all Miss Martineau's amount of unbelief on some points, we cannot but regard her as extremely credulous on others; and though she is liberal to the full on general questions, there are topics on which she seems to us (particularly in her book on "Man's Development") to be a considerable bigot. It is quite possible to be bigoted against bigotry, and to be superstitious in the very avoidance of superstition. There was a good deal of force in the rough saying of Luther, that the human mind is like a drunken peasant on horseback set him up on one side and he falls down on the other.

Miss Martineau's best book is the "History of England during the Peace," published by Charles Knight. It is an extremely able, painstaking, and we think impartial history of England since 1815. It exhibits the results of great reading and research, as well as of accurate observation of life and manners. It is unquestionably the best work of the kind-indeed it may be said to stand by itself, as a history of our own times. execution does the author much credit, and we trust she will long be spared to produce books of equally unexceptionable quality and

character.

Its

It is exactly a thousand years since Ruric the Scandinavian chief, assisted by a piratical force, invaded the eastern shores of the Baltic, and laid the foundations of a dominion which his successors held for something like seven centuries. Before two hundred years had elapsed, the Russians had made no less than three attempts to plunder Constantino ple; and the policy of the chiefs of the first period is that of the Czars of the fifth. The former erected a statue in the square of Taurus, on which there miraculously appeared a written prophecy, that the Russ would one day sit in the seat of the Greek emperor. This mendacious policy still influences the government, and Nicholas the Czar sanctions the lie which declares that the Virgin Mary has appeared hovering over his army, by way of testimony that their march in the direction of Constantinople was blessed by her approval.

All the early expeditions made against the last-named city were by sea, and, despite the ferocity with which they were maintained, the commercial relations of the Greek empire and the Russian state were but slightly affected, and consequently the civilization of the Russ was not materially impeded. Ruric was succeeded by his son Igor, whose wife and successor, Olga, went to Constantinople to be baptized. This religious circumstance did not prevent her son Sviatoslav from attempting to destroy the holy city; but he

was so roughly treated in the attempt by John Zimiscos that he humbly thanked the latter for a safe conduct back to his dominions. The present Czar, Nicholas, has had the effrontery to cite this occurrence as a proof of the friendly union which was begun in early times between the Russ and the Greek. A man knocks down a thief in the highway, but if the robber falls under the wheel of a wagon, the man pulls him out of the peril, and thereupon the brigand boasts that they have shaken hands and are friends! Under Vladimir, the son of Sviatoslav, all Russia was converted to a very equivocal sort of Christianity; and with him ends the list of the Czars of the first period, A. D. 1015.

Vladimir divided his extensive dominions among his ten sons. The natural result of this course was an internecine war of succession carried on during two centuries and a half, with all the aggravated ferocity peculiar to family quarrels. The Tartars benefited by the dissensions, and made of the people a herd of slaves; and the fratricidal disturbances and the Tartar supremacy fill up the second and third periods of the Russian history.

The fourth period commences with Ivan I. and his establishment of a capital at Moscow, in 1325; but he and his successors had to struggle daily with the Tartar hordes, who were not thoroughly subdued till 1425, when Ivan III. mounted the ducal throne, opened

the fifth period, and, after a reign full of what is called "glory," left a large inheritance to his son Ivan the Terrible. A.D. 1533.

This monster was without teeth when he succeeded to his father's greatness, but his mother, Helena, reigned during his minority, and set such an example to her sex that Messalina was pure by comparison. The boy was trained to be a savage, to kill animals, to ride over people in the streets. He was taught to be a destroyer; and the Czars of later days have not forgotten the instruction, though they apply it more tenderly. Ivan was only in his teens when he had one of his own attendants worried by dogs in the public highway. The young gentleman thought it excellent sport; and he was encouraged to indulge in it by the Gluisky family, who were proud to be the preceptors of so promising a pupil. It was that family who seriously taught him that he was an exception to the commandment which said, "Thou shalt do no murder." They incul cated assassination as a virtue in a prince.

