and Prussia, as subsidiary to their views upon Germany and their northern neighbours. They concluded a new defensive alliance with the court of Vienna in 1746, and in the year following entered into a treaty of subsidy with England and Holland, by which they engaged to furnish a succour of thirty thousand troops, who were on their march to the Rhine, when the convention of Aix-la Chapelle preparatory to the peace of that name, stopped them in Bohemia. The Russian ministry were, at the same time, indefatigable in the prosecution of the old scheme of subduing Poland, Sweden and Denmark, completely to their will, and preparing them for the yoke. Warsaw, Stockholm, and Copenhagen were respectively the scene of intrigues, of which corruption and violence carried to the highest pitch of enormity, formed the leading features. France was, at all these courts, the steady antagonist of Russia; but while she tried every means of seduction, she abstained from the expedient of intimidation, which the situation of the latter invited, and enabled her to employ with greater probability of success.

An oligarchical anarchy reigned in Sweden, and afforded an ample field for this iniquitous competition. The venality of the parties into which the court and diet were divided, almost kept pace with the profligacy of the foreign interlopers. It was natural for Russia, after securing the election of Adolphus Frederick as crown prince, to believe that her ascendency was immoveably established; but the marriage of this prince with a sister of the king of Prussia, the ally of France, -the superior cunning and munificence of the French system of bribery, -the hereditary antipathy of the Swedes to the Russians, and the intemperate, hectoring violence of the Russian minister at Stockholm, produced a different result. The influence of France became completely paramount in the diet of 1747, and drew Sweden, the same year, into a defensive alliance with Prussia, levelled, as the French historians acknowledge, against Russia, and cemented by a French subsidy.

The court of St. Petersburg was more uniformly successful, although not less imperious, at Copenhagen. Denmark was bound down, not only by the fear of losing Sleswick, to which Russia had pretensions in favour of the duke of Holstein, but by the necessity of fortifying herself with external aid against the ambition of Prussia and Sweden. She renewed, in 1746, her old treaty of alliance with Russia, practised the most mortifying submissions, and fed the rapacity of the Russian courtiers with ruinous pensions and donatives. The ministers of Elizabeth are said to have made conventions, from time to time, with Denmark, merely for the purpose of extorting the gratifications which an ancient usage of their government, borrowed from the east, entitled them to receive on such occasions. Thus was maintained a sort of equilibrium in the Russian court, between the sums which corruption gathered from Denmark, and those which it dispensed to the Caps of Sweden.

The government of Russia, consigned to favourites and adventurers, was, at this period, and indeed throughout the whole of Elizabeth's reign, a tissue of the grossest excesses of peculation, and the most oppressive abuses of authority. The same disorders which I have described as prevalent under Peter the Great, now obtained equally in the administration of the national and provincial concerns, and were indulged the more generally and shamelessly, among the public functionaries of all ranks, in consequence of the total absence of control and the assurance of impunity. The crown was impoverished, and the treasury drained to enrich individuals; the navy languished; the public works fell to decay; the monopolies of salt, tobacco, and brandy, always the source of numerous ills, were aggravated in their pressure and in their consequences; the malversation extended also to the customs and to the mines.

The empire ftourished, however, in its negotiations. Elizabeth was not insensible to the importance of good management in this quarter, and it was a matter in which she could not be deceived. She had, moreover, a taste for the magnificence and refinements of the southern courts. Considerable progress was therefore made at her own, in manners and appearance. At the same time the great cities of the empire reaped advantage from her fondness for building palaces and churches. The mildness of her disposition, and the graces of her address, shed a salutary influence where such an influence was eminently wanted. How far her extreme sensuality, and the excesses with which it was accompanied, were calculated to do mischief in the example, may be best determined when we come to treat of her successor, Catharine II.

