diplomatique in Europe.”  He liked to declaim upon the enormous impossibility of his ever exchanging a seat in Congress for “the shabby splendors” of an office in Washington, or in a foreign mission “to dance attendance abroad instead of at home.”  When it was first buzzed about in Washington, in 1830, that General Jackson had tendered the Russian mission to John Randolph, the rumor was not credited.  An appointment so exquisitely absurd was supposed to be beyond even Andrew Jackson’s audacity.  The offer had been made, however.  Mr. Randolph’s brilliant defence of General Jackson’s bad spelling, together with Mr. Van Buren’s willingness to place an ocean between the new administration and a master of sarcasm, to whom opposition had become an unchangeable habit, had dictated an offer of the mission, couched in such seductive language that Mr. Randolph yielded to it as readily as those ladies accept an offer of marriage who have often announced their intention never to marry.  Having reached the scene of his diplomatic labors at the beginning of August, he began to perform them with remarkable energy.  In a suit of black, the best, he declared, that London could furnish, he was presented to the Emperor and to the Empress, having first submitted his costume to competent inspection.  Resolute to do his whole duty, he was not content to send his card to the diplomatic corps, but, having engaged a handsome coach and four, he called upon each member of the diplomatic body, from the ambassadors to the secretaries of legation.  Having performed these labors, and having discovered that a special object with which he was charged could not then be accomplished, he had leisure to observe that St. Petersburg, in the month of August, is not a pleasant residence to an invalid of sixty.  He describes the climate in these terms:—­

“Heat, dust impalpable, pervading every part and pore ...  Insects of all nauseous descriptions, bugs, fleas, mosquitoes, flies innumerable, gigantic as the empire they inhabit, who will take no denial.  This is the land of Pharaoh and his plagues,—­Egypt and its ophthalmia and vermin, without its fertility,—­Holland, without its wealth, improvements, or cleanliness.”

He endured St. Petersburg for the space of ten days, then sailed for England, and never saw Russia again.  When the appropriation bill was before Congress at the next session, opposition members did not fail to call in question the justice of requiring the people of the United States to pay twenty thousand dollars for Mr. Randolph’s ten days’ work, or, to speak more exactly, for Mr. Randolph’s apology for the President’s bad spelling; but the item passed, nevertheless.  During the reign of Andrew Jackson, Congress was little more than a board of registry for the formal recording of his edicts.  There are those who think, at the present moment, that what a President hath done, a President may do again.