of July, 1762; and a week later her miserable husband learned how true was the Italian dogma, that the distance between the prisons of princes and their graves is but short.  Catharine II. founded a new dynasty in Russia, and gave to that country the peculiar character which it has ever since borne, and which has enabled it on more than one occasion to decide the fate of Europe, and therefore of the world.  Important as were the labors of Peter the Great, it does not appear to admit of a doubt that their force was wellnigh spent when Peter III. ascended the throne; and his conduct indicated the triumph of the old Russian party and policy, as the necessary consequence of his violent feeling in behalf of German influences, ideas, and practices.  The Czarina, like those Romans who became more German than the Germans themselves, affected to be fanatically Russian in her sentiments and purposes, and so acquired the power to Europeanize the policy of her empire.  She it was who definitely placed the face of Russia to the West, and prepared the way for the entrance of Russian armies into Italy and France, and for the partition of Poland, the ultimate effect of which promises to be the reunion of that country under the sceptre of the Czar.  It was the seizure of so much of Poland by Russia that fixed the latter’s international character; and it was Catharine II. who destroyed Poland, and added so much of its territory to the dominions of the Czars.  After the first partition had been effected, it was no longer in Russia’s power to refrain from taking a leading part in European politics; and when her grandson, in 1814, was on the point of making war on England, France, and Austria, rather than abandon the new Polish spoil which he had torn from Napoleon I., he was but carrying out the great policy of the Great Catharine.  If we look into the political literature of the last century, we shall find that Peter I.’s action had very little effect in the way of increasing the influence of Russia abroad.  His eccentric conduct caused him to be looked upon as a sort of royal wild man of the woods, rather than as a great reformer whose aim it was to elevate his country to an equality with kingdoms that had become old while Russia was ruled by barbarians of the remote East.  He was “a self-made man” on a throne, and displayed all the oddities and want of breeding that usually mark the demeanor of persons whose youth has not had the advantages that proceed from good examples and regular instruction.  Of the courtly graces, and of those accomplishments which are most valued in courts, he had as many as belong to an ill-conditioned baboon.  A railway-car on a cattle-train does not require more cleaning, at the end of a long journey, than did a room in a palace after it had been occupied by Peter and his clever spouse.  Some of his best-authenticated acts could not be paralleled outside of a piggery.  The Prussian court, one hundred and sixty years since, was not a very nice place, and its members were by no means