Though Covel devoted some attention to archaeology, it was with a lack of interest which he is at no pains to conceal. He could hardly express his scorn for the “whiflers” who came out of England and France and careered over the Ottoman Empire buying or stealing classical antiques. The lore he really loved was folklore: Greek legends, Turkish songs, living superstitions. If we except manuscripts dealing with early Heresies, for which he had a passion (even the sanest of us are mad), the Rev. John only collected curios that appealed to his sense of the beautiful--if he came across them cheap. For the same reason he had an appreciative eye for costumes, jewels, carpets, and other articles of personal or domestic adornment: they all served to make life pleasant. On all these topics our Chaplain would talk and scribble with unflagging volubility--“at full gallop,” to use his own racy simile--repeating himself, digressing, returning to the subject, straying from it again, losing himself in a labyrinth of minute irrelevancies. Fond of shooting and riding, a friend of gay young men and no enemy to gay young women, especially pretty ones, the Rev. John was immensely popular with our factors, who found in him a “papas”[65] after their own hearts. To the Ambassador also the Rev. John was very acceptable. Going everywhere, seeing everybody, and hearing everything, the divine had much to say that was useful for a diplomat to know, particularly about Greek Patriarchs, Latin friars and their quarrels; a subject, as we shall see hereafter, by no means foreign to an English ambassador’s business in those days. Precluded by his dignity from crossing the water in person, Sir John could employ the Rev. John as a channel of communication between Pera and the Phanar. And the Rev. John, as one gathers from his own voluminous writings, was versatile enough to act as the friend of all contending parties in turn, according to the exigencies of the political vane, far too worldly-wise to let consistency interfere with preferment. For Covel, though content with the present, never forgot the future; he was not less anxious to get on than Rycaut, only built on softer, more supple and sinuous lines, he glided where the other stumbled.[66] Altogether an astonishingly brisk, jovial, garrulous parson of six-and-thirty this, full of harmless little vanities, human levities, and healthy little profanities.