The account of the interior of the seraglio in Don Juan is also only probably correct, and may have been drawn in several particulars from an inspection of some of the palaces, but the descriptions of the imperial harem are entirely fanciful.  I am persuaded, by different circumstances, that Byron could not have been in those sacred chambers of any of the seraglios.  At the time I was in Constantinople, only one of the imperial residences was accessible to strangers, and it was unfurnished.  The great seraglio was not accessible beyond the courts, except in those apartments where the Sultan receives his officers and visitors of state.  Indeed, the whole account of the customs and usages of the interior of the seraglio, as described in Don Juan, can only be regarded as inventions; and though the descriptions abound in picturesque beauty, they have not that air of truth and fact about them which render the pictures of Byron so generally valuable, independent of their poetical excellence.  In those he has given of the apartments of the men, the liveliness and fidelity of his pencil cannot be denied; but the Arabian tales and Vathek seem to have had more influence on his fancy in describing the imperial harem, than a knowledge of actual things and appearances.  Not that the latter are inferior to the former in beauty, or are without images and lineaments of graphic distinctness, but they want that air of reality which constitutes the singular excellence of his scenes drawn from nature; and there is a vagueness in them which has the effect of making them obscure, and even fantastical.  Indeed, except when he paints from actual models, from living persons and existing things, his superiority, at least his originality, is not so obvious; and thus it happens, that his gorgeous description of the sultan’s seraglio is like a versified passage of an Arabian tale, while the imagery of Childe Harold’s visit to Ali Pasha has all the freshness and life of an actual scene.  The following is, indeed, more like an imitation of Vathek, than anything that has been seen, or is in existence.  I quote it for the contrast it affords to the visit referred to, and in illustration of the distinction which should be made between beauties derived from actual scenes and adventures, and compilations from memory and imagination, which are supposed to display so much more of creative invention.

And thus they parted, each by separate doors,
   Raba led Juan onward, room by room,
   Through glittering galleries and o’er marble floors,
   Till a gigantic portal through the gloom
   Haughty and huge along the distance towers,
   And wafted far arose a rich perfume,
   It seem’d as though they came upon a shrine,
   For all was vast, still, fragrant, and divine.