Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/235

 BETWEEN THE CZAli AND THE SULTAN. 193 •to have received without question the fables with cuap. which the Eastern mind Avas portraying the se-. vere, the implacable Eltchi. It was vain to show a monarch, thus wrought to anger, that the -difference between him and the terrible Ambassa- dor lay simply in the fact that the one was in the wrong and the other in the right. The thought of this only made the discomfiture more bitter. In the eyes of the Czar, Lord Stratford's way of keeping himself eternally in the right and eternal- ly moderate was the mere contrivance, the mere inverted Jesuitism, of a man resolved to do good in order that evil might come — resolved to be forbearing and just for the sake of doing a harm to the Church. It was plain that, to assuage the torment which the Czar was enduring, the remedy was action : yet, strange to say, this disturber of Europe, who seemed to pass his life in preparing soldiery, was not at all ready for a war even against the Sultan alone. His preparations had been stopped in the beginning of March, and the movements which his troops had been making in Bessarabia were movements in the nature of threats. He wished to do some signal act of violence without plunging into war. The disposition of the Russian forces on the The Dana it bian Princi banks of the Truth had long been breeding unties. rumours that the Emperor Nicholas meditated an occupation of the Principalities called Wallachia and Moldavia. These provinces formed a part of the Ottoman dominions in Europe ; but they were held by the Sultan under arrangements vol. t. N