This change in the dress of his army has given to his people the idea that their new Sultan is anti-Christian, and will restore the Ottoman Empire to its former state and condition. How far this will be verified, still rests to be seen. Reforms not entirely needed, and but half carried out, leave the recipients in that transitory state which weakens and demoralizes without effecting any permanent and real benefit. An external change is certainly less efficient than a moral one, but it goes far toward influencing the feelings of patriotism and loyalty which are so essential to man in his political condition, and it is more than probable that the anti-reforms of Sultan Abd-ul-Aziz will effect more real good in his capital, and elsewhere, than the boasted reforms of his illustrious father. WITCHES, ELVES, AND GOBLINS. The creative power of man, though so much boasted, is after all but a mere phantom--a vapor which rises from the ground and floats with little change of form from place to place. The diapason which we thought so extensive, appears, on inquiry, to consist of only a few notes, and the changes that may be rung upon them, may almost be counted upon the fingers. Homer's fables are near of kin to those of Shakspeare; the legends of ancient Greece find their details mirrored exactly in the traditions of Spain, Scotland, and Scandinavia. Whether in the remoter fogs of the past some glimmering traces of light may lead us to discover a common origin, a universal fountain, whence proceed pure and limpid all the streams that are contaminated by baser contact in their later course, is a question which might mightily task the most powerful minds. The gods of Greece and Rome are reproduced in Odin and Thor, Freia, and Gerda and Tduna. Aphrodite at Athens, Venus on the Seven Hills, Freia in the North, differ but in name. Dark hair and coal-black eyes, and a warm, sunny beauty may please the ardent inhabitants of Greece and Rome; the Swedes and Germans may bow before golden hair and blue eyes, fair and blooming cheeks. But transport the Grecian Aphrodite to the Dofrefield glaciers, and she will soon grow white as their snow, her eyes will fade to the pale cold blue of their skies, and with the winter frosts her hair will turn like fall leaves, golden yellow; and under the sun of Italy, Freia will tan to the burning, dark-hued, voluptuous Venus of the South. The two soils naturally breed the one cold statues, the other passionate life, but these two different phases are in themselves identical, Thor's hammer, and the various wonderful exploits of the Northern gods and goddesses, their dim, ill-defined notions of creation, of time and space, and of future worlds, are but natural growths from the nature of the North. Their gods, like their men, are all action, and to raise their actions above those of the human race, they naturally invest them with peculiar supernatural physical endowments, and a strange, mysterious mode of action.