by post; therefore, here is a very long letter which I have written to her in your name : nothing of the detail is omitted, although it contains some rough expressions. I am sorry for the Empress; but since she heard and gave credit to a calumny, it is but right that she should read the justification with patience. Copy this letter, sign it, and I will take charge of it. I will send some one to put it in the post at the nearest town. Take courage; believe me, your triumph is not doubtful.'

In fact, the letter was sent and put in the post; the Empress received it ; and, after having read this memorial, which was fully explanatory, and accompanied by undeniable attestations, she inveighed bitterly against the informers, revoked her rigorous orders, recalled Paul Jones to court, and received him with her usual kindness.

That brave seaman enjoyed, with a becoming pride, a reparation which was due to him; but he trusted very little in the compliments that were unblushingly heaped upon him, by the many persons who had fled from him in his disgrace; and shortly afterwards, disgusted with a country, where the fortune of a man may be exposed to such humiliations, under the pretence of ill health, he asked leave of the Empress to retire, which she granted to him, as well as an honourable order and a suitable pension."

As far as Count de Ségur has proceeded in his Memoirs, his principal personage is Catherine II. When he reaches the era of Napoleon, whom he enjoyed a like opportunity of studying both as a man and ruler, we shall have another object still more splendidly imposing and anomalous. But what the lexicographers call gynarchy or gynecocracy-female or petticoat government-possesses a peculiar interest, which may preserve for his present sketches a measure of popularity greater than will remain with those to come, however skilfully and amply he may exhibit his hero. Of all the shining females who have sustained with glory the weight of empire, whether in ancient or modern Europe, Catherine, perhaps, is the most remarkable and eminent; and though she is the subject of many printed volumes, there is comparatively but little extant concerning her, of that kind of direct and adequate testimony upon which implicit reliance may be placed. Tooke's "Life,' &c.,-much of which is a mere translation from Castera's, and which has been widely current-contains, no doubt, many authentic details and accurate views; yet, such of his statements as relate to her private deportment and character, and the chronicles of her court, cannot inspire the ablute faith due to those of our author, who passed five years in the centre, we may say, of that court, and in the closest inspection of her policy and demeanour. We are inclined to deem him the safest witness, besides being by far the best informed; for, without losing the urbanity proper to one of his nation and sphere, or forgetting the indulgence owing to her sex, he has not abstained from free strictures on her ambitious schemes and shameless

amours.

We are tempted to hint, by the way, that the lords of the creation, who, whether as historians, biographers, or moralists, have treated of lady sovereigns independent in their rule, have been

sadly wanting, for the most part, in the temper and tone of refined and reasonable chivalry:-their judgments are too often harsh; their invectives immoderate; and their interpretations cynical. How excessive and discourteous the severity with which the Marys and Elizabeths of England, the Queen of Scots, the de Medicis of France, Christina of Sweden, have been tried and condemned in the pages of the party writers and disputants political and religious! and when they have been defended and extolled, it seems to have proceeded rather from polemical zeal than the fairness of mild truth and just allowance, and a suitable generosity of heart and delicacy of sentiment. This criticism might be extended to the treatment of the ancient queens, particularly by the historians and the authors of the great dictionaries, from the tenth to the eighteenth century. Catherine has not escaped unqualified reprobation. At the seasons in which Russia happened to be particularly obnoxious to England or France, her character has been fully exposed to the action of the hostile feelings and plans, which were excited by the power or ambition of the empire she so much aggrandized and vivified. Several productions exemplifying this remark, were issued in Paris, at the time Napoleon was either preparing for a rupture, or involved in a desperate struggle, with the Northern colossus. We are therefore the more pleased that it is a French statesman, like M. de Ségur, who represents her with impartial wisdom, but liberal lenity and polite obeisance, and who has the strongest claims to authority as an arbiter and limner.

