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By LORD BRYCE

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. Just in the middle of this period of two and a half centuries several intelligent observers from England and France visited Constantinople and described the singular phenomena of a semi-civilised Empire which, despite its internal corruption and weakness, was still strong enough to threaten its neighbours, maintain a long sea war against Venice and besiege Vienna. One of these observers was Sir John Finch, a man of learning and ability, who had begun his career by studying medicine at the University of Padua, had held the chair of anatomy in the University of Pisa, and had for five years been King Charles II.’s Minister at Florence. In 1672 he was named ambassador at Constantinople, and accepted, somewhat reluctantly, the post, yielding to the counsels of the influential friends who had procured it for him. There he remained till 1681, and his experiences in the discharge of his functions there are recorded in this volume. The letters on which it is based, and from which many extracts are given, present a vivid picture of what Turkish administration was, and of the way in which the long-suffering representatives and merchants of civilised countries had to adjust themselves to it. Mr. Abbott’s book is not only a contribution to history, but a narrative lively enough and dramatic enough to be worth reading as a study in human nature, and more particularly of that Oriental human nature in which guile and folly, inconstancy and obstinacy are so strangely combined.