is by no means a milksop, and who can deal heavy blows, as we have just seen, even from his sick-bed—might not the Turk oppose the armed intervention of the Powers, and might not some untoward collision be the result, and might not the Turkish navy be annihilated; and then—O! then, might not the way to Constantinople be more open, and the Balkan more easily crossed? Such were the cogitations that might naturally begin to move in the brain of a thoroughly Russian energetic and enterprising young Czar, when the proposal was made to coerce the Sultan into the recognition of the total or partial independence of one of his revolted provinces. And the result, as we all know, was exactly such as the most brilliant imagination of a brisk young emperor could have conceived. In the course of a few months the Turkish fleet was destroyed at Navarino; in two years Kustendji and Varna, and the whole sea-road to Stamboul, were in the hands of the Russian fleet; and in three years General Diebitch had made himself immortal by surmounting the unsurmountable Balkan, and was resting with twenty thousand men (supposed, however, to be sixty thousand!) on the banks of the Hebrus at Adrianople. Never was game better played. The Turko-Russian campaign of 1828–9, which we can now study to such advantage, was, we may say, impossible, but for the battle of Navarino, which was only the natural result of the armed intervention of the three Powers in favour of Greece. Add to this the disorganisation of the Turkish army, caused by the massacre of the Janizaries in 1826, and the consequent disaffection among the old Turkish conservatives; and we shall see at once how the campaign of 1828–9 ended so gloriously for Russia, while that of 1854 has proved so shameful. The cause of the difference lies obviously in the command of the Black Sea, which Russia, by the disaster of Navarino, then had, and which, by the Anglo-French alliance, she now has not. This, and this only, has on the present occasion made the gallant defence of a single fortress by the Turks equivalent to the loss of a whole campaign by the Russians.