behind the flags of the Guard regiments that were always placed in his bedroom, and thence into a chimney, up which he climbed for a short distance. For a moment the conspirators fancied that their victim had escaped them, and ran helplessly about, the more helplessly because Bennigsen had gone out to see the cause of the disturbance in the anteroom. But a light was brought, and the Czar was discovered up the chimney. He was seized by the legs and dragged down. Then came a wildly grotesque interlude in the frightful drama. Paul, in his Bashkir ugliness, only dressed in a shirt, and all over soot, stood in the centre of the conspirators and began to gesticulate and harangue, spit and snarl. The drunkards amused themselves with the pitiable maniac, and laughed at his appearance and behaviour. Then came the end. The unhappy man attempted to escape from the circle and reach the door. Prince Jaschvil tried to prevent him; the Czar thrust him back; Jaschvil seized him, and in the struggle both rolled on the ground. At this moment there was a wild medley, the light was again extinguished, and the screen thrown down. Once again the Czar got on his legs and uttered a piercing scream for help. Prince Wyäsemsky and two Guard officers, Sartorinow and Serjaetin, held him firmly, and one of them pressed his hand against the shrieking man's mouth. The emperor, now in fear of death, removed his hand with a desperate effort, and groaned, "Spare me! grant me at least time to pray to God!" Who knows whether these last words were heard by any but those in his immediate vicinity? At any rate, the entreaty was not granted. Serjaetin had taken off his scarf and now wound it tightly round the Czar, who had again been dragged to the ground. Others thrust their pocket-handkerchiefs into his mouth. Jaschvil held the victim tightly by the legs, and several others, pressing on in the gruesome darkness, threw themselves on the horrible group. At length Serjaetin had the scarf secured round the Czar's neck, and Nikolai Zubow drew the ends of it violently together. When Bennigsen returned with a light, he found the murdered emperor lying on the ground, stark naked, bleeding, trampled, throttled, choked-an awful sight, which even horrified the drunken murderers. Then they regained their energy, and finding their courage again in their success, they rushed with the wild shout of "Il est achevé!" out of the death-room and down the stairs. Thus died Paul I., the imperial lunatic, who regarded all men as slaves, and treated them as such; who deified absolute force, and gave away to noblemen upwards of two million souls. And yet he was one of the Dei gratiâs and an "anointed of the Lord." The news, "The tyrant is dead!" ran like a peal of joy-bells through the streets of the capital, through the whole empire, made men feel like those "who receive a reprieve on the steps of the gallows," and everywhere produced an immoderate delight and true stupor of happiness. Mountains of imprecations and abuse were heaped on the corpse of the murdered man, in all the shops rings were sold bearing the date of his death, men carried purses and women medals, with the inscription "March 12 (o.s.), 1801." Valerian Zubow is said to have been the first to hurry from the scene of murder to the Grand-Duke Alexander, and salute the surprised man as emperor. According to his story, when * Prince Dolgorukow. La Vérité sur Russie. ** Plato Zubow and Bennigsen laid before the Czar the act of abdication, he sat up in his bed, sank back on his pillow through amazement and fury, and an attack of apoplexy put an end to his life. According to another report, Alexander was not greatly surprised by the message that the crisis was over. General Bennigsen is said to have written in his Memoirs, which were sold by his widow to the Russian court: "When I (after the emperor's death) went to the heir to the throne unannounced, as I had been ordered, I found him lying on the sofa in full uniform. Alexander leapt up hurriedly and asked me, ere I had time to utter a word, in great excitement and with a violent manner,' Is it all over?"" If this were the case, the grand-duke had, indeed, weighty reasons for saying with horror to the Guard officers who flocked in to salute him as emperor, "I will not accept this blood-stained crown; carry it to Constantine." In truth, he spoke thus in the first moment of horror. He knew that he had expected his father's dethronement, if not his death, and this consciousness became a worm in his mind, which only died with him. Not only in days of trial and misfortune, but in those of happiness and triumph, which at a later date set in so brilliantly for Alexander, not even when the lustre of the Czaric crown illumined all Europe, did the blood stains that polluted that crown disappear from his sight. Hence came the gloom spread over his temper, and the eventual overthrow of his mental faculties. A man cannot, even when half or wholly compelled, sever unpunished the most sacred bonds of nature; no, not even in thought. It is very credible that the grand-duke, driven to desperation by the storm of his feelings, at length burst into convulsive sobbing. Count Pahlen aroused him from this outburst of surely conscientious sorrowfor the Alexander of that day was very different from the Alexander of the Congress of Erfurt-by the coarse remark, "This childish whining has lasted long enough; it is time for you to assume the government,' and dragged him off so