Czar
desired it_," having made sure that

"I had given our Court such light into his affairs as is contained
in this paper; for which I beg leave to appeal to the King, and to
vouch the Viscount Townshend, who heard his Majesty give that
vindication." "And yet, notwithstanding all this, I have been for
these five years past kept soliciting for a very long arrear still
due, and whereof I contracted the greatest part in executing a
commission for her late Majesty."

The anti-Muscovite attitude, suddenly assumed by the Stanhope Cabinet,
our author looks to in rather a sceptic mood.

"I do not pretend to foreclose, by this paper, the Ministry of that
applause due to them from the public, when they shall satisfy us as
to what the motives were which made them, till but yesterday,
straiten the Swede in everything, although then our ally as much as
now; or strengthen, by all the ways they could, the Czar, although
under no tie, but barely that of amity with Great Britain.... At
the minute I write this I learn that the gentleman who brought the
Muscovites, not yet three years ago, as a royal navy, not under our
protection, on their first appearance in the Baltic, is again
authorized by the persons now in power, to give the Czar a second
meeting in these seas. For what reason or to what good end?"

The gentleman hinted at is Admiral Norris, whose Baltic campaign against
Peter I. seems, indeed, to be the original pattern upon which the recent
naval campaigns of Admirals Napier and Dundas were cut out.

The restoration to Sweden of the Baltic provinces is required by the
commercial as well as the political interest of Great Britain. Such is
the pith of our author's argument:

"Trade is become the very life of our State; and what food is to
life, naval stores are to a fleet. The whole trade we drive with
all the other nations of the earth, at best, is but lucrative;
this, of the north, is indispensably needful, and may not be
improperly termed the _sacra embole_ of Great Britain, as being
its chiefest foreign vent, for the support of all our trade, and
our safety at home. As woollen manufactures and minerals are the
staple commodities of Great Britain, so are likewise naval stores
those of Muscovy, as also of all those very provinces in the Baltic
which the Czar has so lately wr