Ignorant as I am also of architecture as a science, I have a sufficient perception of the beautiful and the symmetrical, to make me lament the incongruous medley of different orders and materials by which I was surrounded. What gigantic pillars encircle the dome!—What individual treasures are collected together! But with what recklessness are they forced into juxtaposition! Columns of varying sizes and proportions; some of Egyptian granite, others of porphyry, others again of scagliola, and various precious marbles, are scattered, like the fragments of many distinct buildings, throughout the whole body of the edifice. The eye is bewildered, and the mind remains unsatisfied. Eight of the porphyry pillars are relics of the temple of Heliopolis; while those of _verd-antique_ are from that of Ephesus. The walls are lined with marble, jasper, porphyry, and verd-antique, to the height of a gallery which surrounds the temple; and which, like the base of the building, is floored with rich marbles, and supported by plain columns of the same material. But the dome, which was formerly adorned with minute mosaics, was white-washed when the Turks converted St. Sophia into a mosque; and the original richness of the design is now only to be deciphered in spots where the plaster has fallen away; added to which, the inferior Imams attached to the building make a trade of the fragments of mosaic that they are continually tearing down, and which are eagerly bought up by travellers, who thus encourage a Vandalism whose destructive effects are irreparable. Before we ascended to the gallery, we were introduced to one of the miracles of the place, in the shape of a column; a portion of whose surface is cased with iron, in one part of which a deep cavity is worn away beneath the metal; and into this orifice the visiter is invited to insert his finger, in order to convince himself of the humidity of the marble. This column is called by the Imams “the Sweating Stone;” but if the indignation of the inanimate matter at the transformation of a Christian temple into a Mahommedan mosque have really reduced it to a state of perpetual and palpable perspiration, I am under the necessity of confessing that the miracle was not wrought for me; for, on making the trial, I was conscious only of an extreme chill. Hence we ascended by a very dilapidated and crumbling spiral stair to the gallery, devoted originally to the use of the women, and capacious enough to contain several hundreds; and here the mosaic merchants plunged their hands into their breasts, and from amid the folds of their garments drew forth some thousands of the gilt and coloured stones which they had torn away from the elaborately-ornamented dome.