In the early part of her reign, Elizabeth prohibited all capital punishments: but she abolished neither the secret chancery nor the torture. These engines of savage tyranny were employed with double activity by the unworthy delegates of her power. If immediate death could not be inflicted, they found in these, in the knout, and the other modes of punishment of which I have had too often occasion to speak, means of gratifying fully all the furious passions and depraved appetites of which human suffering is the aliment or the sport; and to which the members of a rude despotism must be always mutually obnoxious. It is affirmed, that the prisons of Russia were never more crowded, and that the number of wretches mutilated for Siberia, was at no time greater, than during the sway of Elizabeth. The wanton and cruel severities practised within this period, were in proportion to the crying abuses of every kind to which the empire was a prey.

Such was the state of things under a sovereign celebrated, not altogether without reason, for the virtues of the heart. She was, say the historians, at the same time, pacific, unambitious, and timid in her nature; she consented with the utmost reluctance to a recourse to arms, and shed tears over the victories gained by her

own commanders. Yet the government of Russia was never before distinguished by bolder enterprises of ambition and rapacity, by greater tyranny and arrogance towards the neighbouring powers; it had never waged more destructive wars; it had never been more dangerous or hostile to Europe.

I note these circumstances chiefly with a view to show how little reliance is to be placed, under a political constitution such as that of Russia, on the private character of the monarch, in respect to national policy and conduct. However excellent his dispositions, if he be of a feeble or indolent character, he can furnish no security, either to foreign nations or to his own subjects: If indued with suitable energy, he can rarely be other than ambitious, and then the former will be equally exposed; and, as must ever be the case in an absolute despotism with an extended empire, the latter can promise themselves little more from his vigilance, than a slight alleviation, or at least a partial cure of their misery. It is a truth, established by the experience of all great empires, that the people of them will never be well governed in their municipal concerns, but by functionaries of their own choice.

The character and resources of Frederick the Great, and the situation of his dominions, rendered him, of all the neighbours of Russia, the most truly formidable to her ambition. Bestucheff viewed his power with a jealous and covetous eye, and Elizabeth cherished a strong personal resentment against him, on account of some witticisms in which he had indulged at her expense. The sympathetic feelings of the three courts of Vienna, Dresden, and St. Petersburg, on the subject of Prussia, led them into an alliance ostensibly defensive, for which the ambitious dispositions of Frederick furnished the pretext. The Prussian monarch on his side availed himself of this concert, which he described, perhaps correctly, as levelled against his crown, to commence the execution of his own schemes of aggression, by surprising, towards the end of August, 1756, the city of Dresden, and making himself master of the Saxon territory, as a preface to the invasion of Bohemia.

Augustus III, king of Poland and elector of Saxony, compelled to fly from Dresden to Warsaw, claimed the stipulated aid from Elizabeth, and offered a free passage through Poland for the Russian troops, who might be sent to retaliate upon Frederick in his own kingdom, the mischief which he was committing in those of her allies. The court of St. Petersburg wanted but a fair opportunity of striking at the existence itself of the Prussian power, and of cantoning its forces in Poland. The invitation of Augustus was, therefore, accepted without hesitation, and a large army marched with all possible speed to assail the territories of

Frederick.

About the same time commenced between France and England, the celebrated struggle so well known to us, under the name of the war of 56, the causes of which it does not come within my pro

vince to explain. The king of Prussia took part with England; a circumstance which induced a treaty of coalition, between France and Austria. This great and extraordinary revolution in the politics of these two powers, the subject of such warm and widespread controversy among the French writers, was followed by a change, scarcely less unexpected, in the system of Russia towards France. Elizabeth, invited by the Austrian and French cabinets to enter into their union against Prussia, acceded to it as a principal contracting party. We have thus, in 1757, Russia in strict alliance with France, under the reservation, however, of her friendly relations with Great Britain.

