DIORAMA OF CONSTANTINOPLE.
That now long-established denizen of the Egyptian Hall, Mont Blanc, has since this week got Constantinople for its over-the-way neighbour. Mr. Allom, assisted by Messrs. Desvignes and Gordon, has painted dio- rama—done, we are apprized, before Constantinople had become "the thing." Messrs. Albert Smith and Shirley Brooks, both from personal knowledge, have written the lecture ; and Mr. Charles Kenney delivers it, iz a room Turkifled for the occasion. We enter at the Dardanelles and go out at the Bosphorus ; passing- we need not say how many minarets and !lames, how many mosques, fountains, turbans, and calques, or how inevitably a slave-market, a bazaar, a bath, a coffee-shop, a sultan, and a wrangle of doge. The series closes with the city by moonlight, and
another of the inevitables, a fire in the background. We have seen better-painted dioramas; but this is fair enough, and probably, though it were worse, the public would find it sufficiendy good just now to aid them in giving a certain definiteness to hazy notions about picturesque oppressed Turks and truculent Russian scoundrels.
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