Or again:

Abdel Sekkédé, hadji Mekkédé.
(The monk to the convent, the pilgrim to Mecca.)

Also to be found in other languages:

Chasseur dans les bois, voyageur sur la route,
Les hommes, commes les mots n’out de prix qu’à leur place.
(Pariset.)

Or the simpler German:

Schuster bleib’ bei deiner Leiste.

There are no epics in the Turkish language, yet their wanderings should have called forth some such ebullition had they ever had some slight tendency to rise out of their primordial inarticulateness. They have little songs which the Anatolian peasants sing when the day’s work is done, which sound through the latticed windows of the women’s secluded chambers. But these songs are generally of love or homely matter, and do not tend to inspire the listener with ambition to emulate the deeds of his fathers for the honour and glory of his race and country. Other races emerging from barbarism to this day sing of their national heroes. What traveller along the lower reaches of the Danube has not listened to those bands of wandering Tsigani?

Then again, the Highlands of Scotland ring still with the recital of some great clan leader’s doughty deeds. True, they are mostly tales of strife and bloodshed, but they hold the germs of history and record it in the manner most likely to lead others to higher aims. Of all this the Turk knows nothing. No epic tells of those days when his wild forebears left the congeries of nomad tribes which haunted the hunting-grounds north of the Hwang-Ho, of Tibet, and the rolling plains beyond the Hindu-Kush. Mongol and Manchu, Tartar and Magyar, forming groups of nomad tribes, akin and possibly speaking the same primitive language, which, when history became articulate, only differed in vocabulary, hardly at all in structure, as it does so widely from Aryan and Chinese. Of these races Manchu and Tartar have risen to greatness; Manchu till recently reigned over China from Peking, while one Osmanli, descendant of a wandering Tartar tribe, sits in the seat of former Roman Emperors of the East. The Finns, belonging to the same race, have in the course of centuries developed a literature of a high order, and are among the most enlightened of the children of the Tsar of all the Russias; Hungary’s history lives in glowing epics and passionate song; and both these scions of the same stock are valuable factors in the æsthetic life of Europe. But the Manchus have fled from Peking after centuries of dark incompetence, and the Sultan, whose palace stands on the European banks of the Bosphorus, has during his short reign seen the provinces won by the sword of Othman torn from him by younger nations, whose soul has been nourished by stirring recital of their former greatness, whose heroes live in song and epic, which by these puts heart into the warrior and leads him on to victory.

Now those young nations are without the gates of Constantinople; they have reduced the Turkish Empire in Europe to a narrow strip of land between the Bosphorus and a line of defences, stretching from the Sea of Marmora to the Black Sea, the lines of Chatalja.

The Turks themselves claim descent from Japheth, the son of Noah, as do the Armenians, by the way, and there is no reason to dispute with them about their traditional ancestor, who, by all accounts, was a most respectable person, and will serve as well as any other for genealogical mystification. Undoubtedly the Turks and their origin began to attract attention comparatively early in the history of Europe, and an English historian (Knolles) of the seventeenth century writes of them as follows: “The glorious empire of the Turks, the present terrour of the world, hath amongst other things nothing in it more wonderful or strange than the poor beginning of itself, so small and obscure as that it is not well knowne unto themselves, or agreed upon even among the best writers of their histories; from whence this barbarous nation that now so triumpheth over the best part of the world, first crept out and took their beginning. Some (after the manner of most nations) derive them from the Trojans, led thereunto by the affinity of the word Turci and Teucri; supposing (but with what probability I know not) the word Turci, or Turks, to have been made of the corruption of the word Teucri, the common name of the Trojans.”