This action of France, Spain, and Russia fully warranted the British Government in not admitting into the fortress the 2,000 Neapolitan troops that arrived in the autumn of 1802.  Our evacuation of Malta was conditioned by several stipulations, five of which had not been fulfilled.[234] But the difficulties arising out of the reconstruction of this moribund Order were as nothing when compared with those resulting from the reopening of a far vaster and more complex question—­the “eternal” Eastern Question.

Rarely has the mouldering away of the Turkish Empire gone on so rapidly as at the beginning of the nineteenth century.  Corruption and favouritism paralyzed the Government at Constantinople; masterful pachas, aping the tactics of Ali Pacha, the virtual ruler of Albania, were beginning to carve out satrapies in Syria, Asia Minor, Wallachia, and even in Roumelia itself.  Such was the state of Turkey when the Sultan and his advisers heard with deep concern, in October, 1801, that the only Power on whose friendship they could firmly rely was about to relinquish Malta.  At once he sent an earnest appeal to George III. begging him not to evacuate the island.  This despatch is not in the archives of our Foreign Office; but the letter written from Malta by Lord Elgin, our ambassador at Constantinople, on his return home, sufficiently shows that the Sultan was conscious of his own weakness and of the schemes of partition which were being concocted at Paris.  Bonaparte had already begun to sound both Austria and Russia on this subject, deftly hinting that the Power which did not early join in the enterprise would come poorly off.  For the present both the rulers rejected his overtures; but he ceased not to hope that the anarchy in Turkey, and the jealousy which partition schemes always arouse among neighbours, would draw first one and then the other into his enterprise.[235]

The young Czar’s disposition was at that period restless and unstable, free from the passionate caprices of his ill-fated father, and attuned by the fond efforts of the Swiss democrat Laharpe, to the loftiest aspirations of the France of 1789.  Yet the son of Paul I. could hardly free himself from the instincts of a line of conquering Czars; his frank blue eyes, his graceful yet commanding figure, his high broad forehead and close shut mouth gave promise of mental energy; and his splendid physique and love of martial display seemed to invite him to complete the campaigns of Catherine II. against the Turks, and to wash out in the waves of the Danube the remorse which he still felt at his unwitting complicity in a parricidal plot.  Between his love of liberty and of foreign conquest he for the present wavered, with a strange constitutional indecision that marred a noble character and that yielded him a prey more than once to a masterful will or to seductive projects.  He is the Janus of Russian history.  On the one side he faces the enormous problems of social and political reform, and yet he steals many a longing glance towards the dome of St. Sofia.  This instability in his nature has been thus pointedly criticised by his friend Prince Czartoryski:[236]