land has common interests with England in the Near East. Of course such motives bore no weight with the Sultan. He judges everybody by his own standard; and when I tried to defend myself against such accusations, and even one day quoted to him the saying of Mohammed, "_El fakru fakhri_" ("Poverty is my pride"), he took the remark with a diabolical smile, and turned the conversation into another channel. I must confess the character of Sultan Abdul Hamid has always been a riddle to me. I strained every nerve to penetrate him, but all in vain. Brilliant qualities and incredible weaknesses were always at strife in him. The man and the ruler were constantly at war with one another, and in the same manner his Oriental views always came into collision with the ever more pressing demands of modern civilisation. Fear and suspicion were naturally at the bottom of this moral condition, and if from time to time he would have recovered himself, and listened to the dictates of his heart--for I did not find him heartless, as he is generally supposed to be--the instruments of his despotic arbitrariness kept him back, and made him commit deeds which in the eyes of the world were rightly condemned. In keeping with his own character was also the quality of the officials around him, who after the decline of the Porte acted as ministers of State. Divided into various cliques according to their personal interests, the secretaries, adjutants, chamberlains, court-marshals, body-servants, &c., have created quite a chaos of intrigues, plots, and calumnies round the person of their ruler, which he was quite able to cope with when in the full vigour of his manhood, and with his marvellous perspicacity could fathom at a glance. But even Sultan Abdul Hamid could not be expected to do superhuman things; physically never very strong, his nervous system at last grew perceptibly weaker, and in the thirtieth year of his reign he became very infirm. The reins of government fell from his hands, and gradually he sank from a ruler to being ruled over, and he fancied himself secure against all danger only in the mutual envy, malice, and hatred which he had provoked among those immediately surrounding him. In this terrible position the Sultan himself was most to be pitied, and this doleful picture of the so-called autocrat I have often had occasion to contemplate at close quarters. Great State cares, pressing financial troubles, the threatening grouping of the European Powers, and the fearful phantom of an internal revolution, all of which tormented the Sultan, left him neither rest nor peace. The Sultan's fear of Young Turkey was exaggerated, for in Turkey revolutions are not instigated by the masses, but by the upper classes, and since these were quite impoverished and dependent on their official position, a revolt against the Crown is not very probable nowadays, especially as the old party of the time of the forcible dethronement of Abdul-aziz exists no more, and