With regard to Sweden I cannot say much.  The French influence is struggling with her independence; and they who consider the manner in which the ambassador of that power was treated not long since at Paris, and the manner in which the father of the present King of Sweden (himself the victim of regicide principles and passions) would have looked on the present assassins of France, will not be very prompt to believe that the young King of Sweden has made this kind of requisition to the King of Great Britain, and has given this kind of auspice of his new government.

I speak last of the most important of all.  It certainly was not the late Empress of Russia at whose instance we have given this pledge.  It is not the new Emperor, the inheritor of so much glory, and placed in a situation of so much delicacy and difficulty for the preservation of that inheritance, who calls on England, the natural ally of his dominions, to deprive herself of her power of action, and to bind herself to France.  France at no time, and in none of its fashions, least of all in its last, has been ever looked upon as the friend either of Russia or of Great Britain.  Everything good, I trust, is to be expected from this prince,—­whatever may be without authority given out of an influence over his mind possessed by that only potentate from whom he has anything to apprehend or with whom he has much even to discuss.

This sovereign knows, I have no doubt, and feels, on what sort of bottom is to be laid the foundation of a Russian throne.  He knows what a rock of native granite is to form the pedestal of his statue who is to emulate Peter the Great.  His renown will be in continuing with ease and safety what his predecessor was obliged to achieve through mighty struggles.  He is sensible that his business is not to innovate, out to secure and to establish,—­that reformations at this day are attempts at best of ambiguous utility.  He will revere his father with the piety of a son, but in his government he will imitate the policy of his mother.  His father, with many excellent qualities, had a short reign,—­because, being a native Russian, he was unfortunately advised to act in the spirit of a foreigner.  His mother reigned over Russia three-and-thirty years with the greatest glory,—­because, with the disadvantage of being a foreigner born, she made herself a Russian.  A wise prince like the present will improve his country; but it will be cautiously and progressively, upon its own native groundwork of religion, manners, habitudes, and alliances.  If I prognosticate right, it is not the Emperor of Russia that ever will call for extravagant proofs of our desire to reconcile ourselves to the irreconcilable enemy of all thrones.