well known that when the Czar visited England, in 1844, he had discussed the Eastern Question with the Queen and her principal advisers, and that he and Lord Aberdeen had become personal friends. His Majesty had propounded to Peel and Aberdeen his fixed idea that it would be well, in view of the impending dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, that England and Russia should agree as to the disposal of its European provinces. As Austria would follow Russia, an Anglo-Russian coalition would necessarily dictate terms to France, who, by her support of Mehemet Ali, had shown that her interests were as hostile to those of England in Egypt, as they were to those of Russia in Syria. In fact, the Czar’s conversations with the Tory Ministers in 1844 were almost identical with those which he subsequently held with Sir Hamilton Seymour in 1853. Sir Theodore Martin asserts that Peel rejected these overtures, saying that England did not regard the dissolution of Turkey as imminent, that she wanted no Turkish territory for herself, that she merely desired to prevent any government in Egypt from closing the road to India, and that she must decline to pledge herself to accept Russian plans for disposing of the Turkish territory, till events rendered its disposal a pressing question.[105] Sir Theodore Martin, however, admits that there was “a general concurrence in the principle expressed” by the Czar, that no Great Power--least of all France--should be permitted to aggrandise itself at the expense of Turkey. Now, it seems certain that up to the very moment when war was declared, the Emperor Nicholas was convinced that Lord Aberdeen’s Government would never take sides with France against him, in any quarrel about Turkey. He was convinced, despite the despatches of the British Ministry, that the ideas of the British Government and his own in regard to the future of Turkey, were in principle the same--and this conviction he evidently carried away with him from England in 1844. He must have been, therefore, too stupid to correctly understand what Peel said to him, or Peel must have said more to him than Sir Theodore Martin felt himself at liberty to record, in his masterly but discreet biography of Prince Albert. The manifest reluctance of Lord Aberdeen to thwart the Russian Emperor, and his obvious embarrassment when his duty forced him to comment publicly on Russian diplomacy in 1853, indicate that something more _was_ said. What it was has been revealed by Lord Malmesbury in an entry in his Diary under date the 3rd of June, 1853. “There is,” says Lord Malmesbury, who speaks with the authority of one who had held the seals of the Foreign Office, “a circumstance which I think must strongly influence Lord Aberdeen at this moment; which is, that when the Emperor Nicholas came to England in 1844, he, Sir Robert Peel (then Prime Minister), the Duke of Wellington, and Lord Aberdeen (then Foreign Secretary) drew up and