BAGDAD. 
243 
mounted on benches by the way-side, sipping their coffee, and 
occasionally inhaling a more soporific vapour from their gilded 
pipes, with an air of solemnity not to be anticipated from such 
a tulip-garbed fraternity. The contrasted appearance of the gaily 
coloured, and gloomily pompous Turk, when compared with the 
parsimoniously clad Persian, sombre in appearance even to the 
black dye of his beard, yet accompanied with the most lively 
and loquacious activity of body and mind, amused me much; 
and in traversing these characteristic paths, I could not but 
recollect I was now in the far-famed city of the Caliphs, the 
capital of Haroun-al-Raschid, through whose remote avenues 
he and his faithful vizier used to wander by night, in disguise, 
to study the characters of his subjects, and to reign with jus¬ 
tice. But history was not alone, in busying the memory with 
recollections ; the delightful tales of childhood started up along 
with her, and remembrances of the Arabian Nights seemed to 
render the whole a sort of eastern classic ground, consecrating 
its bazars, mosques, palaces, and even coblers’ stalls, to a kind 
of romantic celebrity. I must confess, however, that as I rode 
along the narrow streets, I was assailed by scents far different 
from those of fairy-land ; though I found a vestige of that left- 
handed humanity towards the brute creation which is the boast 
of Islamism, and was so eminently exhibited in the beauteous 
queen of the great Caliph, when out of pure tenderness 
to her three canine friends, she daily flogged them within an 
inch of their lives! In short, I beheld, in a variety of places, 
droves of dogs and cats with the forms of skeletons, which the 
humane Turks would neither feed, nor put out of their misery. 
Wild with hunger, or tottering under the weakness of famine, 
they crossed us at every twenty yards; and those which were too 
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