able that he will never again
interfere to restrain the grossest injustice.

And here ends our melancholy tale, which the censorship of the press in
Russia prevented from ever before being publicly related. Corroboration
can, however, be derived from the inhabitants of Vilna, who lived there
from 1816 to 1826; from the archives of criminal courts of that place,
where M. Getzewicz's correspondence is preserved; from the list of all
the crown servants of Russia, sent every year to the State Secretary of
the Home Department at St. Petersburgh; in which, for 1825 and 1826,
Procureur Botwinko was reported to be imprisoned at Vilna for the above
case, and that the Strapchy of Oszmiana was acting in his stead as
procureur _pro tem._

NAPOLEON AND THE POPE.--A SCENE AT FONTAINEBLEAU.

In the autumn of 1804, the court was at Fontainebleau. The Consulate had
but recently merged in the Empire, with the consent of all the orders of
the state. The senate by a decree had declared the First Consul to be
Emperor of the French; and the people, to whom the question of
succession had been deferred, had, by a majority of three millions to
three thousand, decided that the imperial dignity should be hereditary
in his family. History, as Alison observes when recording the fact,
affords no instance of a nation having so unanimously taken refuge from
the ills of agitation and anarchy under the cold shade of despotism.

A new order of things having commenced, all, as may easily be imagined,
was in a state of transformation and change in the composition of the
court, as well as in the arrangement of the imperial household. Under
the republican _regime_, a great degree of simplicity had prevailed in
the appointments of the various departments of the state, as well as in
the domestic economy of family circles: it could not, however, be
called unpretending; there was a certain affectation in it, evidently
assumed with a view to contrast, even in minute particulars, the system
of the republic with that of the old monarchy--the plainness of the one
with the profuseness of the other. But this was not fated to last long:
it had already been giving way under the Consulate, and was now
disappearing altogether in accordance with the views of the new monarch.
Titles and dignities were to be restored; court formalities and
ceremonials were being revived, and new ones instituted. The old
nobility, sprung from the feudal system, and dating, as some