There is, in fact, not another spot of earth in Europe whose mere name calls into life such an extraordinary mixture of awful and pleasing associations, about which so much has been talked and thought and written and guessed, which has given rise to so many vague and contradictory rumors--been the object of so much insatiate curiosity, of so many stupid mistakes and extravagant tales. Now-a-days any one can go there, and many who do so come away quite unimpressed; but of one thing we may be quite certain, and that is that when centuries shall have elapsed, when possibly the Ottoman power will be only a memory in Europe, and that exquisite hill be crowned by the busy streets of a new and populous city, no traveller will pass through them without seeing again, in fancy, the imperial kiosks of former days, and thinking enviously of us in the nineteenth century who can still behold the speaking, breathing records of that storied habitation of the Ottomans. Who knows how many archæologists will concentrate their painstaking research upon the identification of a doorway or portion of a wall discovered in the courtyard of some modern building--how many poets will break forth into verse over a few heaps of stones scattered along the shore? On the other hand, it may be that hundreds of years from now those walls will still be jealously preserved, and scholar, lover, and artist, flocking to see them, that strange picturesque life which was led there for four hundred years be resuscitated and spread over the entire surface of the globe in hundreds of volumes and pictures.