tion has been more obscured. The fashion
of liberal thought has changed, the history, like that of town and gown,
has been written by the victorious aggressors, and Poland is become the
rendezvous of the political sophistries, as it has been the cockpit of
the political ruffianism, of all Europe. But Catharine could boast that
she had pushed the frontiers of Russia farther than any sovereign since
Ivan the Terrible. "I came to Russia a poor girl. Russia has dowered me
richly, but I have paid her back with Azov, the Crimea, and the
Ukraine."

There remains the side of her which attracted Byron, and which no one
has failed to seize. The beginnings of her moral descent are there
before us in the memoirs; ennui and solitude weighed upon her, and as
she gained greater liberty she sought distractions which, at first, were
harmless. The third stage was the infamous command of the Empress--the
Grand Duke and she have no children; the succession must be secured. If
Soltikoff, as Catharine implies, were the father of her son Paul, the
sovereigns who have since occupied the throne of Russia are Romanoffs
only in name. From this point till her death, in 1796, she entirely
ignored the code of morality convenient in a society whose basis is the
family. In the succession of her "lovers" only Patiomkin, and for a
moment Gregory Orloff, acquired a position of the first political
importance; and Patiomkin's was maintained long after his first relation
had come to an end. It has been ascribed to her as a merit that she
pensioned these worthies handsomely, instead of dealing with them after
the manner of Christina of Sweden; and that she was able to make
passion, which has lost others, coincident with her calculated
self-interest.

Certainly she entered, a child, into a society "rotten before it was
ripe." She was surrounded with a court long demoralized by a succession
of drunken and dissolute czarinas, which aped the corruption of
Versailles more consummately than its refinement. The age was that of
Louis XV, of Lord Sandwich, of Augustus the Strong: in it even a Burke
had persuaded himself that "vice lost half its evil by losing all its
grossness." The reader of Bayle and Brantome had been introduced to a
bizarre sort of morality; her "spiritual father," Voltaire, was the
author of _La Pucelle_ and _Jacques le Fataliste_ proceeded from the
same pen as the _University for Russia_. Diderot, indeed, whose moral
obscenity was not the whol