Their horses or their waggons

So was it with their ancestors, the Tartars; now dosing on their horses or their waggons, now galloping over the plains from morning to night.

However, these successive phases of Turkish character, as reported by travellers, have seemed to readers as inconsistencies in their reports; Thornton accepts the inconsistency. “ The national character of the Turks”, he says, “ is a composition of contradictory qualities. We find them brave and pusillanimous ; gentle and ferocious; resolute and inconstant; active and indolent; fastidiously abstemious and indiscriminately indulgent. The great are alternately haughty and humble, arrogant and cringing, liberal and sordid”. What is this but to say in one word that we find them barbarians ?

According to these distinct moods or phases of character, they will leave very various impressions of themselves on the minds of successive beholders. A traveller finds them in their ordinary state in repose and serenity; he is surprised and startled from their being so different from what he imagined; he admires and extols them, and inveighs against the prejudice which has slandered them to the European world. He finds them mild and patient, tender to the brute creation, as becomes the children of a Tartar shepherd, kind and hospitable, self-possessed and dignified, the lowest classes sociable with each other, and the children gamesome. It is true; they are as noble as the lion of the desert, and as gentle and as playful as the fireside cat. Our traveller observes all this; and seems to forget that Vid. Sir Charles Fellows’ Asia Minor.

From the highest to the humblest of the feline tribe, from the cat to the lion, the most wanton and tyrannical cruelty alternates with qualities more engaging or more elevated. Other barbarous tribes also have their innocent aspects;from the Scythians in the classical poets and historians down to the Lewchoo islanders in the pages of Basil Hall.

Natural excellences of the Turks

But whatever be the natural excellences of the Turks, progressive they are not. This Sir Charles Fellows seems to allow: “ My intimacy with the character of the Turks”, he says, “ which has led me to think so highly of their moral excellence, has not given me the same favourable impression of the development of their’moSl powers Their refinement is of manners and affections; there is little cultivation or activity of mind among them”. This admission implies a great deal, and brings us to a fresh consideration.