because he had become unpopular or had made himself obnoxious to his people. The deposition of the Sovereign was not the object aimed at by those who carried it out. It was but a means to an end, that end being the establishment of constitutional freedom; and it was not resorted to till it became certain that the object could not be attained in any other way; but if ever the deposition of a Sovereign is justifiable, it certainly was so in the case of Abdul

Aziz.

Everything had, so far, gone without a drawback of any kind; but this was not fated to last long, and there came a succession of unfortunate incidents, which shattered the hopes that had been raised, the first of them being the tragical death of the ex-Sultan. In England he is, I believe, universally supposed to have been murdered, and it is certainly not unnatural that this should be the case; for when, on the morning of June 4, five days after his deposition, it was announced that Abdul Aziz had committed suicide by opening the veins of his arms with a pair of scissors, there was probably not a person who doubted, any more than I did myself, that he had in reality been the victim of an assassination; and my suspicion of foul play was only removed in the course of the forenoon by the report of Dr. Dickson, the embassy physician, who made me acquainted with particulars and details which in this country are still almost, if not entirely, unknown.

Dr. Dickson was a man of great intelligence, of long experience in many parts of the East, where he had seen much of the secret and dark doings of the harems. He was of a suspicious rather than of a confiding character, little likely to shut his eyes to any evidence of a crime, and he certainly would not have concealed it from me, his ambassador, if he had entertained even the remotest doubt upon the case.

Dr. Dickson came to me at Therayia straight from an examination of the body, and declared in the most positive manner that there was not a doubt in his mind that it was a case of suicide, and that all suspicion of assassination must be discarded. He told me that early in the morning he had received a summons from the Government inviting him to go to the palace to examine the body of the ex-Sultan, and to ascertain the cause of his death. All the principal medical men of Constantinople had received a similar invitation, which eighteen or nineteen, including those of several of the embassies, together with Turkish, Greek, and Armenian physicians, had accepted.

Besides these there was another English doctor, an old Dr. Millingen, the same who was with Lord Byron when he died at Missolonghi, and who had ever since remained in the East, and was a medical attendant of the ladies of the imperial harem.

He and Dickson went together to the palace, but found on their arrival that the other doctors had finished their examination, and

Dickson told me that he and Millingen, being thus left alone, had made as complete an examination of the body as it was possible to make. He told me that they had turned it over and looked minutely at every part of it, to see what traces of violence could be found upon it, but there were absolutely none, with the exception of cuts in both arms, partly severing the arteries, from which the Sultan had bled to death. The skin, he said, was more wonderfully delicate than he had ever seen in a full-grown person, and was more like the skin of a child, but there was not a scratch, mark, or bruise on any part of it, and he declared that it was perfectly impossible that the force that would have been required to hold so powerful a man could have been employed without leaving visible marks. The artery of one arm was almost entirely and that of the other partially severed, the wounds being such, in Dickson's opinion, as would be made, not by a knife, but by sharp-pointed scissors, with little cuts or snips running in the direction that would be expected in the case of a man inflicting them on himself.

He had therefore no hesitation in accepting as correct the account that had been given of the manner of the Sultan's death. The wounds, moreover, if not made by himself, must have been made from behind by some one leaning over his chair, where no one could have taken up his position without a struggle, of which traces must have remained, or without a noise, that would certainly have been heard in the adjoining room, in which the ladies were collected. It further appeared that when the Sultan was seated in the chair in which the pools of blood proved him to have bled to death, the back of his head could be seen by the women who were watching at a flanking window in the next room, and to whom any one getting behind the chair would be distinctly visible.

From all this Dr. Dickson and Dr. Millingen concluded, as I have said, without hesitation, that the Sultan had destroyed himself; and when they went out and joined the other physicians who had examined the body before their arrival at the palace, they found that they also had been unanimous in arriving at the same opinion. Among them were foreigners whose independence of character was beyond dispute, and who would without hesitation have given a contrary verdict if there had been reason for it; but they one and all came to the same conclusion, and several years later Dr. Marouin, the eminent physician of the French Embassy, as well as Dr. Dickson, published a statement to the effect that nothing had in the slightest degree shaken the conviction originally arrived at by them. Even if the medical evidence stood alone, it would seem to be very conclusive; but it does not stand alone, and, taken in conjunction with the statements of the women of the harem, it appears quite irresistible.

Dr. Millingen, as medical attendant of these ladies, went into the

harem and questioned them immediately after examining the body. They told him that, in consequence of the state of mind into which the Sultan had fallen since his deposition, every weapon or instrument by which he could do himself or others an injury had been removed from his reach; that in the morning he had asked for a pair of scissors to trim his beard, which were at first refused, but afterwards, in spite of the urgent remonstrances of the women, they were sent to him by the order of the Sultana Validé, who did not like to refuse him, and that as soon as he got them he made the women leave the room and locked the door. The women took their station at the projecting side window of the adjoining room, of which I have spoken, from whence they could look into the part of the room where the Sultan's chair stood, and could just see the back of his head as he sat in it. After a time they saw his head fall forward, and alarm being taken, the Validé ordered the door to be broken open, when the Sultan was found dead, with pools of blood on the floor and with the veins of both arms opened. When Dr. Millingen, hearing that the Validé was in a state of distraction, asked if she would see him, she exclaimed that it was not the doctor but the executioner who should have been sent to her, as it was she who had caused the death of her son.

All these details were given me by Dr. Dickson on coming straight from the palace, and nothing can be more certain than that the persons who would have been the very first to believe in an assassination, i.e. the Validé, the sultanas, and ladies of the harem, did not at the time entertain a suspicion of the Sultan having died otherwise than by his own hand.

