He
owned, and for the most part controlled, a violent temper; it broke
bounds sometimes, to our great amusement as we read to-day, to the
occasional discomfiture of attaches or of dependents, {19} to the
abject terror of Turkish Sublimities who had outworn his patience.
But he knew when to be angry; he could pulverize by fiery outbreaks
the Reis Effendi and his master, Abdu-l-Mejid; but as
Plenipotentiary to the United States he could "quench the terror of
his beak, the lightning of his eye," disarming by his formal
courtesy and winning by his obvious sincerity the suspicious and
irritable John Quincy Adams. When Menschikoff once insulted him,
seeing that a quarrel at that moment would be fatal to his purpose,
he pretended to be deaf, and left the Russian in the belief that
his rude speech had not been heard. Enthroned for the sixth time
in Constantinople, at the dangerous epoch of 1853, he could point
to an unequalled diplomatic record in the past; to the Treaty of
Bucharest, to reunion of the Helvetic Confederacy shattered by
Napoleon's fall, to the Convention which ratified Greek
independence, to the rescue from Austrian malignity of the
Hungarian refugees.
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