ry grave accident, think all political people, think
especially the Foreign Excellencies at Warsaw, when news of it arrives.
Burning of Balta, not to be quenched by the amplest Russian apologies,
proved a live-coal at Constantinople; and Vergennes says, he set
population and Divan on fire by it: a proof that the population and
Divan had already been in a very inflammable state. Not a wise Divan,
though a zealous. Plenty of fury in these people; but a sad deficiency
of every other faculty. They made haste, in their hot humor, to declare
War (6th October, 1768); [Hermann, v. 608-611.] not considering much how
they would carry it on. Declared themselves in late Autumn,--as if to
give the Russians ample time for preparing; those poor Turks
themselves being as yet ready with nothing, and even the season for
field-operations being over.

King Friedrich, who has still a Minister at the Porte, endeavored to
dissuade his old Turk friends, in this rash crisis; but to no purpose;
they would listen to nothing but Vergennes and their own fury. Friedrich
finds this War a very mad one on the part of his old Turk friends; their
promptitude to go into it (he has known them backward enough when
their chances were better!), and their way of carrying it on, are alike
surprising to him. He says: "Catharine's Generals were unacquainted with
the first elements of Castrametation and Tactic; but the Generals of the
Sultan had a still more prodigious depth of ignorance; so that to form a
correct idea of this War, you must figure a set of purblind people, who,
by constantly beating a set of altogether blind, end by gaining over
them a complete mastery." [_OEuvres de Frederic,_ vi. 23, 24.] This,
as Friedrich knows, is what Austria cannot suffer; this is what
will involve Austria and Russia, and Friedrich along with them,
in--Friedrich, as the matter gradually unfolds itself, shudders to think
what. The beginnings of this War were perhaps almost comical to the
old Soldier-King; but as it gradually developed itself into complete
shattering to pieces of the stupid Blind by the ambitious Purblind, he
grew abundantly serious upon it.

It is but six months since Polish Patriotism, so effulgent to its own
eyes in Orthodoxy, in Love of glorious Liberty, confederated at Bar,
and got into that extraordinary whirlpool, or cesspool, of miseries
and deliriums we have been looking at; and now it has issued on a broad
highway of progress,--broad and precipitou