Such was the report which the English legations made of what they had seen and suffered in Russia; and their evidence was confirmed by the appearance which the Russian legations made in England.  The strangers spoke no civilised language.  Their garb, their gestures, their salutations, had a wild and barbarous character.  The ambassador and the grandees who accompanied him were so gorgeous that all London crowded to stare at them, and so filthy that nobody dared to touch them.  They came to the court balls dropping pearls and vermin.  It was said that one envoy cudgelled the lords of his train whenever they soiled or lost any part of their finery, and that another had with difficulty been prevented from putting his son to death for the crime of shaving and dressing after the French fashion.

Our ancestors therefore were not a little surprised to learn that a young barbarian, who had, at seventeen years of age, become the autocrat of the immense region stretching from the confines of Sweden to those of China, and whose education had been inferior to that of an English farmer or shopman, had planned gigantic improvements, had learned enough of some languages of Western Europe to enable him to communicate with civilised men, had begun to surround himself with able adventurers from various parts of the world, had sent many of his young subjects to study languages, arts and sciences in foreign cities, and finally had determined to travel as a private man, and to discover, by personal observation, the secret of the immense prosperity and power enjoyed by some communities whose whole territory was far less than the hundredth part of his dominions.

It might have been expected that France would have been the first object of his curiosity.  For the grace and dignity of the French King, the splendour of the French Court, the discipline of the French armies, and the genius and learning of the French writers, were then renowned all over the world.  But the Czar’s mind had early taken a strange ply which it retained to the last.  His empire was of all empires the least capable of being made a great naval power.  The Swedish provinces lay between his States and the Baltic.  The Bosporus and the Dardanelles lay between his States and the Mediterranean.  He had access to the ocean only in a latitude in which navigation is, during a great part of every year, perilous and difficult.  On the ocean he had only a single port, Archangel; and the whole shipping of Archangel was foreign.  There did not exist a Russian vessel larger than a fishing-boat.  Yet, from some cause which cannot now be traced, he had a taste for maritime pursuits which amounted to a passion, indeed almost to a monomania.  His imagination was full of sails, yardarms, and rudders.  That large mind, equal to the highest duties of the general and the statesman, contracted itself to the most minute details of naval architecture and naval discipline.  The chief ambition of the great conqueror and legislator