Sultan Abdul Aziz had an undoubted predisposition to insanity in his blood; the mind of his brother, Abdul Medjid, whom he succeeded, had broken down under his excesses while still a young man ; and his nephew, Murad, who succeeded him, became hopelessly insane immediately after his accession. He had himself, to my own knowledge, been out of his mind on several different occasions; the first time as far back as the year 1863, when I find it mentioned in letters that I wrote from Athens, where I was on a special mission; and on two later occasions, within eighteen months of his deposition, I had spoken of his insanity in my letters to Lord Derby, reporting that I had been told of it, as an undoubted fact, by one of the ministers with whom I was intimate, and mentioning some of the peculiarities by which it was exhibited. At one time he would not look at anything that was written in black ink, and every document had to be copied in red before it could be laid before him. Ministers appointed to foreign courts could not proceed to their posts, and were kept waiting indefinitely, because their credentials addressed to foreign sovereigns could not well be written in red ink, and he would not sign those that were written in black. At another

time, a dread of fire had got hold of him to such a pitch that, except in his own apartment, he would not allow a candle or a lamp to be lighted in the whole of his vast palace, its innumerable inmates being forced to grope about in the dark from sunset to sunrise; and in many other respects his conduct passed the bounds of mere eccentricity.

That such a mind as his should have entirely given way under the blow that had fallen upon him need hardly excite surprise; and under the circumstances there is nothing even improbable in the fact of his taking his own life, especially as he was known to hold that suicide was the proper resource of a deposed monarch. When the news of the abdication of the Emperor Napoleon was brought to him, his immediate exclamation had been, And that man consents to live!' When I first heard this story I did not know whether to believe it, but the truth of it was afterwards vouched for to me by the person to whom the Sultan said it, and he is not a man whose word need be doubted.

If at the time there was no ground for a suspicion of assassination, there was certainly no evidence deserving of the slightest attention brought forward at the iniquitous mock trial instituted three years later, when the ruin of certain important personages had been resolved upon. The fact that the charges against them could only be supported by evidence which could not by any possibility be true, and the falseness of which could easily have been exposed if, in flagrant defiance of the law, the accused had not been denied their right of cross-examining the witnesses, affords sufficient proof that no real evidence against them existed. As the disgraceful mockery of the whole proceedings was admitted universally, even by those who entertained no friendly feelings towards the accused, it is unnecessary to enter into an examination of them. The object, however, was attained, and eminent persons, who were considered dangerous, and who might stand in the way of the resumption of the absolute power of the palace, were effectually got rid of; while the men on whose perjured and suborned evidence the convictions were obtained, although they declared themselves to have murdered the Sultan with their own hands, at the instigation of the pashas, were not only not executed, but are believed to have continued in the enjoyment of comfortable pensions ever since.

There is no way of explaining why, after the lapse of three years, a wrestler and a gardener should come forward and declare that they had assassinated the Sultan, except by the assumption that they had been promised not only immunity but reward, if, while making their confession, they procured the conviction of Midhat and the other pashas as the instigators of their crime. They duly earned the promised recompense, and the Sultan secured an iniquitous conviction that enabled him to rid himself of the men whom he dreaded; but it was at the cost of an indelible blot upon his reign.

The tragical end of Sultan Abdul Aziz was destined to prove fatal to the hopes of the reformers. Murad was known at one time to have indulged in habits of intemperance, though he was supposed latterly to have overcome them; but he was of weak character and devoid of personal courage, and when Abdul Aziz, about a month before his deposition, caused him to be closely confined in his apartment, under the continued fear that an order would be given for his assassination, he again reverted to stimulants more immoderately than ever, drinking largely of champagne' cut' with brandy. While the conspiracy that was to place him on the throne was in progress he was in a state of terror, for he knew that its failure would cost him his life; and the news of the death of his uncle, Sultan Abdul Aziz, gave him a shock that left him in a state of imbecility, which necessarily put a stop to all the measures which it had been intended immediately to carry out.

Sensational events had been succeeding each other with startling rapidity, but we were not yet at the end of them. Within ten days from the death of Abdul Aziz the calm which had followed it was again suddenly disturbed by the news that the ministers had been attacked while sitting in council, and that some of them were killed and others wounded.

It being naturally supposed that a counter-revolution was being attempted, a complete panic took possession of many people, and one of my colleagues, with a face as white as a sheet of paper and his teeth literally chattering, came into my room while I was dressing in the morning to ask what I proposed to do, and whether I intended at once to go on board the despatch-boat. Of course I said that I intended to remain quiet till I knew more of what was taking place; and that I certainly would do nothing likely to cause a panic or to make one spread.

It soon appeared that there was no cause for alarm, and that the outrage had been the act of a single man, who, without confederates or assistants, had carried it out with an audacity and resolution for which it would not be easy to find a parallel. He was a young Circassian officer, known as Tcherkess Hassan, and there is reason to believe that he entertained no particular resentment against any of the ministers except Hussein Avni, the Minister of War; but that, like an Indian 'running amuck,' he had maddened himself with 'bang,' or Indian hemp, and attacked every one within his reach. In confirmation of this view, it was proved that he had first looked for Hussein Avni at his own house, but, finding that he was attending a council, he at once followed him there.

Nothing can show more conclusively the perfect tranquillity and confidence prevailing in a town where a revolution had just been carried out than the fact that the ministers were sitting at night without a sentry or armed guards of any kind. Tcherkess Hassan, VOL. XXIII.-No. 132. U