration has no part in the nobility of that effect. There is nothing to hide. Each of those leaping arches and soaring domes does something—and in a way! But there is also a perfection of detail, rich, coloured, as if suffused by a glamour of dusky gold that is between the white morning clarity of paganism and the Gothic twilight.