e
people--the bankers and capitalists of the kingdom. Their mode of
existence under the shadow of the Sultan's mercy, but without national
representation or protection, has subdued them to a condition of patient
endurance, and killed the energy of their nature. They are quiet, fat,
and lethargic, reserving their anxieties for money-getting.

There might be to fiery spirits something humiliating in the dress to
which they are so anxious to acquire the right: the huge and ugly cap
which bespeaks them to be under some particular foreign protection, as
the case may be, which is their only safeguard against all sorts of
oppression. But where nationality is a mere idea without embodiment, it
soon becomes as a dream. The Armenian is content to be endured and
protected. Meanwhile he is not without a sort of national ambition; but
it is of a new kind for him. They believe themselves to be the most
ancient of people, retaining the original language that was spoken
before the dispersion of Babel, and by consequence the identical
language that was spoken by Adam. An interesting excursion might be made
on this subject, seemingly so far at variance with the conclusions of
learned ethnographers. Their deductions are from undoubted facts, and
tend to their conclusion with a force that some philologists at least
have considered irresistible.

Through the Armenian quarter our road lay onward for a short distance by
the banks of Miles. It is but an insignificant stream, of scarcely
sufficient tide to turn a mill; but in no better case are Ilissus and
Cephissus found to be in the present day. The shade of Socrates still
seems to linger over the Attic streamlet, swelling its puny tide to the
capacity of the loftiest musings of the humanized; and the memory of
Homer is wedded to these waters of Meles. The critics who would disprove
the existence of the bard, and assign the different members of his
compositions to numerous anonymous authors, or to indefinite traditions,
would find this no vantage ground. The influences of the place would
abash their contumacy. There is something poetical even now about the
locality. The stream flows through the Armenian quarter, passing by a
short course to the well-known Caravan-bridge, and thence into the open
country. At pretty well all hours of the day, groups of nymphs may be
seen washing clothes in the waters, exhibiting _tableaux vivans_ of
Nausicaa and her maidens. No vulgar washerwomen are these wit