something that startles us even
more than their contents--viz., their form. All these letters are
"confidential," "private," "secret," "most secret"; but in spite of
secrecy, privacy, and confidence, the English statesmen converse among
each other about Russia and her rulers in a tone of awful reserve,
abject servility, and cynical submission, which would strike us even in
the public despatches of Russian statesmen. To conceal intrigues against
foreign nations secrecy is recurred to by Russian diplomatists. The same
method is adopted by English diplomatists freely to express their
devotion to a foreign Court. The secret despatches of Russian
diplomatists are fumigated with some equivocal perfume. It is one part
the _fumee de faussete_, as the Duke of St. Simon has it, and the other
part that coquettish display of one's own superiority and cunning which
stamps upon the reports of the French Secret Police their indelible
character. Even the master despatches of Pozzo di Borgo are tainted with
this common blot of the _literature de mauvais lieu_. In this point the
English secret despatches prove much superior. They do not affect
superiority but silliness. For instance, can there be anything more
silly than Mr. Rondeau informing Horace Walpole that he has betrayed to
the Russian Minister the letters addressed by the Turkish Grand Vizier
to the King of England, but that he had told "at the same time those
gentlemen that as there were several hard reflections on the Russian
Court he should not have communicated them, _if they had not been so
anxious to see them_," and then told their excellencies not to tell the
Porte that they had seen them (those letters)! At first view the infamy
of the act is drowned in the silliness of the man. Or, take Sir George
Macartney. Can there be anything more silly than his happiness that
Russia seemed "reasonable" enough not to expect that England "should pay
the WHOLE EXPENSES" for Russia's "choosing to take the lead at
Stockholm"; or his "flattering himself" that he had "persuaded the
Russian Court" not to be so "unreasonable" as to ask from England, in a
time of peace, subsidies for a time of war against Turkey (then the ally
of England); or his warning the Earl of Sandwich "not to mention" to the
Russian Ambassador at London the secrets mentioned to himself by the
Russian Chancellor at St. Petersburg? Or can there be anything more
silly than Sir James Harris confidentially whispering into th