He robbed his people, not merely by oppressive taxation, but by vulgar open plunder a process which Nicholas carries out more politely by forced loans. They who groaned by way of dissent were slain for their audacity; and he jocosely compelled parents to slay their children, and children one another; and then, if he were not too weary, slew the survivor, where one was left breathing, and, like Scrub, "laughed consumedly. He placed himself upon that equality with God from which the present Czar has hardly descended, by one shallow step. His devotion was ostentatious, and he was ever exemplarily devout when he was not stupidly drunk. He would rise from his knees to let slip his wild bears among the citizens in the streets, and "the most pious of Czars" finished his prayers as he looked on at the slaughter, pluming himself on his magnanimity when he flung a few small coins among the wounded. He sometimes suffered, however, from a surfeit of death, and the jesters were then summoned to raise the imperial spirits. They must have addressed themselves to their task with delightful buoyancy, remembering that a bad joke was sure to be strangled in the throat of the utterer, and the latter died with his sorry jest. The very nobles were not safe. He ce flung over Prince Goosdof, who had failed in an attempt to be witty, a tureen of scalding hot soup, and as the prince endeavored to escape, the Czar plunged a knife into his side. The unhappy noble fell dead, and Ivan, remarking that he had

"carried the joke far enough," bade the physician attend to him. "It is only God and your Majesty," said the medical toady, "who can restore the prince to life; he is quite gone." The Czar was little affected at the event, but he took a pleasant way of forgetting it. A favorite noble happened to meet him, and bent in reverence before him. The Czar was delighted to fall in with him, and took hold of him by the ear, just as Napoleon used to do with his arch favorites; but the French emperor was accustomed to leave the ear he pinched upon the head of its owner; not so Ivan, who, using his knife, cut off the member and flung it into the face of his ancient friend, who received the same with many acknowledgments of his master's condescension. Ivan was the husband of seven wives at once; and this was the only circumstance in his character which the Greek Church in Russia ever affected to blame in him. His offer to espouse our Virgin Queen Elizabeth must have made that gracious lady merry. Ivan himself soon ceased to be so. In a fit of fury he smote his own son dead by blows from an iron bar, and God and outraged nature no longer spared this most hideous of monsters. He became gloomy, but hardly less cruel; and partial madness succeeded to gloom, and death at last to both.

This savage was nevertheless one of the ablest of men and of rulers, when he chose to let his natural abilities for good have sway over his natural disposition for evil. He introduced printing into Russia, gave it a code of laws, encouraged religious toleration, and promoted civilization by patronizing the fine arts throughout their brilliant circle with a liberality never perhaps known out of his dominions. But he was a Colossus of intemperance in all things, and intemperance begat cruelty, and the indulgence of both led to insanity,-and therewith, strange to say, this great incarnation of the "beastly" died a natural death! So strange are all things in the land of the Czars!

In the person of his son and successor, Feodor I., ended the line of Ruric. Boris, the brother-in-law of Feodor, and murderer of Demetrius, Feodor's brother, was elected Czar after the death of the son of Ivan IV. His disastrous reign was followed by the more disastrous one of his son, Feodor II., who was ultimately strangled, and his place taken by a monk, who is known as the false Demetrius, and who met the fate he had inflicted on his predecessor. Under the reign of the successor of the pseudo-Demetrius,

Vassili, Russia was torn by insurrection and famine. To make confusion worse confounded, the Poles swept over, the country, destroyed every thing before them, reigned over ruin, and that with such unexampled tyranny, that the nation rose, drove them out, and chose for their Czar, Michael, the first sovereign of the present dynasty-of the house of Romanof. The new Czar created his father Patriarch of the Greek Church in Russia, and chose for his wife the daughter of a man who was ploughing in the fields when the information reached him that he was father-in-law of the Czar. Nicholas, therefore, has no claim to sneer at the marriage of Louis Napoleon with the granddaughter of Mr. Fitzpatrick. The first Romanof made a worse choice, and he gained power by the same means as that which raised the present Emperor of the French to the throne-popular election.

