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our nature, and its narrowness, that the enthusiastic admiration of beauty, which is necessary for the successful prosecution of excellence in painting and sculpture, is very seldom combined with the moral strength necessary to fortify the soul against the fascinations of error, when error arrays herself in the beauties of art, and revels in a land rich, beyond most others, in the magnificence of nature. Claude of Lorraine, an out-of-door student, be it remembered, lived to the advanced age of eighty-two years. died in 1682.

He

ST. SOPHIA: THE MOSQUE.

(Continued from page 9.)

"AT half-past nine o'clock in the morning of May 29th, 1453, the Turks entered Constantinople, and committed the usual barbarities, which were not mitigated by any considerations of policy or humanity towards the people. The streets were soon choked up with heaps of dead bodies; for the soldiers, bent on rapine, killed as many as offered the least resistance, or as did not give up their property without a struggle, or they cut them down without provocation, wantonly. The church of St. Sophia, 'that most spacious and most divine temple of the wisdom of God, that earthly heaven, that throne of the glory of God, that seat of cherubim, that second firmament, that handy-work of God, that exquisite object, joy of the whole world, that beauteous temple, of all things elegant the most elegant,'-for such were the extravagant praises the historian mingles with his lamentation,-was given up to rapacity and violence. This the Greeks, unconscious of the deterioration of their worship from that purity which is essential to Christianity,—and without which a church ceases to be the house of God,-regarded as the most horrible sacrilege; and the outrages of the Turks, even to the apprehension of common humanity, were excessively revolting.

"Merely to deface pictures, to 'dig out the eyes of saints,

and scatter the relies on the pavement,' would be only doing what some good Christians did before, and what many have done since. The Turks laid hands on the sacred vessels, too, probably finding many that Constantine could not find when he wanted them for public service. Silver, gold, jewels from the shrines of saints and the caskets of ladies, filled their bags. Screams of terror and shouts of insolence, laughter and wailing, mingled with deafening reverberations in the roofs of St. Sophia. Women, men, money, all that could be changed into money, the whole substance of the city, fell into the power of the enemy. Sixty thousand persons were leashed together, and marched away for slaves; while the aged, the infirm, the sick, the lepers, and the infants, were killed out of the way.

"The crosses were torn down from roofs and walls, and trampled under foot. Infinitely worse than all this, women, virgins, and youth, were subjected to the brutality of the soldiers; the Nuns, too, were dragged out of their cells into the open streets. Pictures of saints were spread upon the ground, and defiled by actions which language refuses to describe. The Turks carried a large crucifix through the streets, with drums beaten before it, and the head covered with a turban; and, all the way pelting it, and spitting on it, they shouted, 'This is the Christians' God!'

"And if it had been indeed their God, they who paid it adoration could hardly have experienced deeper horror. If relics had been the palladium of Christendom, they could not have bewailed their loss more piteously. 'Most blessed Father!'-wrote the Archbishop of Mitylene to the Pope, thou who bearest the part of Christ on earth, and whom it concerns to avenge so great injuries inflicted on Christ and His people. O, let divine pity move thee! Pity thy own Christendom; for thou knowest how to show pity, and hast the power. All Christian Princes will obey thy nod, to avenge the wrongs of Christians. Otherwise,I am not ashamed to say it,-after such a victory as this, the enemy will not be afraid to enter the Adriatic, and show himself at Rome. Therefore, most blessed Father,

again let the faith of Peter move thee-the seamless robe of Christ, the sponge, the spear, that are now lost-the scattered relics of saints-the sacred edifices ruined-the temples of God converted into dunghills!'”·

Gautier, whose description of Constantinople was published last year in an English translation, thus describes the mosque as he found it in 1853:

"The original plan has disappeared, beneath an aggregation of excrescences and additions, which have obliterated the primitive outlines, and rendered it almost impossible to retrace them.

"Between the buttresses erected by Amurath III., to support the walls, shaken by repeated earthquakes, are crowded tombs, shops, baths, and stalls.

"Above this miscellaneous gathering, rises, amid four heavy minarets, the great cupola, supported upon the walls by courses of masonry, alternately white and pink, and encircled, as by a tiara, with a range of latticed windows. The minarets have not the graceful slenderness of the Arabic style, and the cupolas rest heavily upon the unadorned stone-work; and the traveller, whose imagination has been stimulated by the magic name of 'St. Sophia,' (reminding him of the temples of Ephesus and of Solomon,) experiences a disappointment, which, fortunately, does not continue, after he has once reached the interior of the edifice.

