ions, are unlettered men, who owe their elevation, to
partiality or bribery. Under Mahmoud, beauty of person was the best
recommendation to favor and promotion!

But Turkey has had her golden age of letters as well as her age of
military glory. Her libraries and archives are filled with unread, musty
manuscripts, comprising treatises on philosophy and metaphysics,
histories, biographies, and poems, rich in the classic erudition of the
Orient. In 1336, Sultan Orkan found leisure from war and conquest to
establish, at Brusa, a literary institution, which became so famous for
its learning, that Persians and Arabians did not disdain to avail
themselves of its instruction. But with the death of its founder its
glory passed away. It was no longer the fountain head of learning in the
East.

The Turks, forgetful of the fact that antiquity is the youth of the
world, still follow Aristotle as their guide in philosophy and
metaphysics, and Ptolemy in geography! Missionaries have succeeded in
introducing modern text books into some of the schools, but owing to the
peculiar system of Turkish education, the result has not been so
favorable as was anticipated.

To each mosque is attached a school, where the pupils devote several
years in acquiring the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic;
which completes their education. But few foreign instructors are
employed to teach in the schools, because the government is unwilling to
pay a suitable salary. While on state officers wealth is lavished with
the prodigality of oriental munificence, instructors receive only a
nominal recompense, often not exceeding six cents a day!

A few favored youths receive a European education, especially in French
and Austrian colleges. The oriental academy, established at Vienna by
Maria Theresa for the education of diplomatists to conduct intercourse
with the Porte, has formed many illustrious Turkish scholars. It is a
singular but not unpleasant commentary on the vicissitudes of fortune,
that Turkey should send her sons to be educated at Vienna, which only
two centuries ago a sultan besieged at the head of an army of two
hundred thousand men, and before whose gates he was defeated by the
combined Christian forces, who recovered eighty thousand Christian
captives, among whom were fourteen thousand maidens, and fifty thousand
children of both sexes!

The Christian subjects of the empire have made visible progress in their
educational system, alt