THE EMPRESS CATHERINE.

THE two male conspirators against the liberties of mankind, the rights of nations, the peace of the world, have now been painted, but in colours far more subdued than the natural hues of their crime. It remains that the most profligate of the three should be pourtrayed, and she a woman!—but a woman in whom the lust of power united with the more vulgar profligacy of our kind, had effaced all traces of the softer nature that marks the sex, and left an image of commanding talents and prodigious firmness of soul, the capacities which constitute a great character, blended with unrelenting fierceness of disposition, unscrupulous proneness to fraud, unrestrained indulgence of the passions, all the weakness and all the wickedness which can debase the worst of the human race.

The Princess Sophia of Anhalt Zerbst, one of the smallest of the petty principalities in which Northern Germany abounds, was married to Peter III., nephew and heir-presumptive to the Russian crown, and she took the name of Catherine, according to the custom of that barbarous nation. The profligacy of Elizabeth, then on the throne of the Czars, was little repugnant to the crapulous life which her future successor led, or to his consort following their joint example. The young bride, accordingly, soon fell into the debauched habits of the court, and she improved upon them; for having more

than once changed the accomplices of her adulterous indulgences, almost as swiftly as Elizabeth did, she had her husband murdered by her paramour, that is, the person for the time holding the office of paramour ; and having gained over the guards and the mob of Petersburgh, she usurped the crown to which she could pretend no earthly title. To refute the reports that were current and to satisfy all inquiries as to the cause of Peter's death, she ordered his body to be exposed to public view, and stationed guards to prevent any one from approaching near enough to see the livid hue which the process of strangling had spread over his features.

The reign thus happily begun, was continued in the constant practice of debauchery and the occasional commission of convenient murder. Lover after lover was admitted to the embraces of the Messalina of the North, until soldiers of the guards were employed in fatiguing an appetite which could not be satiated. Sometimes the favourite of the day would be raised to the confidence and the influence of prime minister; but after a while he ceased to please as the paramour, though he retained his ministerial functions. One of the princes of the blood having been pitched on by a party to be their leader, was thrown into prison; and when the zeal of that party put forward pretences to the throne on his behalf, the imperial Jezebel had him murdered in his dungeon as the shortest way of terminating all controversy on his account, and all uneasiness. The mediocrity of her son Paul's talents gave her no umbrage, especially joined to the eccentricity of his nature, and his life was spared. Had he given his tigress mother

a moment's alarm, he would speedily have followed his unhappy father to the regions where profligacy and parricide are unknown.

Although Catherine was thus abandoned in all her indulgences and unscrupulous in chusing the means of gratifying her ambition especially, yet did she not give herself up to either the one kind of vice or the other, either to cruelty or to lust, with the weakness which in little minds lends those abominable propensities an entire and undivided control. Her lovers never were her rulers; her licentiousness interfered not with her public conduct: her cruelties were not numerous and wanton; not the result of caprice or the occupation of a wicked and malignant nature, but the expedients, the unjustifiable, the detestable expedients, to which she had recourse when a great end was to be attained. The historian who would fully record the life of the Czarina, must deform his page with profligacy and with crimes that resemble the disgusting annals of the Cæsars; hut the blot would be occasional only and the darkness confined to a few pages, instead of blackening the whole volume, as it does that of Tacitus or Suetonius; for she had far too great a mind to be enslaved by her passions or merely mischievous in her feelings, although the gusts of the one carried her away, and what of the other was amiable, had far too little force to resist the thirst for dominion, which, with the love of indulgence, formed the governing motive of her conduct.

Her capacity was of an exalted order. Her judgment was clear and sure; her apprehension extraordinarily quick; her sagacity penetrating; her pro

vidence and circumspection comprehensive. To fear, hesitation, vacillation, she was an utter stranger; and the adoption of a design was with her its instant execution. But her plans differed widely from those of her companion Joseph II., or even of her neighbour Gustavus III. They resembled far more those of her longheaded accomplice of Prussia. They were deeply laid in general, and for the most part well digested; formed as to their object with no regard to principle, but only to her aggrandisement and glory; framed as to their execution with no regard to the rights, or mercy for the sufferings of her fellow-creatures. Over their execution the same dauntless, reckless, heartless feelings presided; nor was she ever to be turned from her purpose by difficulties and perils, or abated in her desire of success by languor and delay, or quelled in her course by the least remnant of the humane feelings that mark the softer sex, extinct in her bold, masculine, and flinty

bosom.

In one material particular, and in only one, she seemed to betray her original womanhood, and ceased to pursue the substance after she had gone far enough to gratify her vanity with the shadow of outward appearances and to tickle her ears with popular applause. Her military operations on the side of the East; her attempts at encroachment upon Turkey, whether by skilful negotiations with the Greek chiefs, or warlike movements almost decisively successful against Constantinople *; her measures in concert with Denmark against Sweden,

Had her admirals pushed their advantages at Tchesme, the Porte was laid prostrate at her feet.