Anastasius Or Memoirs of a Greek Author:Thomas Hope Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. ,"—said Suleiman, in all the solemnity of a set speech,—"you have seen our two leaders, and seldom, I should think, can have observed two persona... more »ges more unlike both in mind and in body. The short spare form, the mild countenance, the insinuating address, the cautious calculating turn of the Schaich-el-belled could not find a greater contrast than in the ferocious features, the colossal frame, the voice of thunder, the violent temper, the . fearlessness of danger, the impatience of control, and the prodigality of disposition of his blustering colleague. Little of union might be expected between qualities so dissimilar; and, in fact, the public at large, which sees Ibrahim ever prefer artifice to force and negotiation to war, while Mourad openly professes to hold in his sword his only instrument of persuasion, regards these two chiefs as constantly on the eve of a rupture, and about to hoist the standard of interminable enmity. But we who observe more closely, have lost all hopes on that head.—We can only, when Ibrahim and Mourad affect to be at variance, view in their reciprocal strictures upon each other, studied sallies carefully rehearsed beforehand by the performers, with the view to mask their schemes, and to mislead their rivals. Each appreciates in his heart at its true value, that difference of disposition from the other, which gives him in his associate precisely all he wants in himself, and makes Mourad cut asunder the knot which Ibrahim cannot untie, as it again enables Ibrahim to cure by his management, the wounds which Mourad has inflicted by his rashness. Thus it is that the dissimilar qualities of the two chiefs,—like the gold and the steel of a Damascus blade—only form a closer amalgam, and leave less hopes of those chasms and fissures in their u...« less