ee how duelling could be a
sign of a higher civilisation. The reigning passions were love of money
and the gratification of a coarse vanity. Friendship, virtue, manners,
delicacy, probity, said one witness, are here merely words, void of all
meaning. The tone in public affairs was as low as in those of private
conduct. I might as well, says Sir G. Macartney, quote Clarke and
Tillotson at the divan of Constantinople, as invoke the authority of
Puffendorf and Grotius here.

The character of the Empress herself has been more disputed than that of
the society in which she was the one imposing personage. She stands in
history with Elizabeth of England, with Catherine de' Medici, with Maria
Theresa, among the women who have been like great men. Of her place in
the record of the creation of that vast empire which begins with Prussia
and ends with China, we have not here to speak. The materials for
knowing her and judging her are only in our own time becoming
accessible.[72] As usual, the mythic elements that surrounded her like
a white fog from the northern seas out of which she loomed like a
portent, are rapidly disappearing, and are replaced by the outlines of
ordinary humanity, with more than the ordinary human measure of
firmness, resolution, and energetic grasp of the facts of her position
in the world.

[72] The Imperial Historical Society are publishing a _Recueil
General_ of documents, many of which shed an interesting light on
Catherine's intercourse with the men of letters. In the Archives of
the House of Woronzow (especially vol. xii.), amid much of what for
our purpose is chaff, are a few grains of what is interesting. M.
Rambaud, the author of the learned work on the Greek Empire in the
Tenth Century, gave interesting selections from these sources in two
articles in the _Revue des deux Mondes_ for February and April,
1877. Besides what is to be gathered from such well-known
authorities as William Tooke, Segur, Dashkoff, there are many
interesting pages in the memoirs of that attractive and interesting
person, the Prince de Ligne. The passages from English and French
despatches I have taken from an anonymous but authentic work
published at Berlin in 1858, _La Cour de la Russie il y a cent ans:
1725-83: extraits des depeches des Ambassadeurs anglais et
francais_. Catherine's own Memoirs, published in London in 1859 by
Alexander Herzen, are perhaps