he Russians dwell, and the fateful march of the terrible Huns across
the shallows of the Sea of Azof.

The great physical features of the scene are of course unchanged, but
almost everything else, how changed by four centuries and a half of
Ottoman domination! The first view of Stamboul, with its mosques, its
minarets, its latticed houses, its stream of manifold life both
civilised and barbarous, flowing through the streets, is delightful to
the traveller; but if he be more of an archaeologist than an artist, and
seeks to reproduce before his mind's eye something of the Constantinople
of the Caesars rather than the Stamboul of the Sultans, he will
experience a bitter disappointment in finding how little of the former
is left.

He may still see indeed the land-ward walls of the city, and a most
interesting historical relic they are.[22] They stretch for about four
miles, from the Sea of Marmora to the Golden Horn. It is still,
comparatively speaking, all city inside of them, all country on the
outside. There is a double line of walls with towers at frequent
intervals, some square, some octagonal, and deep fosses running along
beside the walls, now in spring often bright green with growing corn.
These walls and towers, seen stretching up hill and down dale, are a
very notable feature in the landscape, and ruinous and dismantled as
they are after fourteen centuries of siege, of earthquake, and of
neglect, they still help us vividly to imagine what they must have
looked like when the young Theodoric beheld them little more than ten
years after their erection.[23]

[Footnote 22: For the fact that these walls are still visible we have to
thank the good offices of a recent British ambassador, I believe Lord
Stratford de Redcliffe. The Sultana Valide (Sultan's mother) had
obtained from her son an order to pull down the walls, and sell the
materials for the benefit of her privy purse. The ambassador, however,
protested against this act of Ottomanism (rather than Vandalism), and
the walls were saved.]

[Footnote 23: The walls of Constantinople were first built in 412, but
having been much injured by an earthquake were rebuilt (we are told in
the short space of sixty days) by the Prefect of the City, Constantine,
at the command of Theodosius II. This rebuilding, which was partly due
to the terror caused by Attila, took place in the year 447.]

Of the gates, some six or seven in number, two are especially
interesting to us. T