shore, finding sometimes a brighter pebble or a smoother shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him." We complain of sameness of thought, of want of originality in topics, and yet we live in the midst of a boundless profusion of new facts and virgin images, for the first time brought forward by our extended intercourse with all parts of the world, and the heart-stirring events of our political history. There never was a period in the annals of mankind, if we except that of the discovery of America, in which new facts and novel images, and the materials for original thought, were brought with such profusion to the hand of genius; and there never was one in which, in this country at least, so little use was made of them, or in which the public mind seems to revolve so exclusively round one centre, and in one beaten and wellnigh worn-out orbit.

Whence has arisen this strange discrepancy between the profusion with which new materials and fresh objects are brought to hand, and the scanty proportion in which original thought is poured out to the world? The cause is to be found in the impossibility of getting the great majority of men to make the "past or the future predominant over the present." If we add " the absent" to the famous apophthegm of Johnson, we shall have a summary of the principal causes which in ordinary times chain mankind to the concentric circles of established ideas. Amidst common events, and under the influence of no peculiar excitement, men are incapable of extricating themselves from the ocean of habitual thought with which they are surrounded. A few great men may do so, but their ideas produce no impression on the age, and lie wellnigh dormant till they are brought to fructify and spread amidst the turbulence or sufferings of another. Thence the use of periods of suffering or intense excitement to the growth of intellect and the development of truth. The past and the future are then made the present; ages of experience, volumes of speculation, are then concentrated into the passing results of a few years, and thus spread generally throughout mankind. What original thought was evolved in England during the fervour of the Reformation in France during the agonies of the Revolution! Subsequent epochs of ease and peace to each were

but periods of transfer and amplification-of studied imitation and laboured commentary. There has been, there still is, original thought in our age; but it is confined to those whom the agitation of reform roused from the intellectual lethargy with which they were surrounded, and their opinions have not yet come to influence general thought. They will do so in the next generation, and direct the course of legislation in the third. Public opinion, of which so much is said, is nothing but the re-echo of the opinions of the great among our fathers; so slowly, under the wise system of Providence, is truth and improvement let down to benighted world!

ARY

OF THE

We have been forcibly led to these observations by the SITY study of Karamsin's History of Russia, and the immense

stores of new facts and novel ideas which are toORNIA

a work long accessible in its French translation to all, hardly as yet approached by any. We are accustomed to consider Russia as a country which has only been extricated by the genius of Peter the Great, little more than a century and a half ago, from a state of barbarism, and the annals of which have been lost amidst general ignorance, or are worthy of no regard till they were brought into light by increasing intercourse with the powers of western Europe. Such, we are persuaded, is the belief of ninety-nine out of a hundred, even among learned readers, in every European state; yet we perceive from Karamsin, that Russia is a power which has existed, though with great vicissitudes of fortune, for a thousand years; that Rurick, its founder, was contemporary with Alfred; and that it assailed the Bosphorus and Constantinople in the ninth century, with a force greater than that with which William the Conqueror subverted the Saxon monarchy at Hastings, and more powerful than the armies led against it in after times by the ambition of Catherine or the generals of Nicholas ! What is still more remarkable, the mode of attack adopted by these rude invaders of the Byzantine empire was precisely that which long and dearbought experience, aided by military science, subsequently taught to the Russian generals. Avoiding the waterless and unhealthy plains of Bessarabia and Wallachia, they committed themselves in fearful multitudes to boats, which were wafted down the stream of the Dnieper to the Black

Sea; and when the future conqueror of the East approaches to place the cross on the minarets of St Sophia, he has only to follow the track of the canoes, which a thousand years ago brought the hordes of Rurick to the entrance of the Bosphorus.

Complicated, and to appearance inextricable, as the transactions of the Slavonic race seem at first sight, the history of Russia is yet singularly susceptible of simplification. It embraces five great periods, each of which have stamped their own peculiar impress upon the character of the people, and which have combined to produce that mighty empire which now numbers sixty millions of men among its subjects, and a seventh of the surface of the globe beneath its dominion.

