ever ruled the councils of this country. William Pitt may live, but the minister has finished his days."
"Yet," I remarked, "I never heard him more animated or more impressive than on this night. He absolutely broke down all resistance. His mind seemed richer than ever, and his combination of facts and reasoning appeared to me unequalled by even his greatest previous efforts. I should have almost pronounced him to be inspired by the increased difficulties of the time."
"True—yet I conveyed him from the House, fainting;—I have sate, along with his physician, at his bedside ever since, applying restoratives to him, with scarcely a hope of recovery. It is plain that another night of such effort would be too much for his frame; and the question on which I have now come to summon an immediate meeting of our friends, turns on the means of calming public opinion until he shall be able to appear in his place once more. His career is unquestionably at an end, but his name is powerful still; and though another trial of his powers in Parliament would cost him his life, still, as the head of the cabinet, he might effect, for a while, all the principal purposes of an administration."
I doubted the possibility of encountering the present strength of Opposition, reinforced, as it was, by calamity abroad, and asked, "Whether any expedient was contemplated, to restore the public fortunes on the Continent?"
"Every point of that kind has been long since considered," was the answer. "Our alliances have all failed; and we are now reproached, not simply with the folly of paying for inefficient help, but with the cruelty of dragging the states of Europe into a contest, where to be crushed was inevitable."
I still urged an enquiry into the strength of states which had never been sharers in the war. "If the minor German powers have been absorbed; if Prussia has abandoned the cause; if Austria has fought in vain—is the world included in Germany?" I threw the map of Europe on the table. "See what a narrow circle comprehends the whole space to which we have hitherto limited the defence of society against the enemy of all social order. Our cause is broader than Austria and Prussia; it is broader than Europe; it is the cause of civilization itself; and why not summon all civilization to its defence? Russia alone has an army of half a million, yet she has never fired a shot." Still, I found it difficult to convince my fellow minister.
"Russia—jealous, ambitious, and Asiatic; Russia, with the Eastern world for her natural field—what object can she have in relieving the broken powers of the Continent? Must she not rather rejoice in the defeats and convulsions which leave them at her mercy?" I still continued to urge him.
"Rely upon it; it is in the North that we must look for the reinforcement. If the councils of Catharine were crafty, the councils of her successor may be sincere. Catharine thought only of the seizure of Turkey; Paul may think only of the profits of commerce. Yet, is it altogether justifiable to suppose that monarchs may not feel the same sympathies, the same principles of honour—nay, the same abhorrence of a sanguinary republicanism—which a private individual might feel in any other instance of oppression?"
"Still, Marston, I am at a loss to know by what influence a British government could urge a Russian despotism into a contest, a thousand miles from its frontier; in which it can gain no accession of territory, and but little accession of military fame; and all this, while it is itself perfectly secure from all aggression."
"All true; but remember the striking commencement of Voltaire's Memoir of Peter—'Who could have pretended to say, in the year 1700, that a magnificent and polished court would be formed at the extremity of the Gulf of Finland; that the inhabitants of Cazan and the banks of the Wolga would be ranked among disciplined warriors, and, after beating the Turk and the Swede, gain victories in Germany? That a desert of two thousand leagues in length, should, in the space of fifty years, extend its influence to all the European courts; and that, in 1759, the most zealous patron of literature in Europe should be a Russian sovereign? The man who had said this would have been regarded as the most chimerical mortal on earth.' But all this has been done, and the career is not closed. More will be done still. It may even be our most essential policy to bring Russia into full collision with France. She is now the only rival: and I shall scarcely regret the fall of the German sovereignties, if it clears the field, to bring face to face the two great powers which hold at their sword's point the fate of the Continent."
A month passed, of perpetual difficulty in the cabinet, of ill news from abroad, and of violent discontents among the people. A deficient harvest had come, to increase the national murmurs; a season of peculiar inclemency had added its share to the public vexations; and I fully experienced the insufficiency of office, and of the showy honours of courts, to constitute happiness. But a new scene was reserved for me. Casual as my conversation with the secretary of state had been, it was not forgotten: it had been related to the minister; and it had so far coincided with the conceptions of a mind, which seemed to comprehend every chance of human things, that I was shortly sent for, to enter into the necessary explanations. The result was, the offer of a mission to St Petersburg. The proposal was so unexpected, that I required time for my answer. I must abandon high employment at home for a temporary distinction abroad; my knowledge of Russia was slight; the character of the Czar was eccentric; and the success of an embassy, dependent on the most capricious of mankind, was so uncertain, that the result might strip me of whatever credit I already possessed.
But, there was one authority, to which I always appealed. I placed the proposal in the hands of Clotilde; and she settled all my doubts at once, by declaring, "that it was the appointment which, if she had been suffered to choose, she would have selected, in preference to all others, for its honour and its services." I had no power to resist such pleadings—seconded as they were by the rosiest smiles, and the most beaming eyes. But Clotilde was still the woman, and I only valued her the more for it.—Her sincerity had not a thought to hide; and she acknowledged her delight at the prospect of once more treading on the soil of the Continent; at gazing even on the borders of her native land, excluded as she might be from its entrance; at the enjoyment of seeing continental life in the brilliant animation of its greatest court; and at mingling with the scene in a rank which entitled her to its first distinctions.
"But, Clotilde, how will you reconcile your tastes to the wild habits of Russia, and even to the solemn formalities of a northern court?"
"They both present themselves to me," was her answer, "with the charm at once of novelty and recollection. From my nursery days, the names of Peter, Catharine, and their marvellous city, rang in the ears of all Paris. Romance had taken refuge at the pole; Voltaire, Buffon, D'Alembert—all the wit, and all the philosophy of France—satirized the French court under the disguise of Russian panegyric; and St Petersburg was to us the modern Babylon—a something compounded of the wildness of a Scythian desert, and the lustre of a Turkish tale."
The ministerial note had been headed "most secret and confidential," and as such I had regarded it. But I soon saw the difficulty of keeping "a state secret." I had scarcely sent in my acceptance of the appointment, when I found a letter on my table from my old Israelite friend, Mordecai, congratulating me on "my decision." It was in his usual abrupt style:—
"I was aware of the minister's offer to you within twelve hours after it was made. I should have written to you, urging its acceptance; but I preferred leaving your own judgment to settle the question. Still, I can give you some personal knowledge on the subject of Russia. I have been there for the last six months. My daughter—for what purpose I have never been able to ascertain—took a sudden whim of hating Switzerland, and loving the snows and deserts of the North. But I have known the sex too long, ever to think of combating their wills by argument.—The only chance of success is to give way to them. Mariamne, sick of hills and valleys, and unable to breathe in the purest air of the globe, determined to try the exhalations from the marshes of the Neva. But, she is my child, after all—the only being for whom I live—and I was peculiarly grateful that she had not fixed on Siberia, or taken a resolution to live and die at Pekin. I do not regret my journey. It has thrown a new light on me. I must acknowledge to you, that I was astonished at Russia. I had known it in
