appointed to rule, he was, in truth, unconsciously promoting, as perhaps no other sovereign has ever promoted them, the interests of that common humanity of which he was the champion. He would have done all for, though not by, the people of Austria; he prepared the way to the final emancipation and self-government of all peoples. I said, I will water my best garden, I will water abundantly my garden-bed; and lo, my brook became a river, and my river became a sea.'

Has posterity yet attained that impartiality respecting him for which he prayed? Placed beyond the sympathies of both the great leagues of modern thinkers, he has been stigmatised by liberals as an absolutist, by the partisans of reaction as a demagogue. With courtiers and statesmen it has been the ordinary fashion to satirise him as a mistaken, though sincere, visionary. There was, at all events, one class by which his memory was long and fondly cherished; and it was that to the sympathies of which he would have best loved to make his appeal. The Austrian peasantry of German blood are at once an eminently loyal race, and one on which affection and kindness are rarely thrown away. They were never misled in their judgment of him. Even when kneeling before the carriage of the Pope, they had no idea that they were assuming an attitude of opposition to their friend and emperor. No royal name lives among them at this day, in reverential tradition, so truly as that of Kaiser Joseph. Their estimate of him cannot be better expressed than in the simple apologue which is still current in Austria. The peasantry of a Styrian village are met to discuss the news of Joseph's death. They will not believe it. It is a lie of the court nobles, the lawyers, the lazy friars. While they are debating, information is brought of the revival, bit by bit, of the

old order of things: the Carthusians have returned to the neighbouring abbey, the Capuchins have resumed their rounds; the Forstmeister and the gamekeeper have reoccupied their lodges, and the steward is sitting at the receipt of feudal dues. The oldest peasant rises and takes off his hat-Then Joseph is dead indeed; may Heaven have mercy on his soul !' *

'The public and solemn proof that true liberty would not destroy Catholicity, is this: that her sincere enemies fear nothing so much as to see her altogether free. For three centuries past, have they done anything else than conspire, under more or less adroit disguises, against our liberty? Is it not true that ever since the great revolt against the church, the genius of error and of evil has used his every effort to deprive Catholicism of the light, the air, and the sun of freedom? Have we not, for the last three hundred years, and especially the last hundred years, seen the most determined enemies of the church endeavouring in all countries to make themselves masters of the hands of kings, in order to use them as instruments for confining hers? Yes; those maternal hands which sought only to bless them, those sacred and protecting hands which would fain have defended the cause of order by defending that of truth, those very hands the powerful of the earth thought it prudent to enchain. Men had told them that the church was jealous of their authority; and they therefore fastened her right hand and her left hand, by I know not how many knots, to the cross of her Divine Master: and she, with her two hands bound, still did all she could, saying to her numerous enemies, "If you wish to know what I can still do to subdue error and save humanity, deliver me from these bonds and you shall see!" And her enemies answered, "No; if you were free, you would be stronger than we are: you shall not be free!"'

See the Discours du Rev. P. Félix, delivered at the recent Congress at Malines (Correspondant, Sept. 25, 1864); an eloquent and stirring address in favour of the absolute freedom of the church from state control, according to the ideas of the Montalembert school. But if the Reverend Father had inserted one word condemning the temporal power of the Pope, and the various penal sanctions by which the temporal law, in continental countries, enforces the decrees of the church, he would have produced much more effect than by all his vague generalities against usurping sovereigns, at least on really impartial readers.

49

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA.

It is the common lot of the great arbiters of the destinies of their race to be remembered far more distinctly for the abuse which they may have made of their power than for the benefits which they have conferred through its employment. The name of the Empress Catherine is more familiar to European ears as that of the sanguinary destroyer of Polish independence, than of the second founder of Russian greatness. And to many readers, perhaps, it is a name which calls up even more readily associations of a simply ignominious character. European history has preserved no other record, certainly not since the days of the Cæsars, of such utter obliteration of moral sense and self-respect in habitual profligacy, as were exhibited especially in the later years of her reign. It was a state of things in which a so-called civilised and Christian palace seemed reduced for a period to the level of more than savage licence; self-indulgence of every kind was without limit or disguise, and scandal itself that which furnishes the daily interest of ordinary courts, and the common link between that class of society which swims and that which sinks-had almost ceased to exist, because the sensibilities in which it originates were altogether blunted, and the observer had ceased to be scandalised at anything. But with the disorders of the Czarina's private life we need have no concern on the present occasion, except in so far as they affected her conduct of public affairs; and so, in the name of common decency, we will let the curtain

E

drop on Catherine the woman, and rise on Catherine the ruler.

Her training was one of no common severity, and calculated to develop to the utmost the gifts of a mind of firstrate power, as well as tact and acuteness. It is singular that the three great cotemporary rulers of Eastern Europe, who founded, or reestablished, its three great monarchies, had to undergo in this respect a similar probation-broken to the collar by years of bondage in youth, and only emerging on the scene of independent action in middle age, with chastened and sharpened faculties. What Frederic the Great suffered under his father is well known; Joseph II. was subject all his youth to the more affectionate, but jealous and importunate, sway of his mother, Maria Therese. But the trial which Catherine underwent was of a still more searching nature. She was brought a mere child from Germany, to be delivered to a husband whom she, and those whom she inspired, may have painted in too dark colours; but who certainly seems, from all we know of him, to have been little above a cunning idiot in intellect, and a brute in propensities. She had to live for some years in dangerous proximity of rank and position to her predecessor, the Empress Elizabeth, whose mind, though not originally weak, was impaired by habitual self-indulgence: not an ill-natured personage, nor ill-affected towards herself, but irritable, gusty, suspicious, and only to be propitiated by watchful cajolery. Handsome, audacious, and intellectual, Catherine passed the best years of youth in a court composed of drunken uneducated men and frivolous women, whose range of ideas was confined to show, except when it extended to intrigue and partisanship. And the consequences to be dreaded from a single false step amidst the pitfalls through which her path lay, were not merely

court disfavour, or loss of influence; the convent amidst the snows of Archangel, the prison vault below the level of the Neva, Siberia, the scaffold, these were in daily, and hardly in distant, prospect. By the time her husband ascended the throne, he and she had become mortal enemies; he had thrown her aside for others, and she had been notoriously and all but avowedly unfaithful to him. Thenceforth it became a struggle for existence between the two. Had she not accomplished the revolution of 1762, her life or liberty would have been assuredly forfeit. Had his life been spared after his dethronement, the next turn of the wheel would have placed her again at his mercy. Whether she was actually guilty or cognisant of his murder, is an unsettled problem: and those who are inclined, may give her the benefit of the doubt, for it is probable that those who accomplished the design would have deemed themselves more likely to be embarrassed than protected by her participation in it. But she made it her own by adoption of its results, and by the strongest devotion to its perpetrators.

Whether the very curious fragment lately published by Herzen, under the title Mémoires de l'Impératrice Catherine,' be genuine or not, I have no means of conjecturing. It appears to have been handed about for many years in manuscript in the circles of St. Petersburg. Considering that it all but directly establishes, by the avowal of the empress herself, the illegitimacy of her descendants, it might seem strange that it has attracted no government notice and no efforts at suppression. But the absolute indifference with which the Russian authorities have treated it is certainly a great proof of their practical good sense, and has done. much towards rendering the work innocuous, and inclining people to dispute its authenticity. It appears, however, to be admitted without doubt by most of the writers who