they would appear throughout their journey to have eaten the poor people’s fowls and mutton gratis. On arriving at Adrianople, where the sultan was at that time residing with his court, Lady Mary suddenly found herself in a new world, but extremely suited to her taste. Her principal companion was the French ambassadress, an agreeable woman, but extravagantly fond of parade, with whom she went about seeing such sights as the place afforded, which, every object in the city, except her husband, being new, were sufficiently numerous. The sultan, whom she saw for the first time going in solemn procession to the mosque, was a fine, handsome man of about forty, with full black eyes, and an expression of severity in his countenance. This prince, Achmet III., has been said, upon I know not what authority, to have afterward become enamoured of our fair traveller. The report, in all probability, was unfounded; but the reasons which have induced a contemporary biographer[3] to come to this conclusion are particularly various: independently of Turkish prejudices, which, according to his notion of things, would prevent an emperor from conceiving _any such idea_, it was not at all probable, he imagines, that a person possessing a Fatima with such “celestial charms” (as Lady Mary describes), and so many other angelic creatures, should have thought for a moment of an “English lady.” What prejudices the sagacious author alludes to, it is difficult to discover; it would not be those of religion, as the imperial harem, it is well known, is constantly replenished with Circassians and Georgians, Christians and Mohammedans, indiscriminately. This point, therefore, must remain doubtful. With respect to Fatima, whatever may have been her charms, she could have been no bar to the sultan’s admiration of Lady Mary, being the wife, not of the sultan, but of the kihaya. The other “angelical creatures” whose influence he rates so highly may very possibly have restrained the affections of their master from wandering beyond the walls of the seraglio; nevertheless, stranger things have happened than that a prince in the flower of his age, neglecting the legitimate objects of his attachment, should allow a greater scope to his desires than either religion or the common rules of decorum would warrant. The best reason for rejecting this piece of scandal is, not that Lady Mary was an “English woman,” and therefore, as M. Duparc would insinuate, too ugly to rival the slaves of the sultan, but that there is no good authority for admitting it. Footnote 3: M. Duparc, in the “Biographie Universelle.”