ttling, Liverpool Kobiety 16/17 and which had charmed all — from Koszulka Inny Klub our great statesman, our polished lawyer, our young Oxonian, who sighed over certain passages that he feared were wicked, Leicester City down to the writer of this, who, after perusing it with delight, laid it down with wonder, exclaiming, “Aut Diabolus aut”— a book which has since (greatest miracle of all) excited a feeling of warmth and admiration in the bosom of the god-like, impartial, stony Athenaeum. Misseri, the faithful and chivalrous Tartar, is Chelsea transformed Lyon into the most quiet and gentlemanlike of landlords, a great deal more gentlemanlike in manner and appearance than most of us who sat at his table, and smoked cool pipes on his house-top, as we looked over the hill and the Russian palace to the water, and the Seraglio gardens shining in the blue. We confronted Misseri, “Eothen” in hand, and found, on examining him, that it WAS “aut Diabolus aut amicus”— but the name is a secret; I will never breathe it, though I am dying to tell it.
The last good description of a Turkish bath, I think, was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s — which voluptuous picture must have been painted at least a hundred and thirty years ago; so that another Kun Aguero Koszulka sketch may be attempted by a humbler artist in a different manner. The Turkish bath is certainly a novel sensation to an Englishman, and may be set down as a most queer and surprising event of his life. I made the valet-de-place or dragoman (it is rather a fine thing to have Chelsea a dragoman in one’s service) conduct me forthwith to the best appointed hummums in the neighbourhood; and we walked to a house at Tophana, and into a spacious hall lighted from above, which is the cooling-room of the bath.
The spacious hall has a large fountain in the midst, a painted gallery running round it; and many ropes stretched from one gallery to another, ornamented with profuse draperies of towels and blue cloths, for the use of the frequenters of the place. All round the room and the galleries were matted inclosures, fitted with numerous neat beds an |
