which limits the lifetime of nations, restrains the march of conquest, and has for ever rendered universal dominion impossible.

But although, for this reason, it was inevitable that the weakness arising from the prostration of the strength of its central provinces should in the end have destroyed the power, and terminated, if not overturned by actual violence, the existence of the British empire, yet the means of long combating this mortal malady had been given to it by Providence, if they had not been thrown away by the selfish ambition or the blind infatuation of its later rulers. Its vast and growing colonies in every part of the world afforded it the means of counteracting for centuries the decrepitude of age by the vigour and the elasticity of youth. It was inevitable in the days of its maturity that Great Britain should come to depend for the supply of subsistence and the materials of manufactures, in part at least, on distant states-but those distant states might have been its own transmarine possessions. Then prosperity and riches would have reacted incessantly on that of the parent state. The original stock would have been long vivified and invigorated by the growth of its offshoots. But the selfish and suicidal policy which has alienated or ruined our colonies, for the sake of a temporary profit to the dominant urban class at home, has thrown away these advantages, and brought the weakness and difficulties of age upon the state, which still possesses within itself the means of prolonging a respected and prosperous existence.

KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA

[FOREIGN AND COLONIAL REVIEW, JULY 1844]

NEVER was there a more just observation, than that there is no end to authentic history. We shall take the most learned and enthusiastic student of history in the countryone who has spent half his life in reading the annals of human events and still we are confident that much of what is about to be stated in this article will be new to him. Yet it relates to no inconsiderable state, and is to be found in no obscure writer. It relates to the history of Russia, the greatest and most powerful empire, if we except Great Britain, which exists upon the earth, and with whichsometimes in alliance, sometimes in jealousy - we have been almost continually in contact during the last half century. It is to be found in the history of Karamsin, the greatest historian of Russia, who has justly acquired a European reputation; but whose great work, though relating to so interesting a subject, has hitherto, in an unaccountable manner, been neglected in this country.

We complain that there is nothing new in literaturethat old ideas are perpetually recurring, and worn-out topics again dressed up in a new garb-that sameness and imitation seem to be irrevocably stamped upon our literature, and the age of original thought, of fresh ideas, and creative genius, has passed away! Rely upon it, the fault is not in the nature of things, but in ourselves. The stock of original ideas, of new thoughts, of fresh images, is not worn out; on the contrary, it has hardly been seriously worked upon by all the previous efforts of mankind. We may say of it, as Newton did of his discoveries in physical science, that "all that he had done seemed like a boy playing on the sea

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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 a benighted world!

We have been forcibly led to these observations by the study of Karamsin's History of Russia, and the immense stores of new facts and novel ideas which are to be found in 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