A.D. 1789.]

family. His conduct to her was disgraceful. She obtained a legal separation from him, and formed an attachment to Alfieri, the celebrated Italian poet. Though the life of Alfieri had been wild and dissipated, he was deeply attached to the countess of Albany, as the lady was called. They are said to have been privately married. The union had the happiest effect on the character and genius of the poet, whom she survived-living at Florence till the peace of 1815. The pretender was buried with great state, and the title and arms of the king of England were carved on his tomb. His brother Henry Benedict, the cardinal York, succeeded to the empty title by the style of Henry IX. of England. He died in 1807, and with him ended the direct male line of the deposed Stuarts.

Whilst the war of parties had been raging in England, matters abroad had been rapidly assuming a shape which threatened the tranquillity of all Europe. In France the elements of revolution had been fermenting, and had already burst into open fury, and with a character which, to observant eyes, appeared to bode inevitably their spread into every surrounding country. At the same time, the sovereigns of these countries, instead of discerning the signs of the times, and taking measures to guard their people from the contagious influence, were some of them acting so as certainly to invite the specious anarchy. In others, they were wasting their strength on schemes of conquest which only too much enfeebled them for opposition to the dangers, thus preparing. Some of these warlike movements appear, at first sight, to have little connection with the history of England, but, more or less, they all are necessary to our comprehension of our own position in the time of those marvellous subversions which were at hand.

Least of all did the ambitious designs of the czarina Catherine against Turkey seem menacing to us; yet these designs speedily drew into their current the whole power of Austria, and endangered our relations in the countries on the Baltic, and attracted the revolutionary torrent over the fertile plains of the Netherlands, directly opposite to our own shores, and menacing the stability of our allies, the Dutch. Catherine had found the Turks, feeble but tottering as she considered their empire, not so easily to be overcome as she imagined. The absorption of the Ottoman kingdom and the establishment of the Muscovite throne at Constantinople had been her confident dream-as it was that of the czar Nicholas in our day. But the Turks, though in a condition of decline and disorganisation which promised an easy subjugation of them, had still their spirit of fanatic fatalism, which could raise them to deeds of impetuous valour. The whole organisation and regulations of their army were in the worst condition. The janissaries, which had been amongst the finest infantry in the world, were now thoroughly demoralised and in insolent insubordination towards their own government. Their cavalry was numerous, but wretchedly disciplined. The commissariat was in the worst state conceivable, and their artillery, though it had received the energetic attentions of the French baron De Toff, was contemptible. It might have appeared that nothing was necessary but to enter Turkey and drive the whole army, as a disorganised rabble, before them.

But Catherine had not found it so. Her favourite,

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Potemkin, had been repeatedly defeated in his attempts to advance into Turkey from the Crimea, and Catherine had, as we have already related, been glad to engage Joseph II. of Austria in the enterprise by a promise of an ample share of the spoil. In their meeting at Cherson in 1787, Joseph had engaged to send one hundred thousand men to the campaign against Turkey. He had no quarrel with the sultan, and though a zealous advocate for national reforms, he paid very little regard to national or international justice. In all his reforms, Joseph, with true Austrian spirit, showed the despot still. He did not attempt to carry such reforms as his subjects desired, but such as he thought proper for them; and he was always ready to force what he deemed liberalism and improvement upon them at the point of the bayonet. In attacking Turkey, he did not wait to proclaim war, much less to have a pretence for it, but he suddenly made a rush upon the neighbouring city and frontier fortress of Belgrade. The Turks, though taken by surprise, defended the place victoriously; and Joseph's subsequent assault on the fortress of Gradiska was equally unsuccessful and equally disgraceful.

In prosecution, however, of his unrighteous engagement to Catherine, he mustered the large army he had engaged to bring against Turkey, and in February, 1788, he made a formal proclamation of war, having no cause of hostility to assign of his own, but merely that his alliance with Russia demanded that he should support that power in its equally lawless invasion of Turkey. The prince of Saxe-Coburg, who commanded one division of Joseph's army, entered Moldavia, and spent the whole campaign nearly in the siege and reduction of the fortress of Choczim. The emperor himself accompanied another division, the destination of which was the renewal of the siege of Belgrade. He had been led by Catherine to hope, as his reward for the cooperation, the recovery of Bosnia and Servia, the acquisition of Moldavia and Wallachia, and the extension of his boundaries to the Dnieper. But, having waited some time for the junction of the Russians-for the Russians were themselves more warmly occupied than they had anticipated, and they pursued the policy which they have constantly acted upon, of securing their ground as they advanced, and so gradually but surely pushing their progress from the head of the Black Sea onwards, slowly but certainly extending their operations eastward-Joseph's army assembled on the banks of the Danube in February, and occupied itself in securing the banks of that river and of the Save. Joseph himself joined it in April, accompanied by his favourite marshal and counsellor, Lacy, and having also with him, but paying little attention to him or his advice, the brave and able Laudohn, who had so successfully coped with Frederick of Prussia in Silesia. On the 24th, he took the little fortress of Szabatch, whilst another part of his army suffered a defeat from the Turks at Dobitza. He then sate down before Belgrade, but carried on the siege with such slackness as to disgust his own troops and astonish all Europe. He was at length roused by the advance of the vizier, Yussuff, who was coming rapidly down upon him. At his approach, Joseph precipitately retreated behind the Save, while Yussuff threw bridges over the Danube at Cladova, broke the Austrian cordon by the defeat of a portion of the forces

