"No one," says that eloquent author, "attempted to stay the conflagration, which in a short time made terrible progress. Soon the most populous quarter of Constantinople was covered with a sheet of fire. The cries, the groans of women, and old men and children, attracted no attention and excited no pity. In vain they raised their suppliant hands, in vain they begged for beams or planks to save themselves from their burning houses by their roofs: their supplications were vain: they were seen with indifference to fall and to disappear among the flames. The desire of destruction was the only feeling that then prevailed! Sultan Mahmood beheld the awful spectacle from one of the lofty towers of the Seraglio, but not 'like another Nero,' as some have unjustly asserted--the flames were not of his lighting, and he was anxious that they should cease. He ordered Cadi-Pasha to stop his carriage, and to retire with his troops within the walls of the Seraglio, and despatched a hatti-sheriff to the Janissary-agha, commanding him, as he valued his head, to exert himself to stay the conflagration. As Mahmood was Sultan, and from the pledge he had in his hands, was likely to continue so, even when the revolt should end, the Janissary-agha trembled at the imperial mandate and obeyed; but the fire was too intense and active to be subdued or arrested, even by throwing to the ground whole stacks of houses: it vaulted over the chasms thus made, and only found 'sufficient obstacles in the public squares and in the mosques, whose vast cupolas and massy stone walls have frequently preserved Constantinople from entire destruction.'"[42] The fire raged from the Seraglio to the aqueduct of Valens, and a man-of-war in the harbour directed its cannon on the barracks of the Janissaries in the At Meidan. The troops of the barracks on the other side of the Horn, at the Arsenal and at Top-haneh, threw in their lot with the Janissaries. Mahmûd within the Seraglio took the precaution which he had so long refrained from: he ordered the murder of his brother Mustafa IV., and the body was thrown out to the Janissaries. In a few hours Mahmûd outwardly submitted. The new troops were disbanded; the barracks were destroyed; the military schools, the mathematical institution, the printing press, every sign of the dangerous introduction of Western ideas, entirely disappeared. Even the ladies of the Seraglio ceased to learn French, and Mahmûd abandoned the enervating amusements of the opera and the ballet. For sixteen years a curtain fell, raised only to show an occasional massacre. Constantinople returned to its condition as the most orthodox of Moslem cities. It was at this time that the greatest of all European ambassadors at Constantinople first made acquaintance with the power in whose fortunes he was to become so powerful a factor. Stratford Canning came to Stambûl in 1808, as secretary to a special mission. These were his first impressions of Turkey.