_First_,—As to the conduct of RUSSIA. It is a remarkable fact, and very significant of the nature of Russian influence in Turkey, that the Greek Revolution did not commence where one might have expected it to commence, in Greece proper—_i.e._, the mountainous strongholds of Acarnania and the Peloponnesus—but in those very Principalities where we are now fighting, and where the Muscovites are always intriguing. How was this? Plainly because all those Greeks who had for years been brewing revolt in their ἑταιριαι, or secret conspiracies, took it for granted that on that nominally Turkish but really Russian ground, Russia would at once come forward and help them to kill—we use the Imperial simile—the sick old Infidel, who had been so long lying with his diseased lumpish body on the back of the Christian population; and accordingly the man whom they set up to raise the flag of Christian insurrection on the banks of the Pruth and the Sereth, was an officer in the Russian service, Alexander Ypsilanti by name; and the first thing he did when he came forward as military head of the revolt in the Principalities, was to put forth a proclamation, in which the Christian tribes of Turkey were told that “_a great European power_” might be depended on as “_patronising the insurrection_”—ὁτι μιά μεγάλη δύναμις τοῦς προστατευει. Now, here was a lie to begin with, to which perhaps the old _Græcia mendax_ may seem not inapplicable: but in fact it was a most probable lie; and if lies were at all justifiable, either on principle or policy, at the opening scene of a great war, certainly this was the lie which at that time and place looked most like the truth. But it is a dangerous thing to raise warlike enthusiasm at any time, especially when an emperor is concerned, by sounding statements not founded on truth. Had the Czar been ever so willing to assist the movement of the Wallachian Greeks, and to lead his victorious Cossacks, scarcely returned from fair Paris, to magnificent Stamboul, he could not but feel offended at the unceremonious manner in which his decision had been taken out of his own mouth, and the absolute spontaneity of an imperial ukase been forestalled by a vagabond Greek captain. But the Greeks were, from the beginning, out of their reckoning in supposing that the then Czar would, as a matter of course, patronise their insurrectionary movement against the Turks. Alexander, though not naturally a very bellicose person, had already done as much for the territorial aggrandisement of Russia as would have contented the most warlike of his predecessors. He had rounded off the north-west corner of his vast domain in the most neat and dexterous way by the appropriation of Finland in 1808; and he had profited alike in the upshot by the friendship of Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807, and by his enmity at Moscow in 1812. That he should enter upon a new, and in all probability a severe contest with another enemy, and put himself at the head of a great