d
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 was
to be a good boatswain and a good ship's carpenter. Holland and England
therefore had for him an attraction which was wanting to the galleries
and terraces of Versailles. He repaired to Amsterdam, took a lodging in
the dockyard