Page images
PDF
EPUB

the whole economy of the thing, according to the invariable policy of barbarians, was intrusted to the management of old women. Upon the return of the embassy to England, a Mr. Maitland, the ambassador's physician, endeavoured, under the patronage of Lady Montague, who ardently desired its extension, to introduce the practice in London; and in 1721, the public attention having been strongly directed to the subject, and the curiosity of professional men awakened, an experiment, sanctioned by the College of Physicians, and authorized by government, was made upon five condemned criminals. With four of these the trial perfectly succeeded, and the fifth, a woman, upon whom no effect was produced, afterward confessed that she had had the small-pox while an infant. The merit of this action of Lady Montague can scarcely be overrated, as, by exciting curiosity and inquiry, it seems unquestionably to have led the way to the discovery of vaccination, that great preservative of life and beauty, and produced at the time immense positive good.

To return, however, to Adrianople: among the most remarkable things which our fair traveller beheld during her residence in the East was Fatima, the wife of the kihaya, or vizier's lieutenant, a woman: "so gloriously beautiful," to borrow the expression of her panegyrist, that all lovely things appeared to

A writer in the Annual Register for 1762, thus calculates the amount of the benefit conferred on the British public by Lady Montague:-"If one person in seven die of the small-pox in the natural way, and one in three hundred and twelve by inoculation, as proved at the small-pox hospital, then, as 1,000,000 divided by seven, gives 142,857, 1,000,000 divided by 312, gives 3,205 46-312. The lives saved in 1,000,000 by inoculation must be 139,652 11-31. In Lord Petre's family, 18 individuals died of the small-pox in 27 years. The present generation, who have enjoyed all the advantages of inoculation, are adequate judges of the extremely fatal prevalence of the original disease, and of their consequently great obligations to Lady Mary Wortley Montague."-Sir Richard Steele, in the Plain Dealer, prefers the intro duction of this practice to all "those wide endowments and deep foundations of public charity which have made most noise in the world."

dwindle into insignificance in her presence. The passage in which this lady is described, though in a certain point of view it may be liable to objection, is in every other respect the finest portion of Lady Mary's travels; exhibiting a remarkable power of affording the imagination of the reader glimpses of corporeal beauties which language is never sufficiently rich and vivid to paint exactly, and betraying at the same time so enthusiastic and unreserved an admiration of another woman's superior perfections, that we with difficulty recognise in these hurried, ingenuous overflowings of natural eloquence, the female Diogenes of 1740. The whole palace of the kihaya appeared at the moment a fairy creation. Two black eunuchs, meeting the traveller at the door, led her into the harem, between two rows of beautiful female slaves, with their profuse and finelyplaited hair hanging almost to their feet, and dressed in fine light damasks, brocaded with silver. She next passed through a magnificent pavilion, adorned with gilded sashes, now all thrown up to admit the air, and opening into a garden, where there grew a number of large trees, with jessamine and honeysuckles twisted round their trunks, and emitting an exquisite perfume. A fountain of scented water was falling at the lower end of the apartment into three or four basins of white marble, at the same time diffusing an agreeable odour and a refreshing coolness through the air. Over the ceiling the pencil had scattered flowers in gilded baskets. But all these things were forgotten on beholding Fatima. When Lady Mary entered she was sitting on a sofa raised three steps above the floor, and leaning on cushions of white embroidered satin. Two young girls, "lovely as angels," sat at her feet clothed in the richest costume of the East, and sparkling with jewels. They were her daughters. The mother, however, was so transcendently beautiful, that, in the opinion of Lady Mary, neither these girls, nor

any thing that ever was called lovely, either in England or Germany, were capable of exciting the least admiration near her. There is truth in the old saying, that beauty possesses a power which irresistibly subdues the soul. No one ever looked for the first time upon a beautiful form without experiencing a certain awe, or consciousness of being in the presence of a superior nature, which the pagans imagined people felt when some deity overawed them with its shekinah. That an acquaintance with the intellectual or moral imperfections which too frequently attend on beauty very quickly dissipates this impression, we all know: but at the outset most persons feel like our traveller, who says, “I was so struck with admiration, that I could not for some time speak to her, being wholly taken up in gazing. That surprising harmony of features! that charming result of the whole! that exact proportion of body! that lovely bloom of complexion unsullied by art! the unutterable enchantment of her smile! -But her eyes!-large and black, with the soft languishment of the blue! every turn of her face discovering some new grace."

