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Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XX, Issue 3906, 4 May 1877, Page 3

The correspondent of the London Telegraph thus describes the appearance of Abdul Hamid, the present Sultan of Turkey : —A thin unhappy face, the dark whiskers, beard, and moustache of which only served to increase the deadly hue of the sallow cheeks which they encompassed, a meagre somewhat roundshouldered body, a lank, lean, weakly frame —such were the characteristics of the Sovereign of the Ottomans. I know that in the West an idea prevails that Eastern nations are centaurs by birth ; • that the saddle is there cradle, their house, their home, and that-the Grand Turk seated on a magnificent Arab must necessarily be the very model of the Saracen monarchs of old. Yet I must dissipate the pleasing illusion, and say at once that Abdul Hamid would have been —if appearances are to be trusted —much more at home in a comfortable carriage. The steady slaughter of the cadet branches, continued for generations as a State policy, has reduced the House of Othman to a group of seven scrown males, —Murad, Hamid, Mahmoud, and three still younger brothers, besides Yussef (the son of Abdul Aziz), and all these men descend from one man, and all ai-e suspected by physicians of inheriting the same family curse, a tendency to braindisease under circumstances of excitement.