Michael Romanof was elected in 1613, and thirty-two years afterwards he left the throne to Alexis, the father of Peter the Great (by a second marriage.) He was succeeded by Feodor III., a son by his first wife; but his sister Sophia and Prince Galitzin ruled, while he contentedly slumbered. Then came the half-brothers, Ivan and Peter conjointly. The latter could endure no rival like Ivan, still less a superior like Sophia. He accordingly dethroned the first, sent the latter to a monastery, and destroyed the numerous body of Strelitzes who had espoused her cause. There was one exception to the universal massacre of these men, which will be interesting to those who remember the name of Nicholas's late envoy to Vienna. When the Strelitzes who had not been assassinated were being judicially executed, they were called by name, one after the other, to the block. At length the turn came of a youthful soldier, named Orel. He boldly advanced, and as the heads of his comrades impeded his way to the block, he put them aside with his feet, saying, "Make room, comrades, I am coming to join you." His boldness won him his life, and Peter, ennobling his name of Orel (i. e. Eagle) by an additional syllable, ultimately bestowed on him the dignity which is now worn by his descendant, Count Orloff. Peter was perhaps the greatest of the Czars of the sixth period; but the details of his story are too well known to need recapitulation. I will, however, notice how he bore himself in that invasion of Turkey in 1712, from which he escaped in a condition which, bad as it was, will, it is to be hoped, be envied by his imitator, Nicholas.

The triumph of the Czar Peter over the King of Sweden at Pultowa, was the full revenge for a blunder and a crime committed by Charles. The latter had received a Livonian deputation, at the head of which was an officer named Patkul. The object of the deputation was to show the grievances under which Livonia was suffering. Charles XII. received the members graciously, and complimented Patkul on his patriotic frankness. A few days after, the subject assumed a different aspect in his capricious eyes, and the Livonian was then proclaimed by him as a traitor. Patkul escaped, and entered the

service of the Czar. In this act there was no disloyalty to Charles, for Patkul, as a free Livonian, had a perfect right to select his own master. That master subsequently employed him in a matter of diplomacy at the court of that unclean and infamous monster-Augustus of Poland. The Livonian was there under the sacred character of ambassador ; but Augustus flung him over to the mad cruelty of Charles, as soon as the latter thought proper to demand him. The insane

Swede sat down and wrote the doom of his victim; and by virtue of this royal document, Patkul was broken on the wheel, and subsequently quartered. All humanity cried shame! upon the perpetrator of a deed the chief guilt in which attaches to that crowned and cowardly brute-Augustus.

Peter, who was especially incensed at this tragedy, was avenged, though not appeased, by the victory at Pultowa, and the conquest of Riga and the Livonian provinces. Charles, after the loss of that bloody day, took sanctuary and scanty charity at the hearth of the Sultan. Chafed and moody, he nursed his wrath at Bender, where, in return for the small allowance and not over candy-ed courtesy he met with from the head of Islamism, he stirred up the latter to a most uncomfortable consciousness of the dangers which the Ottoman empire would now incur were the triumphs of Russia to be unchecked. The suggestions of Charles were rendered of double importance by those made in similar spirit by the Khan of the Crimean Tartars, whom Peter threatened to devour; and when the Swedish envoy, Poniatowski, represented in fuller details to the Divan the perils which menaced Turkey from the side of Russia, the Turks, in a mingled fever of fear and fury, called out for "war against those red barbarians," whom a cunningly-devised prophecy had held up to their hatred and terror, from the moment that the crescent shone out in triumph over the double-necked eagle,

which proudly symbolized the empire of the Greeks.

