r
centuries ago. We cannot conceive, were Turkey overrun by the Russians
at the present moment, that the fanatical tribes, which are pouring into
Constantinople from Asia Minor, would submit to the foreign yoke, take
service under their conquerors, become soldiers, custom-officers,
police, men of business, attaches, statesmen, working their way up from
the ranks and from the masses into influence and power; but, whether
from skill in the Saracens, or from far-reaching sagacity in the Turks
(and it is difficult to assign it to either cause), so it was, that a
process of this nature followed close upon the Mahometan conquest of
Sogdiana. It is to be traced in detail to a variety of accidents. Many
of the Turks probably were made slaves, and the service to which they
were subjected was no matter of choice. Numbers had got attached to the
soil; and inheriting the blood of Persians, White Huns, or aboriginal
inhabitants for three generations, had simply unlearned the wildness of
the Tartar shepherd. Others fell victims to the religion of their
conquerors, which ultimately, as we know, exercised a most remarkable
influence upon them. Not all at once, but as tribe descended after
tribe, and generation followed generation, they succumbed to the creed
of Mahomet; and they embraced it with the ardour and enthusiasm which
Franks and Saxons so gloriously and meritoriously manifested in their
conversion to Christianity.

8.

3. Here again was a very powerful instrument in modification of their
national character. Let me illustrate it in one particular. If there is
one peculiarity above another, proper to the savage and to the Tartar,
it is that of excitability and impetuosity on ordinary occasions; the
Turks, on the other hand, are nationally remarkable for gravity and
almost apathy of demeanour. Now there are evidently elements in the
Mahometan creed, which would tend to change them from the one
temperament to the other. Its sternness, its coldness, its doctrine of
fatalism; even the truths which it borrowed from Revelation, when
separated from the truths it rejected, its monotheism untempered by
mediation, its severe view of the divine attributes, of the law, and of
a sure retribution to come, wrought both a gloom and also an improvement
in the barbarian, not very unlike the effect which some forms of
Protestantism produce among ourselves. But whatever was the mode of
operation, certainly it is to their religion that this pecu