Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/131

 BETWEEN THE CZAR AND THE SULTAN. S9 siuii* Upon the whole, therefore, it seemed to chap. VI. the Czar that now, if ever, England might be willing to acquiesce in his encroachments upon Turkey, and even perhaps to abet him in schemes for the actual dismemberment of the Empire. The Minister who represented the Queen at the sir 1 . Hamilton Russian Court was Sir Hamilton Seymour. It is Seymour. said that before there was a prospect of his being accredited at St Petersburg, he had conceived a high admiration of the qualities of the Emperor Nicholas, and that this circumstance, becoming known to the Czar, tended at first to make the English Minister more than commonly welcome at the Imperial Court. Sir Hamilton was not so constituted as to be liable to the kind of awe which other diplomatists too often felt in the majestic presence of the Emperor; but his de- spatches show that he was much interested, and, so to speak, amused by the conversation of a prince who wielded with his own very hand the power of All the Russias. Moreover, Sir Hamilton had the quickness and the presence of mind which enable a man to seize the true bearing and import of a sentence just uttered, and to meet it at the instant with the few and appropriate words which convey the needful answer, and provoke a still further disclosure. On the night of the 9th of January 1853, the English Minister was at a party gathered in the palace of the Grand Duchess Helen, when the published in the early months of 1853.
 * See the ' articles ' in that direction which the ' Times '