So was it with their ancestors, the Tartars; now dosing on their horses or their wagons, now 5 galloping over the plains from morning to night. However, these successive phases of Turkish character, as reported by travelers, have seemed to readers as inconsistencies in their reports; Thornton accepts the inconsistency. "The 10 national character of the Turks," he says, "is a composition of contradictory qualities. We find them brave and pusillanimous; gentle and ferocious; resolute and inconstant; active and indolent; fastidiously abstemious, and 15 indiscriminately indulgent. The great are alternately haughty and humble, arrogant and cringing, liberal and sordid."[39] What is this but to say in one word that we find them barbarians? [39] Bell's Geography. According to these distinct moods or phases 20 of character, they will leave very various impressions of themselves on the minds of successive beholders. A traveler finds them in their ordinary state in repose and serenity; he is surprised and startled to find them so different from what 25 he imagined; he admires and extols them, and inveighs against the prejudice which has slandered them to the European world. He finds them mild and patient, tender to the brute creation, as becomes the children of a Tartar shepherd, kind 30 and hospitable, self-possessed and dignified, the lowest classes sociable with each other, and the children gamesome. It is true; they are as noble as the lion of the desert, and as gentle and as playful as the fireside cat. Our traveler observes 5 all this;[40] and seems to forget that from the humblest to the highest of the feline tribe, from the cat to the lion, the most wanton and tyrannical cruelty alternates with qualities more engaging or more elevated. Other barbarous 10 tribes also have their innocent aspects--from the Scythians in the classical poets and historians down to the Lewchoo islanders in the pages of Basil Hall. [40] Vid. Sir Charles Fellows' Asia Minor.