graves are shallow, and thin boards only, laid over the corpse, protect it from the immediate pressure of the earth, which is set with flowers, according to the custom of the Pythagoreans, and a cypress tree is planted near every new grave. As a grave is never opened a second time, a vast tract of country is occupied with these burial-fields, which add by no means to the salubrity of the vicinity. Much is gained, unquestionably, as regards the health of the inhabitants, by burying without the cities; but the shallowness of the graves contributes to render these vast accumulations of animal dust, at certain seasons more especially, a source of pestilential miasmata. The cemeteries near Scutari are immense, owing to the predilection which the Turks of Europe preserve for being buried in Asia—that quarter of the world in which are situated the holy cities, Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and Damascus. The author of Anastasius gives the following vivid description of this extraordinary spot:—

"A dense and motionless cloud of stagnant vapours ever shrouds these dreary realms. From afar, a chilling sensation informs the traveller that he approaches their dark and dismal precincts; and as he enters them, an icy blast, rising from their inmost bosom, rushes forth to meet his breath, suddenly strikes his chest, and seems to oppose his progress. His very horse snuffs up the deadly effluvia with signs of manifest terror, and, exhaling a cold and clammy sweat, advances reluctantly over a hollow ground, which shakes as he treads it, and loudly re-echoes his slow and fearful step. So long and so busily has time been at work to fill this chosen spot—so repeatedly has Constantinople poured into this ultimate receptacle almost its whole contents—that the capital of the living, spite of its immense population, scarcely counts a single breathing inhabitant for every ten silent inmates of this city of the dead. Already do its fields of blooming sepulchres stretch far away on every side, across the brow of the hills and the bend of the valleys; already are the avenues which cross each other at every step in this domain of death, so lengthened, that the weary stranger, from whatever point he comes, still finds before him many a dreary mile of road between marshalled tombs and mournful cypresses, ere he reaches his journey's seemingly receding end; and yet, every year does this common patrimony of all the heirs to decay, still exhibit a rapidly increasing size, a fresh and wider line of boundary, and a new belt of young plantations, growing up between new flower beds of graves.

"There, said I to myself, lie, scarcely one foot beneath the surface of a swelling soil, ready to burst at every point with its festering contents, more than half the generations whom death has continued to mow down for nearly four centuries in the vast capital of Islamism. There lie, side by side, on the same level, in cells the size of their bodies, and only distinguished by a marble turban somewhat longer or deeper—somewhat rounder or squarer—personages, in life, far as heaven and earth asunder, in birth, in station, in gifts of nature, and in long laboured acquirements. There lie, sunk alike in their last sleep—alike food for the worm that lives on death—the conqueror who filled the universe with his name, and the peasant scarcely known in his own hamlet; Sultan Mahmoud, and Sultan Mahmoud's perhaps more deserving horse; ⁴ elders bending under the weight of years, and infants of a single hour; men with intellects of angels, and men with understandings inferior to those of brutes; the beauty of Georgia and the black of Sennaar; visiers, beggars, heroes, and women.'"

The approach to Constantinople from the sea of Marmora is likewise thus beautifully described by the same author, and will form an appropriate conclusion:

"With eyes rivetted on the expanding splendour, I watched as they came out of the bosom of the surrounding waters, the pointed minarets, the swelling cupolas, and the innumerable habitations, either stretching along the jagged shore, and reflecting their shape in the mirror of the deep, or creeping up the crested mountain, and tracing their outline on the expanse of the sky. At first agglomerated in a single confused mass, the lesser part of this immense whole seemed, as we advanced, by degrees to unfold, to disengage themselves from each other, and to grow into various groups, divided by wide chasms and deep indentures; until at last the clusters, thus far still distantly connected, became transformed, as if by magic, into three distinct cities, each individually of prodigious extent, and each separated from the other two by a wide arm of that sea whose silver tide encompassed their base, and made its vast circuit rest half on Europe, and half on Asia."

Since writing the above we have visited Mr. Burford's New Panorama of Constantinople, which has lately been opened for exhibition in the Strand; and although we cannot in this Number enter into the detail of its merits, we recommend it to our lionizing friends as one of Mr. Burford's most finished paintings, and equal if not superior in effect to any exhibition in the metropolis; but we reserve an account of its pictorial beauties for our next publication.

TWO SONNETS.

To M—— F——.

(For the Mirror.)

I.

II.

* * H.

ILLUSTRATION OF SOME OLD PROVERBS, &c.

(For the Mirror.)

"Ax." To ask. This word which now passes for a mere vulgarism, is the original Saxon form, and used by Chaucer and others. See "Tyrwhitt's Glossary." We find it also in Bishop Bale's "God's Promises." "That their synne vengeaunce axed continually." Old Plays. i. 18. Also in the "Four P.'s," by Heywood, "And axed them thys question than." Old Pl. i. 84. An axing is used by Chaucer for a request. Ben Jonson introduces it jocularly: