the Englishwoman to the German must be admitted; and this arose from the different circumstances of the two Sovereigns, and the feebler authority with which the former was invested. Through her whole reign she was a dissembler, a pretender, a hypocrite. Whether in steering her crooked way between rival sects, or in accommodating herself to conflicting factions, or in pursuing the course she had resolved to follow amidst the various opinions of the people, she ever displayed a degree of cunning and faithlessness which it is impossible to contemplate without disgust. But if there be any one passage of her life which calls forth this sentiment more than another, it is her vile conduct respecting the execution of Mary Stuart-her hateful duplicity, her execrable treachery towards the instruments she used and sacrificed, her cowardly skulking behind those instruments to escape the censures of the world. This was the crowning act of a whole life of despicable fraud and hypocrisy; and, from the necessity of resorting to this, Catherine's more absolute power set her free not that the Empress's history is unaccompanied with traits of a like kind. When her troops had sacked the suburbs of Warsaw, and consummated the partition of Poland by the butchery of thousands of her victims, she had the blasphemous effrontery to celebrate a Te Deum in the metropolitan cathedral, and to promulgate an ad

dress to the people, professing "to cherish for them the tender feelings of a mother toward her offspring." It vexes the faith of pious men to witness scenes like these, and not see the fires of Heaven descend to smite the guilty and impious

actors.

In the whole conduct of their respective governments it would be hard to find a greater contrast than is exhibited by these two famous princesses. While Catherine sacrificed everything to outward show in her domestic administration, Elizabeth looked ever and only to the substance; the former caring nothing how her people fared or her realms were administered, so she had the appearance of splendour and filled the world with her name; the latter, intent upon the greatest service which a sovereign in her circumstances could perform, the allaying the religious dissensions that distracted all classes of her subjects, and maintaining her crown independent of all foreign dictation. Assuming the sceptre over a barbarous people scattered through a boundless desert, Catherine found the most formidable obstacles opposed by nature to what was obviously prescribed by the circumstances of her position as her first duty, the diffusing among her rude subjects the blessings of civilization; but desirous only of the fame which could be reaped from sudden operations, and impatient of the slow progress by which natural improvement

must ever proceed, she overcame not those obstacles, and left her country in the state in which it would have been whoever had filled her place. Succeeding to the throne of a nation torn by faction, and ruled by a priesthood at once tyrannical and intolerant, Elizabeth, by wise forbearance, united to perfect steadiness of purpose, by a judicious use of her influence wheresoever her eye, incessantly watchful, perceived that her interposition could help the right cause, above all, by teaching each sect that she would be the servant of none while disposed to be the friend of all, and would lend her support to that faith which her conscience approved without suffering its professors to oppress those of rival creeds, left her country in a state of peace at home as remarkable and as beneficial as the respect which her commanding talents and determined conduct imposed on foreign nations.

The aggrandisement of the Russian empire during Catherine's time, at once the monument of her worst crimes and the source of the influence ever since exerted by her successors over the affairs of Europe, has been felt by all the other powers as the just punishment of their folly in permitting Poland to be despoiled, and by none more than those who were the accomplices in that foul transaction. It is almost the only part of her administration that remains to signalise her reign; but as long as mankind persist in preferring for the sub

ject of their eulogies mighty feats of power, to useful and virtuous policy, the Empress Catherine's name will be commemorated as synonymous with greatness. The services of Elizabeth to her people are of a far higher order; it is probable that they owe to her the maintenance of their national independence; and it is a large increase of the debt of gratitude thus incurred to this great princess, that ruling for half a century of troublous times, she ruled in almost uninterrupted peace, while by the vigour of her councils, and the firmness of her masculine spirit, she caused the alliance of England to be courted, and her name feared by all surrounding nations.

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If, finally, we apply to these two Sovereigns the surest test of genius and the best measure of success in their exalted station-the comparative merits of the men by whom they were served-the German sinks into insignificance, while the Englishwoman shines with surpassing lustre. Among the ministers who served Catherine, it would be difficult to name one of whom the lapse of forty years has left any remembrance: but as Elizabeth never had a man of inferior, hardly one of middling capacity in her service, so to this day, at the distance of between two and three centuries, when any one would refer to the greatest statesmen in the history of England, he turns instinctively to the Good Times of the Virgin Queen.

APPENDIX.

I.

THE kindness of a most accomplished and venerable person, the ornament of a former age, and fortunately still preserved to enlighten the present (1836), has permitted the insertion of the following interesting note:

"A circumstance attended Lord Chatham's eloquent invective against our employment of the Indians in the American war, which we have not handed down to us along with it, but which could hardly fail to be noticed at the time. The very same thing had been done in the former war carried on in Canada by his authority and under his own immediate superintendence; the French had arrayed a tribe of these savage warriors against us, and we, without scruple, arrayed another against them. This he thought fit to deny in the most positive manner, although the ministers offered to produce documents written by himself that proved it from among the papers at the Secretary's office. A warm debate ensued, and at length Lord Amherst, the General who had commanded our troops in that Canadian war, was so loudly appealed to on all sides, that it compelled him to rise, and, most unwillingly (for he greatly respected Lord Chatham), falter out a few words; enough, however, to acknowledge the fact-a fact admitted generally, and even assumed by the opposition lords who spoke afterwards. They seemed to lay the question quietly by as far as it concerned Lord Chatham's veracity, and