The City of the Sultan. Miss Pardoe
is, or requires to be, an universal genius.
Azmi Bey, the Military Commandant, with a zeal which retains him a willing prisoner almost constantly within the walls of the college, and an enthusiasm that neither difficulties nor disappointments have yet quenched, is, nevertheless, too young and too inexperienced to be equal to meet efficiently the weighty responsibility that has been thrust upon him; and for which he is indebted to a quickness of observation, an ardent desire of improvement, and a facility of imitation, called forth and developed by his brief residence in Europe. All that he was competent to effect, he has already accomplished; for he has reduced to order the chaos of conflicting prejudices and associations, and habits, which met him, Hydra-headed, on the very threshold of his task. From his limited experience of European feelings and manners, he has also profited sufficiently to enable him to adopt much that was worthy of imitation; while, on the other hand, he has judiciously rejected much of which the utility and desirableness were at best problematical. The easy, I may almost say, affectionate manner of all around him convince you at once that he is gentle in his rule; while the earnestness with which he interests himself in the most minute details connected with the Establishment is an equal proof of his unfeigned desire for its success. But the brevity of his European sojourn, and the confusion of ideas, and hurry of mind, consequent on a residence in London during the height of the season—the rapidity with which he was whirled from military and naval colleges to railroads and manufactories, from museums and libraries to public gardens and theatres—could scarcely, even with the most ceaseless efforts on his own part, have afforded opportunities for study, or time for reflection and research, calculated to render him the efficient mainspring of so complicated and delicate a piece of machinery as a great National Academy.
I fear that I have been prolix on the subject of this interesting Establishment, which might have become a moral sceptre in the hand of a future Sultan, and which is now “a vain shadow” and “a white-washed sepulchre;” but it is impossible not to feel deeply the cruel wrong committed by the false sophisms of a smiling enemy, towards a confiding and unsuspicious people; yet was my sympathy unmingled with surprise. Did not Russia refuse to allow the Porte to ratify the engagements entered into by Reschid Bey with the European officers whom he had selected for the service of the Sultan? And was it probable that she would permit a nearer and a more certain danger without an effort to annihilate it?
One more question, and I have done. Will the traveller in Turkey, fifty years hence, have any thing to tell of the Military College of Constantinople? Alas! I doubt it.
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