Into the details of her dress, in the description of which Lady Mary employs warm colouring, it is not necessary to enter. Fatima, on her part, very quickly divined the taste and temperament of her guest, and after a little conversation, carried on through the medium of a Greek lady who accompanied the traveller, she made a sign to four of her beautiful slaves to entertain the stranger with music and dancing. Those who have read descriptions of the fandango of the Spanish ladies, the chironomia of antiquity, or the performances of the Hindoo dancing-girls, or voluptuous almi of Egypt, will perhaps be able to form a just conception of the dance Iwith which the ladies of the harem amuse themselves and their female visiters. "This dance," says Lady Montague," was very different from what

I had seen before. The tunes so soft!the motions so languishing!-accompanied with pauses and dying eyes! half falling back, and then recovering themselves in so artful a manner.”

Before her departure from Adrianople, she went to visit the mosque of Sultan Selim I., and being in a Turkish dress was admitted without difficulty; though she supposes, no doubt rightly, that the doorkeepers understood well enough whom they had allowed to enter. The walls were inlaid with Japan china in the form of flowers, the marble pavement was covered with rich Persian carpets, and the whole body of the edifice free from those pews, forms, and chairs which encumber our churches, both Protestant and Catholic, and give the latter, during week-days, the appearance of a lumber-room. About two thousand lamps were suspended in various parts of the building, which, when lighted at night, must show off to great advantage the solemn splendour of the architecture.

The road to Constantinople carried them through the richest meadows, which, as it was then the month of May, were clothed with exceeding beauty, and so thickly sprinkled with flowers and aromatic herbs, that the wheels of the carriages, crushing them as they drove along, literally perfumed the air. At Kutchuk Tchekmedje, where they lodged in what had formerly been a monastery of dervishes, Lady Montague requested the owner, a country schoolmaster, to show her his own apartments, and was surprised, says she, to see him point to a tall cypresstree in the garden, on the top of which was a place for a bed for himself, and a little lower one for his wife and two children, who slept there every night. I was so much diverted with the fancy, I resolved to examine his nest nearer; but, after going up fifty steps, I found I had still fifty to go up, and then I must climb from branch to branch with some hazard of my neck; I thought it, therefore, the best way

to come down again. Navigators in the South Sea have found whole nations who, like this romantic Ottomite, lived perched upon trees, like eagles, descending only when in lack of prey or recreation.

The first objects which struck her on arriving at Constantinople were the cemeteries, which upon the whole seemed to occupy more ground than the city itself. These, however, with their tombs and chapels, have been so frequently described by modern travellers, that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them, curious as they are; though we may remark, in passing, that their fancy of sculpturing a rose on the monuments of unmarried women is a delicate allusion to the purity of the dead. In the month of June they were driven by the heat of the weather to the village of Belgrade, fourteen miles from Constantinople, on the shores of the Black Sea, one of the usual retreats of the European embassies. Here our fair traveller found an earthly representation of the Elysian Fields:

Devenere locos lætos, et amœna vireta
Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas.
Largior hic campos, æther et lumine vestit
Purpureo.

Their house, the site of which, nothing more remaining, is still visited by European travellers, stood in the middle of a grove chiefly of fruit-trees. The walks, carpeted with short soft grass, were shady and cool; and on all sides a perpetual verdure was maintained by numerous fountains of pure, beautiful water. From the house and various other points views were obtained of the Black Sea, with its picturesque verdant shores, while the fresh breezes which blew continually from that quarter sufficiently tempered the heat of summer. The charms of such scenes inspire gayety even in the oppressed. For here the Greeks, forgetting for a moment the yoke of the Ottomite, assembled in great numbers of both

« PreviousContinue »