"To reach the entrance of the mosque, the visiter follows a narrow street, lined with sycamores, and with turbés whose gilded and painted stone-work gleams vaguely through their gratings; and he arrives, after a few divergences, in front of a gate of bronze, one leaf of which still retains the imprint of the Greek cross. This is a sideentrance, which gives access to a vestibule pierced with nine doors. At this point, the visiter exchanges his boots or shoes for slippers, which it is important to have brought by the dragoman; because to enter the mosque in boots, would be as palpable an irreverence as to keep one's hat on

"Mohammed II." By the Rev. W. H. Rule. Mason.

in a Catholic" (Romish) "church; and might, moreover, entail results by no means agreeable to the offender.

"At the first step within, I was struck with amazement. I seemed to be at Venice, and entering from the Piazza, beneath the nave of St. Mark; only that the dimensions had enlarged immeasurably, and assumed colossal proportions. The columns rose gigantic from the mat-covered pavement; the dome of the cupola hung overhead, like the arch of the sky; the galleries, in which the four sacred streams pour forth their waters in mosaic, described immeasurable circuits; the tribunes seemed destined to contain whole nations! St. Mark, in fact, is but a miniature of St. Sophia; reduced, on the scale of an inch to a foot, from the basilica of Justinian. Nor is there anything surprising in this; for Venice, separated by only a narrow sea from Greece, lived always in familiarity with the Orient; and her architects would naturally seek to reproduce the type of that church, which was then considered the richest and the most beautiful of all Christendom. The erection of St. Mark was commenced about the tenth century; and its architects would have been able to see St. Sophia, in all its integrity and splendour, before it had been profaned by Mohammed II.; an event which did not take place until A.D. 1453.

"Although Islamism, in its hostility to the pictorial and plastic arts, has despoiled St. Sophia of the greater part of its noblest ornaments, it is still a magnificent edifice. The mosaics, upon a ground of gold, representing scriptural subjects, like those of St. Mark, have disappeared beneath a coating of lime. They have preserved the four gigantic cherubim of the galleries: the six wings of each shine through the scintillations of masses of gilded crystal; but the heads of these masses of gorgeous plumage are hidden behind enormous golden suns, the representation of the human face being the especial horror of the Moslemah. At the end of the sanctuary, beneath the oven-like arch which forms its termination, are vaguely traceable the outlines of a colossal figure, which the deposit of the lime has not altogether obliterated: this was the image of the patron of

the church, an embodiment of the Divine Wisdom in an individual form, the Agia Sophia; and which, beneath this half-transparent veil, still presides over the ceremonies of a hostile faith.

"The statues have been removed. The altar, made of an unknown metal,-the result, like the Corinthian brass, of a combination of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and precious stones, in a state of fusion,-is replaced by a slab of red marble, indicating the direction of Mecca. Above hangs an old and worn carpet, a mere dirty rag, which possesses, for the Turks, the unspeakable merit of being one of the four carpets on which Mahomet himself knelt to perform his devotions.

"Immense green disks, given by different Sultans, are attached to the walls, and inscribed with verses from the Koran, or pious maxims, written in enormous golden letters. A scroll of porphyry bears the names of Allah, of Mahomet, and of the first four Kalifs, Abu-Bekir, Omar, Osman, and Ali. The pulpit (nimbar), where the khatib stands to read the Koran, is placed against one of the pillars, and is reached by a steep staircase, decorated with two balustrades of open carving, of a delicacy unsurpassed by that of the finest lace. The reader always ascends with the Book of the Law in one hand, and a drawn sabre in the other, as in a conquered mosque.

"Cords, from which are suspended tufts of silk, and ostrich-eggs, hang from the dome to within ten or twelve feet of the floor, sustaining circles of iron wire, decorated with lamps to form a chandelier. Desks in the form of an X, similar to those which we use to support portfolios of engravings, in fact, a sort of tressels,-are dispersed about the mosque, to support manuscripts of the Koran. Many are ornamented with enamel, or delicate inlayings of brass, or mother-of-pearl.

"Mats of rushes in the summer, and carpets in the winter, cover the pavement, formed of slabs of marble, the veins of which are skilfully arranged, to give the appearance of three streams, congealed, as they flow in wavy undulations through the edifice. The mats also present a singular

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