that he might present the new Czar to the troops collected in front of the Winter Palace. Early on March 24 the officers and officials of all ranks who hurried up to do homage, saw the youthful Cæsar, "with dishevelled hair and in tears," attending service for the dying in the palace chapel, while outside all who met on the squares or in the streets embraced and congratulated each other, and the people yielded to a delight which no pen is able to describe. A very different scene was taking place in the apartments of the Empress Maria, in the Michailow murder-palace. The noise, by which she was aroused from her sleep, must have told her, in the existing state of affairs, that something was being done to her husband. The task was completed, however, ere the report reached her that the Czar was removed from the throne. She attempted to hasten to him, but found herself locked into her apartments. Shall I now be Empress-regent of Russia? That this thought occupied her mind there is not the slightest doubt. When Pahlen, sent by Alexander, came in to her, she received * The attack of apoplexy was everywhere announced, and at first believed abroad to be real. Thus the First Consul wrote on April 12, 1801, to his brother Joseph: "L'Empéreur de Russie est mort dans la nuit de 23 au 24 Mars, d'une attaque d'apoplexie."-Correspondance de Nap., VII. 145. him with the words: "Shall I be able to endure the burden of this heavy office?" "Oh, madam, that is provided for" (on a eu soin), Pahlen replied; and then told the story about the apoplectic stroke. The imperial widow burst into the most violent passion, and distracted by horror, grief, and disappointment, impetuously ordered the count to leave her. General Bennigsen, who came in the name of the new emperor to invite her to the Winter Palace, was no better treated. "Who is emperor? who calls Alexander emperor ?" "The voice of the nation, madam. The Guards have appealed to him." "I shall not recognise him till he has given me an explanation." The poor empress, however, was not the only person whom the Emperor Paul's death aroused from all sorts of illusions and urged to violent language. In Paris, the Bonapartistic bomb burst in the Moniteur of 27 Germinal: "Paul Ier est mort dans la nuit du 23 au 24 Mars!!! L'escadre anglaise a passé le Sund le 31!!! L'histoire nous apprendra les rapports qui peuvent exister entre ces deux évènements." History, however, has not condescended to confirm the Bonapartistic oracular statement that it was really Pitt's hand that twisted the eventful scarf round Paul's neck. At the outset, too, the occurrence of that awful March night had not the political consequences which the First Consul apprehended. A year later (March 11, 1802), he was enabled to write to his brother Joseph: "The Emperor Alexander is more than ever disposed to go hand in hand with France in all the great affairs of Europe." It is true, the vacillation of the Czaric temper was speedily displayed, not only in his external but in his internal policy. For several years, we allow, he clung firmly to the liberal and humane principles with which his tutor, the Swiss Laharpe, had inoculated him, and individually he wished and did many things in that sense. It is much to his honour, that as on his accession to the throne he gave no serfs to his ministers, generals, and favourites, that partition of human cattle ceased in Russia which had been a disgrace to Catharine's government, and under Paul became the inevitable consequence of his absolutistic madness. But, generally speaking, all the hopes which the liberally-infected Russian aristocracy placed in the new Czar were destroyed. Several of the chiefs of the conspiracy formed against Paul-before all, Pahlen and Panin-were filled with the idea of obtaining from the palace revolution a limitation of the Czaric power, a Magna Charta for Russia, a constitutional government, naturally in a pre-eminently aristocratic sense. They appear, too, prior to the catastrophe, to have obtained from the heir-apparent some sort of oral promise of a constitution. But the affair failed from the fact that the conspirators began quarrelling about this constitution immediately after the catastrophe. Pahlen and the three Zubows, it is true, reminded the new emperor of the grand-duke's promise; but, Talysin, Uwaroff, and Wolkonski, reading more truly Alexander's absolutistic instincts still hidden under the liberal varnish of youthful idealism, demanded that he should be proclaimed unlimited ruler, and carried it through.* Hence, from the horrors of that March night of 1801, there arose no dawn of a new Magna Charta for Russia, and the Russian aristocracy * Dolgorukow. were compelled to console themselves with the thought that at any rate the efficacy of the old one was fearfully confirmed on that night. When, shortly after the Emperor Paul's tragic ending a Muscovite grandee described all the details of the night of murder to the Hanoverian envoy, Münster, it produced a terrible impression on the German count, who was able to understand attacks upon nations but not upon princes. Whereupon the Muscovite, noticing the German's horror, soothingly remarked: "Mais, mon Dieu, que voulez-vous, Monsieur le Comte? La tyrannie tempérée par l'assassinat, c'est notre Magna Charta."