_From a Print by Smith after a Picture by Kneller._
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
_London, Published by Charles Knight, Pall Mall East._ ]
At the close of the sixteenth century, the dominions of Russia, or Muscovy, as it was then more generally called, were far thrown back from the more civilized nations of southern Europe, by the intervention of Lithuania, Livonia, and other provinces now incorporated in the Russian empire, but then belonging either to Sweden or Poland. The Czar of Muscovy therefore possessed no political weight in the affairs of Europe; and little intercourse existed between the Court of Moscow and the more polished potentates whom it affected to despise as barbarians, even for some time after the accession of the reigning dynasty, the house of Romanof, in 1613, and the establishment of a more regular government than had previously been known. We only read occasionally of embassies being sent to Moscow, in general for the purpose of arranging commercial relations. From this state of insignificance, Peter, the first Emperor of Russia, raised his country, by introducing into it the arts of peace, by establishing a well organized and disciplined army in the place of a lawless body of tumultuous mutineers, by creating a navy, where scarce a merchant vessel existed before, and, as the natural result of these changes, by important conquests on both the Asiatic and European frontiers of his hereditary dominions. For these services his countrymen bestowed on him, yet living, the title of Great: and it is well deserved, whether we look to the magnitude of those services, the difficulty of carrying into effect his benevolent designs, which included nothing less than the remodelling a whole people, or the grasp of mind, and the iron energy of will, which was necessary to conceive such projects, and to overcome the difficulties which beset them. It will not vitiate his claim to the epithet, that his manners were coarse and boisterous, his amusements often ludicrous and revolting to a polished taste: if that claim be questionable, it is because he who aspired to be the reformer of others, was unable to control the violence of his own passions.