day’s after the battle, the town surrendered.  The consternation, which this defeat has occasioned here, is inexpressible; and the sultan, apprehending a revolution, from the resentment and indignation of the people, fomented by certain leaders, has begun his precautions, after the goodly fashion of this blessed government, by ordering several persons to be strangled, who were the objects of his royal suspicion.  He has also ordered his treasurer to advance some months pay to the janizaries, which seems the less necessary, as their conduct has been bad in this campaign, and their licentious ferocity seems pretty well tamed by the public contempt.  Such of them as return in straggling and fugitive parties to the metropolis, have not spirit nor credit enough to defend themselves from the insults of the mob; the very children taunt them, and the populace spit in their faces as they pass.  They refused, during the battle, to lend their assistance to save the baggage and the military chest, which, however, were defended by the bashaws and their retinue, while the janizaries and spahis were nobly employed in plundering their own camp.

You see here, that I give you a very handsome return for your obliging letter.  You entertain me with a most agreeable account of your amiable connexions (sic) with men of letters and taste, and of the delicious moments you pass in their society under the rural shade; and I exhibit to you, in return, the barbarous spectacle of Turks and Germans cutting one another’s throats.  But what can you expect from such a country as this, from which the Muses have fled, from which letters seem eternally banished, and in which you see, in private scenes, nothing pursued as happiness, but the refinements of an indolent voluptuousness; and where those who act upon the public theatre live in uncertainty, suspicion, and terror?  Here, pleasure, to which I am no enemy, when it is properly seasoned, and of a good composition, is surely of the coying kind.  Veins of wit, elegant conversation, easy commerce, are unknown among the Turks; and yet they seem capable of all these, if the vile spirit of their government did not stifle genius, damp curiosity, and suppress an hundred passions, that embellish and render life agreeable.  The luscious passion of the seraglio is the only one almost that is gratified here to the full; but it is blended so with the surly spirit of despotism in one of the parties, and with the dejection and anxiety which this spirit produces in the other, that, to one of my way of thinking, it cannot appear otherwise than as a very mixed kind of enjoyment.  The women here are not, indeed, so closely confined as many have related; they enjoy a high degree of liberty, even in the bosom of servitude, and they have methods of evasion and disguise, that are very favourable to gallantry; but, after all, they are still under uneasy apprehensions of being discovered; and a discovery exposes them to the most merciless