and coffeed with all possible despatch. They appeared to take little interest in the lecture, and seemed rather to have come in as a sort of agreeable lounge. As nearly as I could decipher the teacher's barbarous Turko-Italian-French lingo, one of these officers was an inspector, and the other a general of bombardiers.

At twelve the school was dismissed, and we took our leave, much gratified to find academical institutions of such a high order among a people who are considered as little better than barbarians by the rest of Europe. After leaving the school-room, one of the young men took us into the library, a spacious apartment on the same floor, containing from 800 to 1000 volumes. They were chiefly French; indeed I saw none in any other European language. They were principally treatises upon engineering, and other subjects connected with the military art. With these were a number of manuscripts, and a few printed works on the mathematics in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. We were informed by our young companion, that the number of students in this institution was 200; that most of them were destined for the army; and that the term of study was three years. I inquired what text-books were used by the students, and he exhibited the four volumes of the principal, assuring us, with much simplicity, that when they had faithfully gone through these volumes, they would have acquired all the knowledge in the world. I have been much struck upon various occasions with the modest demeanour and simplicity of character of the young Turks, and their eagerness to acquire information. Their national shyness and reserve are the only serious obstacles to their rapid acquisition of knowledge. French and Italian are now commonly taught in their higher schools, and the knowledge of a foreign language, so far from being as in former times a reproach, is now quite a distinction in Turkey. The library contained a pair of large globes, various models of useful machines, and several philosophical

instruments. The walls were covered with many paltry coloured English prints of the battle of Prague and other military engagements of that period.

The Turks cannot be charged with inattention to public instruction. Each of the sixteen royal mosques has a maydresay or college attached to it, and the number of students in each varies from three to five hundred, besides free-schools in the vicinity, which are partly supported out of the funds of the mosque. I need hardly remark that elementary schools may be found in every street of Stamboul; indeed their loud recitations compel your attention, and the see-saw motions and sing-song spelling of the little urchins remind one of our own village-schools. Fifty years ago the number of schools in Constantinople alone exceeded 500, and it is asserted that there are more than 1000 at the present day. The children of the nobility and wealthier classes are generally educated at home.

Independent of these places of instruction, there are numerous public libraries, among which that of the seraglio is the most conspicuous. To every royal mosque, and to many of the tekkays, or chapels of the dervises, is attached a library, and the largest is stated to contain 6000 volumes. This may be considered a small number; but it must be remembered that oriental literature is circumscribed in comparison with ours, and that they contain but few foreign works. The library of Abdool Hamed is stated to be the best arranged and most accessible; but facilities are readily given to examine all, upon making application in the proper quarter.

With regard to the language and literature of the Turks my means of information are limited; but from the little attention I have as yet paid to it, I am enabled to submit the following remarks.

The Turkish is a Tatar dialect full of soft vowel sounds, and when well spoken falls very agreeably upon the ear. It is characterized by an accomplished scholar as being

inferior to no ancient or modern tongue in softness, flexibility, or harmony; and its rules are so admirably simple, that we should rather suppose them to have been framed by an academy of learned men, than by a society consisting of wandering and pastoral tribes. Its total dissimilarity from any European language renders its acquirement no easy task, and I have met with but four Europeans who had succeeded in mastering its difficulties. They had all, however, been born and brought up in the country, and acquired the language in the natural way before they began to study the alphabet. There are thirty-three letters in this alphabet, of which twenty-nine are derived from the Arabic, three from the Persian, and one peculiar to the Turkish. Of these, thirty are always consonants, one alone is always a vowel, and four are occasionally vowels or consonants. It will be readily perceived that from the absence of vowels, one must have some idea of the word before he can pronounce it, and it is not until he has pronounced it that he can be certain of its meaning. These are, however, difficulties common to all the languages of the East, but there are others almost peculiar to the Turkish.* The thirty-three characters stand in the alphabet as

* Of grammars I have seen four, the oldest of which is by a Frenchman named Ryer, who resided several years in Constantinople. His grammar is a thin quarto, printed at Paris in 1633. It is in Latin, and the Turkish forms of speech are made to bend to that language. Its most remarkable peculiarities are an outrageous specimen of debasing flattery in his dedication to Richelieu, and an attempt to print backwards in imitation of the orientals.

