Wheler says that the Seven Towers do not look strong enough for a castle; but sufficiently so for a prison; which was the employment to which it was put for great men, or great malefactors, like the Tower of London. He was not permitted to enter into it; but he observed that one of the gateways was adorned with bassi-relievi, or oblong tablets of white marble. One of these represented the fall of Phaeton; another Hercules fighting with a bull; another Hercules combating with Cerberus; and another, Venus coming to Adonis during the time in which he is sleeping. The appearance of these walls, says Hobhouse, (the work of the second Theodosius), is more venerable than any other Byzantine antiquity; their triple ranges rise one above the other in most places nearly entire, and still retaining their ancient battlements and towers, which are shaded with large trees, which spring from the fosse, and through the rents of repeated earthquakes. The intervals between the triple walls, which are eighteen feet wide, are in many places choked up with earth and masses of the fallen rampart; and the fosse, of twenty-five feet in breadth, is cultivated and converted into gardens and cherry orchards, with here and there a solitary cottage. Such is the height of the walls, that to those following the road under them on the outside, none of the mosques or other buildings of the capital, except the towers of Tekkun-Sana, are visible; and as there are no suburbs, this line of majestic ramparts, defenceless and trembling with age, might impress upon the mind the notion, that the Ottomans had not deigned to inhabit the conquered city, but, carrying away its people into distant captivity, had left it an unresisting prey to the desolations of time. The Seven Towers reminded La Martine of the death of the first sultan, who was immolated by the Janissaries. Othman was allured by them into the castle, and perished two days afterwards by the hand of the vizir Daoud. Shortly after, the vizir himself was conducted to the Seven Towers. His turban was torn off his head; he was made to drink at the same fountain where the unfortunate Othman had slaked his thirst; and he was strangled in the same chamber in which he had strangled his master. "I have seen the ruins of Athens, of Ephesus, and Delphi," says Lord Byron; "I have traversed great part of Turkey; and many other parts of Europe, and some of Asia; but I never beheld a work of nature or art, which yielded an impression like the prospect, on each side, from the Seven Towers to the Golden Horn." NO. XX.--CAIRO (OLD).