Under the Turk in Constantinople

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Whoever discovers a dark bypath of history and opens it up by careful research renders a service to scholars. If he has also the gift of presenting the results of his investigation in a form agreeable to the general reader who has a taste for novelties in other books as well as in novels, he earns a double meed of thanks. Mr. Abbott has not only had the good fortune to find such a bypath and the acuteness to note its interest, but is also the possessor of a talent enabling him to make the best use of his materials. To most Europeans and Americans, even among the class which reads for instruction as well as for pleasure, the annals of the Turkish Empire had remained almost a blank from the triumphant days of Solyman the Magnificent through the long process of decay down to the time when Napoleon's campaign in Egypt and Syria and thereafter the Greek War of Independence had drawn attention to the long-forgotten Near Eastern countries.