People to Christianity

Ultimately he was defeated; then followed the conversion of his people to Christianity, which for a period restrained their barbarous rapacity; after this, for two centuries, they were under the yoke and bondage of the Tartars; but the prophecy, or rather the omen, remains, and the whole world has learned to acquiesce in the probability of its fulfilment. The wonder rather is, that that fulfilment has been so long delayed. The Russians, whose wishes would inspire their hopes, are not solitary in their anticipations: the historian, from ‘ whom I have borrowed this sketch of their past attempts, writing at the end of last century, records his own Gibbon.

expectation of the event. “ Perhaps,” he says, “ the present generation may yet behold the accomplishment of a . . . prediction, of which the style is unambiguous ana^unquestionable”. The Turks themselves have long been under the shadow of its influence; even as early as the middle of the seventeenth century, when they were powerful, and Austria and Poland also, and Russia distant and comparatively feeble, a traveller tells us, that “ of all the princes of Christendom, there was none whom the Turks so much feared, as the Czar of Muscovy”.

Favour of Russia

This apprehension has ever been on the increase; in favour of Russia they made the first formal renunciation of territory which had been consecrated to Islamism by the solemnities of religion, a circumstance which has sunk deep into their imaginations; there is an enigmatical inscription on the tomb of the Great Constantine, to the effect that “ the yellow-haired race shall overthrow Ismael”; moreover, ever since their defeats by the Emperor Leopold, they have had a surmise that the true footing of their faith is in Asia; and so strong is the popular feeling on the subject, that in consequence their favourite cemetery is at Scutari on the Asiatic coast.