Another grammar is by a French missionary, Père Vigier. It is a ponderous quarto, printed at Constantinople in 1790. The worthy father has waded beyond his depth, and introduced artificial and arbitrary distinctions which do not belong to the Turkish, and has made confusion worse confounded by the incorrectness of his oriental types. I have in my possession a Romaic grammar of the Turkish language, which is recommendable for its clearness and simplicity. It is written by a Greek physician, Demetrius, and its imprint at Vienna bears date of 1812. The best grammar is that of Jaubert, who was for many years a distinguished drogoman to the French

they are to be written when not connected with any other; but the moment we commence writing a word, the form of each character is altered, and this change takes place in three different ways from its primitive form: 1, before and after another character; 2, after another character, but not joined to it; and 3, at the end of words. These changes are sometimes effected by simple dots or scratches, but are often so material as entirely to alter the form of the character. In manuscripts these apparent minutiæ are often neglected, and amusing mistakes have crept even into documents as important and carefully drawn up as public decrees. I was informed by one of our missionaries that a certain pacha in Syria once received a firmaun from the Porte, ordering him to take a census of all the Jews in his pachalik. An unlucky fly-spot (sit venia verbo) had accidentally been deposited upon or above one of the characters, and entirely altered the sense of a passage. The order thus changed, purported that the Jews were to submit to a severe operation allied in some degree to their customary national rite, and several were operated upon, before the mistake was discovered.

It results from these changes that the alphabet consists of 109 distinct characters;, to say nothing of divers fanciful ad libitum flourishes, depending upon the taste of the writer. And to these we may add, as obstacles in the way of the learner, that there are neither paragraphs nor any sort of punctuation; and that their fine writers are in the habit of interlarding every sentence with pure Arabic and Persian words, which are difficult to reduce to the rules of Turkish syntax. The Persian poets and Arabic philosophers are quoted with the same facility that a well-educated European

embassy, and is now a professor of oriental literature in the university of Paris. It leaves nothing to desire except that the author had been an Englishman or American, for there are sounds in the Turkish language which we hold it to be next to impossible for a Frenchman to imitate correctly.

or American refers to the classical authorities of Greece or Rome. The best Turkish writers carry this affectation so far, that the language of their books is quite distinct from that of ordinary conversation. At the end of this work the reader will find an outline of the elements of the language, with a brief vocabulary,* which, as it is the first attempt with which I am acquainted in our own language, will, I apprehend, be found of service to those who may have occasion to visit Turkey.

The difficulties presented by the Turkish character have led to the proposition, that not only this but all other languages should be written with Roman letters. Volney, a distinguished orientalist himself, was so much impressed with the utility of this plan, that he bequeathed a considerable sum as a premium to those who should carry it into successful execution. In his work entitled "Alfabet Européen appliqué aux Langues Asiatiques," he passes in review all the sounds which occur in the languages of Europe, and finds that they amount to twenty vowels and thirty consonants. The Roman alphabet is incapable of representing all these but, as it is already known, he takes it for the basis of his new alphabet, and by assigning different powers to the redundant letters, and adding marks to others, he succeeded in representing those sounds in which our ordinary alphabet is deficient. Our learned countryman Mr. Pickering has pursued, in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Sciences, the same idea, and his treatise may be advantageously consulted by those who take an interest in the subject. He proposes to adopt the vowel sounds of the French and German, and to express the nasal sounds by a cedilla. Zh expresses the French and Portuguese j, and for others he employs component signs, such as ks, ksh, ts, tz, &c. In the vocabulary at the end, which is written exclusively for those who speak English, it will be perceived

*See Appendix E.

U