This corps has constituted the main portion of the infantry of the Ottoman armies for a period of nearly five hundred years; till, in our own day, on account of its repeated turbulence, it was annihilated, as the Mamlouks before it, by means of a barbarous massacre. Its end was as strange as its constitution; but here it comes under our notice as a singular exemplification of the unproductiveness, as I may call it, of the Turkish intellect. It was nothing else but an external institution devised to supply a need which a civilized state would have supplied from its own resources; and it fell perhaps without any essential prejudice to the integrity of the power which it had served. That power is just what it was before the Janizaries were formed. They may still fall back upon the powerful cavalry, which carried them all the way from Turkistan; or they may proceed to employ a mercenary force; anyhow their primitive social type remains inviolate. Such is the strange phenomenon, or rather portent, presented to us by the barbarian power which has been for centuries seated in the very heart of the old world; which has in its brute clutch the most famous countries of classical and religious antiquity, and many of the most fruitful and beautiful regions of the earth; which stretches along the course of the Danube, the Euphrates, and the Nile; which embraces the Pindus, the Taurus, the Caucasus, Mount Sinai, the Libyan mountains, and the Atlas, as far as the Pillars of Hercules; and which, having no history itself, is heir to the historical names of Constantinople and Nicaea, Nicomedia and Caesarea, Jerusalem and Damascus, Nineveh and Babylon, Mecca and Bagdad, Antioch and Alexandria, ignorantly holding in possession one-half of the history of the whole world. There it lies and will not die, and has not in itself the elements of death, for it has the life of a stone, and, unless pounded and pulverized, is indestructible. Such is it in the simplicity of its national existence, while that mode of existence remains, while it remains faithful to its religion and its imperial line. Should its fidelity to either fail, it would not merely degenerate or decay; it would simply cease to be. 4.