The apophthegm is already old,-that, when kings reign women rule, and when women reign men govern. Another is, that women are best defended against the follies of love by the pursuits of ambition: and the classical reader will recollect the saying of Tacitus about Agrippina-that, impatient of an equal, and eager for sway, she got rid of feminine weakness by assuming manly cares and occupations. None of these points, however, are strengthened by the instance of the Russian empress. We scarcely need repeat how far she continued to be a woman as to "the follies of love," amid the most weighty and arduous " cares and occupations" incident to a crown. Ségur arrived, for the first time, at St. Petersburgh, in quality of ambassador, in the year 1785. He was eager to be immediately presented to the Czarina, with whose fame he had been violently smitten. She caused him to be informed, that she would receive him the day after: yet ten days elapsed before she could see him; and the delay arose, according to authentic information, from the poignant grief which she suffered for the sudden death of a lover, de Lanskoy, who had contrived to persuade her, in spite of the great disparity of their ages, that he was passionately enamoured not of the empress but of Catherine. One queen, Artemisia, of the

olden race, erected, to a deceased husband, a stupendous cenotaph, that has given his name to grand funeral monuments, in most of the cultivated languages. Another, Artemisia of Caria, the intrepid ally of Xerxes, perished by the lover's leap, at the promontory Leucas, driven to despair by the indifference of a native of Abydos. Catherine built in the gardens of her palace of Czarskozelo, a superb mausoleum to the memory of Lanskoy; and, in the first agonies of sorrow for his loss, would have taken the Leucadian leap, if this had been the fashion of disconsolate mistresses in her time. For three days after his dissolution, she refused all sustenance, and for more weeks, remained in mournful seclusion.

Several of her favourites were men of both military and civil talents, able and alert to assist in the execution of vast plans of ambition and policy. It does not appear, that they did more than subserve her conceptions and aims, by which the Russian power was to be incalculably expanded and firmly rooted. Ségur mentions that she dictated the most important dispatches to her ministers, who were, in fact, but her secretaries; and that she was the real guide and luminary of her council of state. Besides contriving deep schemes and strokes of aggrandizement for the empire, she excelled in all the arts of diplomacy, in a degree which caused old Marshal Munich to remark, that she behaved towards the sovereigns of the rest of Europe like the most adroit of political coquettes. Frederick the Great, no friend to her power, used to exclaim, that, if Semiramis had acquired renown by arms, Elizabeth of England by state-cunning, Maria Theresa by firmness in adversity, Catherine alone deserved the title of legislatress. She manifested no caprice nor partiality with regard to the functionaries of the government; all were sure of remaining in place where she exercised immediate control, as long as they performed their duty;-she indulged no distrust, and they had in her a salutary confidence:-we may repeat of her internal administration what Gibbon says of Zenobia, in his masterly sketch of that "the only female whose superior genius broke through the servile indolence imposed on her sex by the climate and manners of Asia." In lieu of the little passions which so frequently perplex a female reign, the soundest maxims of steadiness prevailed; if it was expedient to pardon, she could calm her resentment; if it was necessary to punish, she could impose silence on the voice of pity.

Our author was astonished at the alacrity and facility with which she passed from convivial scenes,-the elegant dissipation of festive repasts, and the perfumed flatteries and sparkling dialogues of her saloon,-to the study of public affairs and the transaction of business. She rose at six o'clock in the morning; made her own fire; then conferred with the police-officers and heads

of departments; practised strict temperance in her diet; spent the greater part of the morning with her books or ministers; rarely admitted more than eight or ten persons to her table; encouraged free and lively discourse; chatted amiably with her guests on all topics; loved to hear and tell pleasant stories; and retired early in the evening, after taking part in whatever served to engage or amuse the court circle. She required no guard in her excursions; forbade the people to kneel to her; allowed herself to be approached by any of her subjects; in travelling, admitted all orders to her presence; and in the provinces, where the custom of rouging was almost universal among the women, never failed, after her public audiences, to find her visage covered with red and white paint, transferred from the female visiters, to all of whom she lent both cheeks to kiss. The peasantry loved her, and hailed her fondly as mother-matushka. There were no small affectations nor pretensions about this potentate, towards any description of persons, or in any of her acts or speeches.

