This lofty portal generally bears a distinct title. At Constantinople it has even grown into one which has given a name to the whole government of the Sultan. I am not aware, however, that the custom here alluded to was ever in force in that capital, though it certainly was in other parts of the empire of Othman. It is not improbable that it was usual with all the Sultans, who, at the head of their armies, seldom had any permanent fixed residence worthy of the name of _palace_. Mahomet the Second, who conquered Constantinople from the degenerate Greeks, may, for some time after his entrance into the city of Constantine—still called in all the official documents, such as “_Firmans_,” or “Royal Orders,” _Kostantinieh_—have held his courts of justice and transacted business at the elevated portal of his temporary residence. The term “Sublime Porte,” in Turkish, is _Deri Alieh_, or the elevated and lofty door; the Saxon word door being derived from the Persian _der_, or _dor_, in common use in the Ottoman language, which is a strange mixture of Tartar, Persian, and Arabic. The French, or rather the Franks, in their earlier intercourse with Turkey, translated the title literally “La Sublime Porte,” and this in English has been called, with similar inaccuracy, “The Sublime Porte.” Long since, the Ottoman Sultans have ceased administering justice before their palaces, or indeed any where else, in person. The office is delegated to a deputy, who presides over the whole Ottoman government, with the title of Grand Vezir, or in Turkish, _Véziri Azam_, the Chief Vezir, whose official residence or place of business, once no doubt at the portal of his sovereign, is now in a splendid edifice in the midst of the capital. At Constantinople the Ottoman government is also called the “Sublime Government,” _Devleti Alieh_, a word closely bordering on that of superiority and pre-eminence claimed by the “Heavenly Government” of the empire of China. The Sultan, in speaking of his government, calls it “My Sublime Porte.” The Grand Vezir being an officer of the highest rank in the empire—a Pacha, of course, in fine, _the_ Pacha—his official residence is known in Constantinople as that of the Pacha, _Pacha Ka pousee_, _i.e._ the “Gate of the Pacha.” The chief entrance to the “seraglio” of the former Sultans, erected on the tongue of land where once stood the republican city of Byzantium, called the “Imperial Gate,” or the _Babi Humayoon_, is supposed by some to have given rise to the title of “The Sublime Porte;” but this is not correct. It may have once been used as a court of justice, certainly as a place where justice was wont to be executed, for not unfrequently criminals were decapitated there; and among others, the head of the brave but unfortunate Aâli Pacha, of Yanina in Albania, the friend of Lord Byron, was exposed there for some days previous to its interment beyond the walls of the city.