Human wisdom could not have devised a measure more eligible than this for the Russian government at such a juncture. It was a master stroke, un coup d'etat of the first order. It had a sure tendency to promote their designs on Prussia, to paralyze the French party in Poland, to re-establish their influence in Sweden, and to weaken the connexion between Turkev and France. Sweden had, in fact, been previously drawn, by the latter, into the war against Russia, and could now resist, in nothing, the united interests of the courts of St. Petersburg and Versailles. Although Louis had excepted Turkey from the casus fæderis, in his convention with Elizabeth, the Divan saw, with great disgust and umbrage, its favourite ally bound in so close a league with its habitual and inveterate enemies. The further consequences, as they develop themselves, will show that the French statesmen were right in considering the accession of Russia, to the alliance between their cabinet and Austria, as the worst of the evils resulting from this memorable revolution.

The Russian army sent against Prussia, under field marshal Apraxin, took Memel and gained an important victory over the Prussian force opposed to it, in the outset of the campaign. Apraxin, however, instead of pursuing his advantage and marching onward to the capital of the enemy, fell back upon Courland and Poland, and entered into premature winter quarters. He was indignantly recalled by Elizabeth, put under arrest, and arraigned for a breach of trust; but acquitted of such a degree of guilt as demanded capital punishment. Among various grounds of justification, he produced, it is said, a letter from Bestucheff, instructing him to adopt the course for which he was subjected to trial. The disgrace of the minister himself followed soon after, and is an event which merits elucidation.

Bestucheff had eagerly promoted the war against Prussia, but consented with reluctance to the alliance with France. His disinclination for this measure, arose from considerations of personal safety, as well as from his just and deeply rooted antipathies. The principal, and only materia objection to the French connexion, was the scope which it would afford, at the court of St. Petersburg, for French intrigue, to which he well knew that he himself would be particularly obnoxious.

In seeking the alliance with Russia, Louis XV was obviously determined, by the hope of being able to acquire a fixed ascendancy over her councils. To this end, all the resources of the diplomatic art, into which this monarch had introduced a particularly odious refinement, were immediately brought into action. St. Petersburg was made one of the theatres of his well known double diplomacy, since unveiled in that most instructive work, the Politique de tous les Cabinets. Aware of the predilection which Elizabeth entertained for the French court, and of the weakness of her character, he opened a secret correspondence with her as a means of turning those circumstances to the best account, of securing her favour, and of opening her eyes to the faults and perhaps treachery of her ministers.

All the fears of Bestucheff, concerning the dangers to which his authority would be exposed from France, were realized. The correspondence which I have just mentioned was established without his privity, and conducted through the channel of the vicechancellor Woronzow, his rival and antagonist in the cabinet, in conjunction with the chevalier D'Eon, a member of the French legation. This individual, whose singular history nearly engrossed the magazines and gazettes of the time, had carried to Paris the accession of Elizabeth to the triple alliance, and on his return to his post was instructed to concert without delay with his ambassador, and the Austrian Minister, the means of accomplishing the ruin of Bestucheff; -a point to which Louis still attached the highest importance.

A more propitious combination of circumstances, than that which attended the mission of la Chétardie, rendered the present attempt entirely successful. Among these, the most remarkable, is the schism which existed in the imperial household. The grand dutchess Catharine had been, from the first years of her marriage, industriously employed in forming an interest adverse to that of her husband, whose vices and extravagances favoured the aims of his treacherous consort. Bestucheff, who is accused by the historians of having early meditated and unremittingly urged, the disinherison of Peter, was enlisted on her side, and while he directed the political intrigue, served as the confidant of her criminal amours. The abused but froward object of these cabals, had imbibed a passionate admiration for the king of Prussia; he regarded the war waged against him as little worse than sacrilegious, and was carried so far by his infatuation, as to denounce vengeance against all those of the army or the cabinet who should contribute to its success. It is even said that he maintained a correspondence with Frederick, and betrayed to him such of the secrets of the Russian councils as he was able to penetrate.

About the period of Apraxin's successes over the Prussians, a serious malady under which Elizabeth had long languished, attained a height which threatened her speedy dissolution. The retrogade movement of this commander, under the orders of Bestu