The Turks having met the Russian army in those vast plains that divide their empires, now recovered their superiority by the advantage of their cavalry, better suited to desultory war: but they had scarce stemmed the torrent of invasion, before the Czarina struck Europe with wonder and respect by a measure at once great, daring, and desperate. She notified her intention of sending a fleet to attack Constantinople itself. The idea was said to be her own, and she persisted against the advice of her Ministers. The length of the voyage, its dangers, and the almost hopeless prospect of success, were lost in the grandeur of the project. I was then at Paris: the French ministry were confounded, and dispatched couriers by land to rouse the Ottoman Monarch: French engineers followed to assist him in fortifying the approach to his capital, which lay, as he thought, securely surrounded by endless tracts of sea and land. The Duke of Choiseul, who had sown those seeds of wide-spread desolation, was confounded at seeing himself excelled in a nobler style. But few days before this intelligence reached him, he had had the vain levity, as I was supping with him at his own house, to send for the last Paris Gazette, which he had dictated himself, to prove the late victory of the Turks, and read it to the company. His invasion of Corsica, and the savage cruelties that were exercised there after the conquest, were puny consolations to his meddling ambition--yet was all the military glory that decorated his administration. The first advantages gained there by the French had been solemnized in a ridiculous manner by ostentatious inscriptions, that were soon followed by defeats; but hosts continually poured in on the abandoned islanders; and the deficiency of military skill in Pascal Paoli, the Dictator of the aspiring Republic, and even his want of valour, as the French themselves asserted, reduced Corsica beneath their yoke. Paoli, who aspired to power, not to the fame of virtue, distinguished between his country and his hopes, and not having fallen like Leonidas, did not despair like Cato. He made his escape and arrived in England, where his character had been so advantageously exaggerated by Mr. Boswell’s enthusiastic and entertaining account of him, that the Opposition were ready to receive and incorporate him in the list of popular tribunes. The Court artfully intercepted the project; and deeming patriots of all nations equally corruptible, bestowed a pension of 1000_l._ a-year on the unheroic fugitive. Themistocles accepted the gold of Xerxes, and excused himself from receiving a visit from Mrs. Macaulay, who had given him printed advice for settling a republic. I saw him soon after his arrival, dangling at Court. He was a man of decent deportment, vacant of all melancholy reflection, with as much ease as suited a prudence that seemed the utmost effort of a wary understanding, and so void of anything remarkable in his aspect, that being asked if I knew who it was, I judged him a Scottish officer (for he was sandy-complexioned and in regimentals) who was cautiously awaiting the moment of promotion. All his heroism consisted in bearing with composure the accounts of his friends being tortured and butchered, while he was sunk into a pensioner of that very Court that had proclaimed his valiant countrymen and associates rebels.[244]