Peter was as unjust in his quarrel with Turkey as the Czar Nicholas is now; and Turkey has been no less prompt in her warlike declarations than she was then;-save, indeed, on one point, her treatment of the Russian envoy in Constantinople. When the Sultan declared war against Peter, he immediately shut up Peter's representative in the Castle of the Seven Towers. Count Tolstoy, it may be added, deserved such a fate much less than Prince Menschikoff on a more recent occasion, whose arrogance was the more lively as he knew that the severity of the old Ottoman code of manners was more somnolent than of yore.

The arrangements made by Peter for the campaign contrast favorably with the blundering tactics which hitherto, at least, have only earned disgrace for the Russian arms on the Turkish frontier. Moldavia was marched upon by a force under Prince Galitzin; and a second, under Marshal Sheremetof, advanced on the same point. The land forces at Azoph and on the shores of the Black Sea, and the fleets near the former and on the waters of the Euxine, were under the supreme command of one man, Admiral Aprixin. It was the most singular and the most faulty of Peter's arrangements. In this respect Nicholas has excelled his prede

cessor.

Peter, as he sat at supper the night before he left Moscow, had with him two friends and counsellors, both of whom had sprung from the lowest of stations by power of the sweetest of voices. One was Menzikoff, who called "hot pies" with so melodious a note in the streets of Moscow, that Peter was won by the tone as well as the wares of the illiterate peasant pastry-cook from the banks of the Volga. He bade the lad renounce his calling, sent him to school, and finally made of him what the Duke of Parma (when he absents himself from his duchy) ever makes of his old groom, Jem Ward-regent of his dominions. Peter left Menzikoff at the head of affairs at St. Petersburg, while the senate of regency was established at Moscow. The other friend of Peter was a woman, who, in her Swedish obscurity, was known by the name of Martha. The widow of a Swedish sergeant, she had been captured at the siege of Magdeburg by General Bauer. The epicurean general placed his prisoner at the head of his culinary department, where her ability attracted the commendations of Menzikoff, who subse

quently introduced her to the Czar. She was as ignorant of letters as the handle of one of her own saucepans; and though she was far from imperially beautiful, she was pretty, vivacious, full of grace of motion, and with that gift which Shakespeare and Luther praised as highly as Peter loved it,— namely, a soft and sweet voice, "an excellent thing in woman!" Peter had privately married this heroine, who, on being made an honest woman, assumed the names of Catharine-Alexina. They had now been married four years, and Peter, before setting out to the Pruth, made public declaration of their union. General Bauer's cook was Czarine

of Muscovy, and though she could neither read nor write, she had as much sense of the strong common sort as half-a-hundred princesses who could do both.

Strong sense and a sweet voice: with these charms she soothed the savage nature of Peter, and brought the imperial Cymon sighing to the feet of the novel Iphigenia. But Peter was not like the swain who "whistled as he went for want of thought;" he was not a "fool of nature," and he needed something more than a nymph to curb the devil in him. Catharine was the precise person fitted for the task. She could be coarse of speech and as unrefined in manner as her lord; but she ever kept under dominion what he was constantly allowing to get the dominion over him-namely, her wits. Peter was for ever losing his, and, when this occurred, Catharine told him of his short comings with a candor which brought down upon her a torrent of abuse, and then her persuasive voice musically wooed her abuser to a confession of error, and expressions of sorrow for fierce uncleanliness of language. The might of her magic consisted in this, that she never lost her temper; the helplessness of the terrible Czar was to be found in the opposite fact, that he not only lost his temper, but there with became entirely oblivious of himself. The odds were all on the lady's side.

The Czarina was resolved to accompany the Czar in this great expedition, of which the present presence of the Muscovites between the Pruth and the Danube is but the logical sequence. Peter was rejoiced to possess so noble an aide-de-camp at his side; and though, as difficulties arose in his path and sufferings heavily fell upon him, he counselled, or feigned to counsel, her return to safety, her indignant tears, her vehement prayers, her witching looks, and her most irresistible of voices won a no very reluctant