the most so, of any people I have ever seen. To impede an
Englishman's locomotion on a journey, is equivalent to stopping the
circulation of his blood; to disturb the repose of a Turk on his, is to
re-awaken him to a painful sense of the miseries of life. The one nation
at rest is as much tormented as Prometheus, chained to his rock, with
the vulture feeding on him; the other in motion is as uncomfortable as
Ixion tied to his ever-moving wheel."[79]

2.

However, the barbarian, when roused to action, is a very different being
from the barbarian at rest. "The Turk," says Mr. Thornton, "is usually
placid, hypochondriac, and unimpassioned; but, when the customary
sedateness of his temper is ruffled, his passions ... are furious and
uncontrollable. The individual seems possessed with all the ungovernable
fury of a multitude; and all ties, all attachments, all natural and
moral obligations, are forgotten or despised, till his rage subsides." A
similar remark is made by a writer of the day: "The Turk on horseback
has no resemblance to the Turk reclining on his carpet. He there assumes
a vigour, and displays a dexterity, which few Europeans would be
capable of emulating; no horsemen surpass the Turks; and, with all the
indolence of which they are accused, no people are more fond of the
violent exercise of riding."[80]

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 to find them so different from
what he imagined; he admires and extols them, and inveighs against the
prejudice which has slandered them