We collect these particulars from the Count, who writes from personal knowledge, and with a sobriety of tone and at a distance of time, that repel all suspicion of exaggerating enthusiasm or flourishing rhetoric. He portrays her as noble in mien and carriage, her gaiety never degenerating into indecorum, nor her gravity into moroseness; of middle stature, high forehead, aquiline nose, blue eyes and black eyebrows; with a mild and winning smile generally, and a fair and dazzling complexion, that survived her other personal attractions. As she advanced in age, her embonpoint grew to a corpulency, to disguise which, in its awkwardness of effect, she wore, adds our author, an ample robe with wide sleeves-une robe ample avec de larges manches, habillement presque semblable à l'ancien habit Moscovite. Let not the reader start or scoff at these minutiæ. The loftiest of historians and of poets have dwelt upon the features, the skin, the eyes, the attire of the most formidable of the royal heroines ancient and modern, They have traced the beauty and costume of Semiramis, who lived two thousand years before Christ-if she ever lived at all-and have endowed her with graces as manifold as her diction is mellifluent in the opera of Metastasio, wherein she appears to so much moral and musical advantage. For our parts, we must confess that when we think of the deeds and propensities which are ascribed to that Amazonian, male-spirited dame, we cannot image her other than a Bellona, with the bloody scourge of that dire goddess, or a Medusa, after the latter had undergone her dreadful metamorphosis; though, independently of the radiant delineations to which we have adverted, she is accredited as born of a fountain nymph, nursed by doves, and worshipped after death by the Assyrians, under the form of a cooing turtle. Zenobia, who, on foot, led

armies to battle and victory, and drank glass for glass with her generals and stranger guests the most renowned for potations, has also been glowingly depicted in every lineament and habiliment. Trebellius Pollio gives her a dark brown complexion, eyes exceedingly black and divinely bright, and teeth so white that many people believed them to be a set of pearls. From that historian down to Gibbon, notice has been always taken of the quantity and quality of the jewels with which she was laden when led in triumph by Aurelian; of the golden fetters fastened to her feet, and the collar and chains of the same metal that encircled her neck and arms. It would be superfluous to specify the manner in which the pencils of the historians and poets have been employed upon the exquisite loveliness, incomparable tournure and perfect tiring taste of Cleopatra, whom Plutarch alone denies to have been so extraordinarily handsome, while he admits that she was irresistible by the witchcraft of her conversation. Neither the person nor the drapery of the British heroine, the martial and magnanimous Boadicea, have been overlooked;she, whom Glover, in his tragedy, has, with so little judgment and patriotism, converted into the worst of the furies incarnate, and into whose mouth Tacitus and Dio Nicæus have put speeches more worthy of her cause and end. The latter historian describes her as a woman of lofty stature and rather austere countenance; with yellow hair, reaching almost to the ground, a plaited tunic of various colours, a chain of gold around her waist, and over all a long mantle. But we must not extend this catalogue of precedents for M. de Ségur, lest we should not have room for the additional matters which we wish to report of Catherine. He styles her in one place the Semiramis, and in another the Cleopatra, of the North. These epithets were addressed to her by others; but she laboured under some suspicions and indulged some frailties, which must have rendered the association or rapprochement rather irksome. According to the common legend, Semiramis was prodigiously addicted to gallantry, though,-so far different from Catherine, who bestowed immense estates upon her discarded lovers-she made away with them; afterwards, to be sure, raising magnificent tombs to their memories. Moreover, the Assyrian queen compassed her tiara by the murder of her husband and the lawful heir to the throne. In like manner, the Egyptian paragon was a little dissolute and versatile, and suspected of hav ing caused her brother, the partner of her sceptre, to be drowned in the Nile. There is some affinity, less exceptionable, in their sailing parties-Catherine on the Borysthenes, and Cleopatra on the Cydnus: our quotations from Ségur have shown the one; for the other, we must refer to Shakespeare. It might have answered as well, or better, to denominate Catherine the Zenobia of the North; yet the star of Palmyra is believed by some acute histo