sentiments are unsupported by laws. Marriages by Kapin, 

 or contracts of cohabitation for a specified time, are also 

 permitted; so that those who can only maintain a single 

 wife may change her often. Thus tyranny, sensuality, 

 and mistrust poison in their fountains the streams of 

 domestic felicity. The Turkish women cannot be called 

 happy; ignorance and confinement must impair the sense 

 of being: quarrels and toys divide their time; they dote 

 on trifles, and all the copiousness of female feeling is 

 wasted on personified objects. 



The language of flowers, which is peculiar to the 

 Turkish harems, owes its celebrity wholly to Lady Wortley 

 Montague; it was she who introduced it into Europe, 

 together with the practice of inoculation, in the same 

 manner as Busbequius, two cenuries before, had intro- 

 duced the Persian lilac and the writings of Dioscorides. 

 The Persian personifies the rose, and makes it the mistress 

 of the nightingale, to whom, on the return of spring, he 

 tells his amorous pains. The Hindoo dedicates flowers to 

 his divinity, whose various attributes they represent to his 

 imagination ; but it is in Turkey alone, and in the harems, 

 that we find this mysterious language, to which there 

 exists nothing similar among other Oriental nations. Our 

 fair countrywoman, however, who has thrown a brilliant, 

 and rather a voluptuous colouring over the manners of the 

 harem, has also much exaggerated the merit of these hiero- 

 glyphics of love; and the " millions of verses," of which 

 she speaks, dwindle down to about two hundred before the 

 researches of the learned. This language of flowers is 

 merely the amusement of the secluded fair ones, and a 

 knowledge of it can only be acquired from the slaves of 

 the harem. A learned Turk, to whom J. von Hammer 

 applied for information on the subject, was highly offended 

 at the freedom, and replied, indignantly, that he was not a 

 woman's slave. 



There is no art more adapted to soothe uneasy passions, 

 or to recreate the weariness .of confinement, than that of 

 music, and we might, therefore, naturally expect to find 

 it the amusement of the Turkish women. But it has never 

 been cultivated in Turkey, and, since its first introduction 



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