* TRÈVES, THE BELGIC ROME. To that small but annually increasing class of summer tourists who are not irresistibly carried away up the Rhine towards the Alps of Switzerland and Savoy, the pleasant banks of the Moselle remain no longer untrodden ground. The opening of the new railway, which connects the valleys of the Saar and Nahe, has rendered still more easy the accomplishment of a trip which used to depend on the somewhat broken reed of the steam communication on the Moselle itself. Either by branching off from Bingen, or by travelling south-east from Namur, it is equally easy to reach one of the most remarkable cities of Europe-Trèves, the Belgic Rome. Here the traveller will find himself, while surrounded by the red sandstone hills which bear the wholesome grape of the Moselle, at the end of a long chain of historic memories. But art having done but little to enhance those monuments of the Sancta Treviris, which date from the middle ages and more modern times, political changes having levelled to the ground the ancient electorate, whose palace Prussian prose has turned into a barracks, the imagination is ready to overleap the gloomy centuries during which the fair city herself and the fertile district around were at once contributing cause and favourite battle-field of the ceaseless contest between divided Germany and rapacious France, and to pass to the days when Trèves was really great and glorious. Those were the times in which the gentle muse of Ausonius sang of the beauty of a region rivalling sweet Baia itself on the Mediterranean shore, of the infinite pomp of the villas which studded the green hills on the banks of the Moselle, and of the city below, deemed worthy of the imperial throne. The days of the Antonines and of Constantine will rise to the traveller's mind; nor will he need the further stimulus of mythical exaggeration, such as is suggested by the venerable inscription on the Old Red House Inn in the market-place at Trèves, announcing with metre and veracity of equal doubtfulness how Ante Romam Treviris stelit annis mille trecentis. * Hormayr. Life Pictures from the War of Liberation. The antiquities at Trèves, though more than sufficient to impress a distinct character on the entire place, are neither many in number nor, as antiquities too often are, fearful and wonderful things to understand. Speculations on the old walls and streets, and as to the traces of the Roman bridge still discernible in the present modern one, may for want of time be readily left to the patient research of the local antiquarians, of whom Trèves has produced a sufficient crop. The stranger will probably content himself by visiting the Porta Nigra, the Thermæ, the Amphitheatre, and the monument at Igel, and will find full occupation for his time while thus restricting its application. The cathedral, built in a hundred successive styles, and fondly declared to be the most ancient Christian church on German soil, still displays vestiges of its earliest form in the Roman period, and the Basilica, entirely restored and renovated by the orders of the late King of Prussia, to a complete reproduction in form of its Roman predecessor. But the visitor is loth to examine vestiges and to appreciate restorations when within a few yards there rise before him Roman remains pure and simple-remains of buildings which recal days when they, like other schemes, were conducted on a scale which must, reasonably or unreasonably, for a moment dwarf in his own eyes even the most self-conscious child of the nineteenth century. Among the four monuments (for ruins two, at least, among them can hardly in justice be called) above mentioned, the most remarkable have only very recently been, so to speak, restored to life. The Therma lay buried two-thirds of their height in the accumulated and ever-accumulating soil, and it is owing to the direction of the late King of Prussia, continued by his successor, that they are now beginning to display themselves in proportions approaching their original grandeur. A fixed sum (of fourteen hundred dollars) is still annually granted from the royal treasury for this purpose. The Porta Nigra, which the saintly barbarism of the middle ages had converted and mutilated into a church, was restored to its ancient purpose of a gate, and to the naked grandeur befitting it, by no less imperious a master than Napoleon. Its history is altogether curious enough to deserve a brief recapitulation. We may premise that all the information concerning the history of the Porta derived from ordinary guide-books, and from the local ciceroni, is worse than apocryphal. After carefully imbibing a large quantity of contradictory statements on the subject, we were enabled to dismiss them all after a visit to the Trèves Library, the courtesy of whose learned librarian, Dr. Schneemann, enabled us, by a series of views of the Porta arranged in due chronological order, to arrive at the truth. There is but little doubt left that the Porta Martis, afterwards popularly called the Porta Nigra, formed, if we may use the expression, the keystone of the fortifications by which Constantine the Great, at the commencement of the fourth century, enclosed his then favourite residence. This fortification, which was not improbably co-extensive with the walls as they partially at present stand, is mentioned in the contemporary panegyric addressed to the emperor at Trèves by Emulinus in the year 310, when the "quinquennalia," a festival in honour of the opening of Constantine's reign five years before, were celebrated. Coins are still extant bearing on one side the head of the emperor, and on the reverse a representation |