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 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 long-headed 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. and which only the interposition of England at Copenhagen, in 1788,* prevented from putting Finland in her possession; her share in the execrable Partition of Poland from the beginning of that crime down to its consummation in 1794-all these schemes of her vigorous and daring policy formed a strange contrast with those ebullitions of childish vanity, which laid the foundation of cities in a desert, never to be finished nor ever built above the corner-stone; or assembled upon her route through the wastes of her empire thousands of half-naked savages and clothed them with dresses to be transported in the night and serve the next day's show, while she was making a progress through her barren, unpeopled domains; or made the shells of houses be raised one week, along the road where she was to pass, destined the week after to tumble in premature but inevitable ruins; or collected groups of peasants where none could subsist, and had these same groups carried on in the night to greet her next day with another false semblance of an impossible population in another waste. Nor was there much more reality in her councils of lawgivers to prepare a Code for her vast empire, and her Instructions, supposed to be written by herself, for guiding their deliberations and assisting their labours. But then she had resolved to be the Semiramis of the North; she must both be the Conqueror of Empires, the Founder of Cities, and the Giver of Laws. But as it was incomparably more easy for an absolute * Our ambassador threatened to bombard Copenhagen with an English fleet, unless the Danes instantly raised the siege of Gottenburgh. |