The first of these periods is that which commences with the foundation of the Russian empire by Rurick, in 826, and terminates with the commencement of the unhappy division of the empire into appanages or provisions for younger children-the source of innumerable evils both to the monarchy and its subjects-in 1054. The extent to which the empire had spread, and the power it had acquired, before this ruinous system of division commenced, is extraordinary. In the tenth century, Russia was as prominent, comparatively speaking, among the powers of Europe, in point of territory, population, resources, and achievements, as she is at this moment. The conquests of Oleg, of Sviatoslof, and of Vladimir, to whom the sceptre of Rurick had descended, extended the frontiers of the Russian territory from Novogorod and Kieff—its original cradle on the banks of the Dnieper-to the Baltic, the Dwina, and the Bug, on the west; on the south, to the cataracts of the Dnieper and the Cimmerian Bosphorus; in the north, to Archangel, the White Sea, and Finland; on the east, to the Ural Mountains and shores of the Caspian. All the territory which now constitutes the strength of Russia, and has enabled it to extend its dominion and influence so far over Asia and Europe, was already ranged under the sceptre of its monarchs before the time of Edward the Confessor.

The second period comprehends the innumerable intestine wars, and progressive decline of the strength and consideration of the empire, which resulted from the adoption of the

fatal system of appanages. This method of providing for the younger children of successive monarchs, so natural to parental affection, so just with reference to the distribution of possessions among successive royal families, so ruinous to the ultimate interests of the state, was commenced by the Grand-prince Dmitri in 1054, and afforded too ready a means of providing for the succeeding generation of princes to be soon abandoned. The effects of such a system may without difficulty be conceived. It reduced a solid compact monarchy at once to the distracted state of the Saxon heptarchy, and soon introduced into its vitals those fierce internal wars which exhaust the strength of a nation, without either augmenting its resources or adding to its reputation. It is justly remarked, accordingly, by Karamsin, that for the next three hundred years after this fatal change in the system of government, Russia incessantly declined; and after having attained, at a very early period, the highest pitch of power and grandeur, she sank to such a depth of weakness as to be incapable of opposing any effectual resistance to a foreign invader.

The third period of Russian history, and not the least in the formation of its national character, commenced with the Tartar invasion, and terminated with the final emancipation of the Muscovite dominions. In 1224, the first intelligence of a strange, uncouth, and savage enemy having appeared on the eastern frontier, was received at Kieff, then the capital of the Muscovite confederacy-for it no longer deserved the name of an empire; and two hundred and fifty years had elapsed before the nation was finally emancipated from their dreadful yoke. This was accomplished by the abilities and perseverance of John III., the true restorer, and in some degree the second founder of the empire, in 1480, in which year the last invasion of the Tartars was repulsed, and the disgraceful tribute so long paid to the Great Khan was discontinued. During this melancholy interval, Russia underwent the last atrocities of savage cruelty and barbaric despotism. Moscow, then become the capital, was sacked and burnt by the Tartars, in 1387, with more devastation than afterwards during the invasion of Napoleon; every province of the empire was repeatedly overrun by these ruthless

invaders, who, equally incapable of giving or receiving quarter, seemed, wherever they went, to have declared a war of extermination against the human race, which their prodigious numbers and infernal energy in war generally enabled them to carry on with success. Nor was their pacific rule, where they had thoroughly subjugated a country, less degrading than their inroad was frightful and devastating. Oppression, long continued and systematic, constituted their only system of government; and the Russians owe to these terrible tyrants the use of the knout, and of the other cruel punishments which, from their long retention in the empire of the Czars, when generally disused elsewhere, have so long excited the horror of Western Europe.

The fourth period commences with the abolition of the ruinous system of appanages by the mingled firmness and cunning, wisdom and fortune, of John III., about the year 1480; and continued till the genius of Peter the Great gave the country its great impetus two hundred years after. This period was a chequered one to the fortunes of Muscovy, but, on the whole, of general progressive advancement. Under Vassili, the successor of John III., the Russians made themselves masters of Smolensko, and extended their frontiers on the east to the Dwina. Under John the Terrible, who succeeded him, they carried by assault, after a terrible struggle, Kazan, in the south of Muscovy, where the Tartars had established themselves in a solid manner and formed the capital of a powerful state, which had more than once inflicted, in conjunction with the Lithuanians, the most dreadful wounds on the vitals of the empire. Disasters great and repeated still marked this period, as wave after wave break on the shore after the fury of the tempest has been stilled. Moscow was again reduced to ashes during the minority of John the Terrible; it was again burnt by the Tartars; and a third time, by accident; the victorious Poles advanced their standards to its gates, and so low were his fortunes reduced, that that heroic but bloody monarch had at one period serious thoughts of deserting his country, and seeking refuge in England from his numerous enemies. Yet Russia, thanks to the patriotism of her children and the indomitable firm