he had begun to study while in Holland under the instruction of the eminent professor Frederick Ruysch, whose museum he afterwards purchased for the sum of thirty thousand florins. Peter, indeed, neglected no opportunity, during his travels, of forming the acquaintance of distinguished individuals; and both in Holland and England many of the ablest men of the time were introduced to him, some of whom he persuaded to accompany him home to Russia. He also expended considerable sums in purchasing such curious productions of art as he conceived might best excite the emulation of his subjects.

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Among other persons who were made known to him when in England was Bishop Burnet, who does not seem, however, to have comprehended the character of the extraordinary man with whom he was on this occasion brought into contact. In the History of his own Times he tells us the impression the Czar made upon him. He wants not capacity," says he, "and has a larger measure of knowledge than might be expected from his education, which was very indifferent ; but immediately after he adds that he " seems designed by nature rather to be a ship-carpenter than a great prince." He did not at that time appear to the bishop to be capable of conducting so great a design as the attack upon the Turkish empire, which he was understood to be meditating; although it is acknowledged that he afterwards displayed a greater genius for warlike operations than the writer then imagined him to possess. Bishop Burnet had a good deal of conversation with him upon religious matters, and remarks that "he was desirous to understand our doctrine, but he did not seem disposed to mend matters in Muscovy." He allows, however, that he was "resolved to encourage learning, and to polish his people by sending some of them to travel in other countries, and to

draw strangers to come and live among them." The learned prelate concludes his account by the following curious reflection: "After I had seen him often, and had conversed much with him, I could not but adore the depth of the providence of God that had raised up such a furious man to so absolute an authority over so great a part of the world."

*

We cannot here enter into any detail of the various reforms in the customs of his people, which this extraordinary man proceeded to introduce on his return to his own dominions, with the view of assimilating them more to those which he had found prevailing in the other countries of Europe. Suffice it to say, that by a series of the most energetic and frequently violent measures, he succeeded in effecting a complete change in some of the oldest institutions of his empire, and even commenced a revolution in the habits and manners of general society, which, from that beginning, has since gone on till it has established, in what was before almost a barbarous country, all the benefits of a flourishing civilization. Peter may be said, indeed, to have given to his subjects nearly every art of civilized life, of which they were some time afterwards found in possession. He taught them navigation, commerce, and even agriculture and the management of flocks, having imported from Saxony and Silesia both herds of sheep and shepherds to take care of them. He called to him artists of all descriptions from other countries, and employed them in contriving, each in his appropriate department, how best to bring into developement the natural resources of the country. He built a new capital, the first truly European city that had been seen in Russia, on a site which did not form part of the empire at his accession. Finally, he founded schools, academies, colleges, libraries, and museums, and thus laid the surest of all foundations

for the permanent and progressive improvement of his people.

A college of physicians, a dispensary, an observatory, and a botanical garden, were among the establishments with which he adorned his two capitals *. The art of printing had been introduced into Russia about the middle of the sixteenth century; but this early press seems to have hardly left any trace of its operations, and Peter, at his accession, found his country without books. To supply this deficiency, he had some scientific works translated into Russian; and, when he was in Amsterdam, he employed a printer of that city to print them, giving him a monopoly for the sale of them in Russia. His majesty himself, some time after this, remodelled the alphabet of his native language, considerably simplifying the forms of the characters, and established several printing-houses in Petersburg, at which various elementary works were thrown off, mostly translated from foreign tongues. From this beginning the literature of Russia has so much increased, that in M. Sopikof's Essai de Bibliographie Russe, no fewer than thirteen thousand two hundred and forty-nine works are enumerated as having appeared in the native language up to the year 1813. In the three years from 1822 to 1824 inclusive, there appeared two hundred and seventy-five translations from French, German, English, Greek, Latin, Italian, Sclavonic, Dutch, Danish, and Armenian, and five hundred and fifty-eight original works; in all eight hundred and thirty-three publications, besides works in foreign languages t.

In 1717, the Czar set out on a second foreign tour,

* Eloge de Pierre le Grand, par Fontenelle.

These particulars are extracted from the Aperçu sur la Littérature Russe, at the end of M. Balbi's Introduction à l'Atlas Ethnographique.

attended on this occasion as became his rank. In the course of his progress he visited successively, Hamburgh, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris; in the last of which cities especially he found all that the arts had yet contrived for the use and enjoyment of man, in the highest state of advancement. He no longer now applied his hand to the practice of the different crafts which he inspected; his days of apprenticeship were over; but he was not on that account less diligent in visiting every workshop and manufactory in which anything novel or curious was to be seen. He went also to see the observatory, the libraries, and the different learned institutions; and was present at a sitting of the Academy of Sciences, which admitted him one of its members.

This great man's education in his youth had been worse than neglected. His sister and her counsellors had even surrounded him with every seduction most calculated to deprave both his moral and intellectual nature, and to stifle in him the desire of knowledge. The bad parts of his character were undoubtedly, in a great measure, the result of the manner in which he was treated at this time of his life. Yet, violent and ungovernable as his passions continued to be, in some respects, to the last, making him act often with a ferocity unsurpassed by anything that is told of the excesses of infuriated savages, he succeeded in completely overcoming that one of his evil habits which he found would have interfered most with the conduct of his great schemes. In his youth he was a slave to the love of ardent spirits, but he had weaned himself entirely, in his maturer days, from that destructive vice; nor was he insensible to the other defects of his original character which he had failed to correct. "Alas!" he would sometimes exclaim, on recovering from one of those paroxysms of rage by which he was liable to be carried away, "I have re

formed my people, but have not been able to reform myself." Perhaps, however, no man in any station ever did more than this illustrious monarch to repair the mischievous consequences of a neglected youth, as far as intellectual acquirements are concerned. In addition to a competent knowledge of mathematics, mechanics, navigation, medicine, and anatomy, he appears to have made himself master of more than one of the modern languages of Europe. He translated several works from the French, the manuscripts of which are still preserved at Petersburg. He had even made himself familiar with the Latin tongue, if we are to believe an anecdote told by M. Stählin*, of his detection, upon one occasion, of the inaccuracies of a monk whom he had employed to translate a work written in that language into Russian. But as the original of the work in question (Puffendorff's Introduction to the History of Europe) is in fact not in Latin, but in German, it is probable that it was by his acquaintance with the latter tongue, or with the French, into which the book had also been translated, that Peter was enabled to discover the defects of the Russian version. M. Stählin tells another anecdote, which shews how fully his majesty understood the value of that early instruction which he had not himself enjoyed. Finding two of his daughters one day reading a French author, he desired one of them to translate the passage before her into Russian,-when, struck with the facility with which the task was performed, he exclaimed, "Ah, my children, how happy are you, who are thus taught to read in your youth, and enjoy all the advantages of an education which I totally wanted." He used often to say that he would willingly have lost one of his fingers to have had a good education in his youth.

* Original Anecdotes of Peter the Great; London, 1788.