of general Wartesleben on the heights of Meadia, and swept through the banat of Temeswar, Joseph's own territory, which he held, and threatened to invade Hungary. Joseph hastened with forty thousand men to support Wartesleben, leaving general Laudohn to conduct the war in Croatia. The army was delighted to have Laudohn at their head instead of the emperor. He led it on the very day of his arrival against the fortress of Dobitza, which he took; he then passed the Save, drove the Turks before him, defeated seven thousand of the enemy before Novi, and took

bottomed boats, in the shallows, or, as they are called, the liman, at the mouth of the river; but besides Potemkin, they had the able Suvaroff to contend with. This sagacious general drew the Russian flotilla under the forts of Kinburn, nearly opposite to Oczakoff, of which they were in possession. Thus safe himself, he swept the broad liman with his guns, destroyed many of the boats of the Turks, as they got entangled in the sands of the shallows, and compelled the capitan-pasha, who commanded, to withdraw his fleet. After several vain attempts, Oczakoff was stormed on St.

that place, where his operations were suspended by the winter. Joseph gained little credit by his junction with Wartesleben. The Turks attacked him, and, though they were for the moment repulsed, the emperor retreated in a dark night, and the Turks and Austrians resumed their former positions. After taking Verplanka, the campaign terminated with a three months' truce. But the Austrian army had suffered more severely from the miasmata of the marshes of the Danube and Save than from the Turks. Joseph had been persuaded by his physicians that vinegar would be a much more efficacious resistant of the marsh fever than their usual rations of wine. He had stopped the wine and ordered the vinegar, and the consequence was that the soldiers died off as by a pestilence.

Meantime, the Russians had been occupied with the siege of Oczakoff, near the mouth of the Dnieper. There the Turks had endeavoured to burn their flotillas and flat

Nicholas-day, the 17th of November. But this success was only obtained at the last moment, in the very desperation of despair, and when the campaign had cost Russia twenty thousand men, of whom five thousand perished in the final assault.

But the czaripa, though mistress of Oczakoff, was far from the end of her designs. She contemplated nothing but the subjugation of the Turkish empire. For this purpose she determined to excite insurrection in all the tributary states of that empire. Her agents had excited the Montenegrins to an outbreak; they had prepared the Greeks for the same experiment, and the Mameluke beys in Egypt. She determined to send a powerful fleet into the Mediterranean to co-operate with these insurgents, to seize on the island of Candia, to ravage the coasts of Thrace and Asia Minor, and to force the passage of the Dardanelles, or, if that were not practicable, to blockade them. Thus open

ing the communication betwixt her forces in the Mediterranean and in the Black Sea, she considered that Turkey would lie helpless at her feet. To give the necessary ascendancy to her fleet, she had long been encouraging English naval officers to take commands in it. At the famous battle of Chesmé, it was the English admirals Elphinstone, Greig, and others who had made Potemkin victorious. Greig was now at the head of her fleet preparing at Cronstadt for this Mediterranean enterprise. Catherine had also invited the famous pirate, Paul Jones, to her service; but on his arrival all the English officers at once sent in their commissions. To avoid the loss of these most important men, Catherine sent Jones to the Black Sea, where he was at the siege of Oczakoff. The English officers then resumed their services, and Catherine sent out agents secretly to engage English seamen for this grand fleet. She had also engaged eighteen British ships of four hundred tons and upwards as transports of troops, artillery, and stores.

If Pitt at this moment had possessed the far-seeing genius of his father Chatham, it was in his power, as the ally of Turkey, to have stepped in and given a blow to the ambitious designs of Russia which would have saved the country a far more arduous and costly effort for that purpose afterwards. Russia had spared no pains to insult England, especially since the unfortunate contest on account of America. It was certain that if she once obtained Turkey she would become a most troublesome power in the Mediterranean; and it now required only the dispatch of a tolerable fleet to the Baltic, and of another to the Black Sea, to annihilate in a few days every vestige of her maritime force. Such a check would have caused her to recoil from her eastern aggressions for the purpose of defending her very existence at home. Holland was bound to us by the re-establishment of the prince of Orange, our fast friend; we were at peace with Prussia; France was engrossed inextricably with her own affairs; Denmark was in terror of us; and Sweden longed for nothing so much as to take vengeance for Russian insults and invasions. Catherine's fleets destroyed, Sweden would have full opportunity to ravage her coasts, and to seek the recovery of her Finnish dominions.

But Pitt contented himself with half measures. Instead of destroying the Russian fleet in the Baltic, or of attacking it in the Mediterranean, the moment it commenced its operations on the Turkish dependencies, and then clearing the Black Sea of their ships, he contented himself with issuing a proclamation in the London Gazette, forbidding English seamen to enter any foreign service, and commanding the owners of the vessels engaged by Russia to renounce their contracts. Thus the fleet before Oczakoff was left to operate against the Turks, and the fleet in the Baltic was detained there. This was, in fact, the preservation of the Russian power, and the establishment of it on such a footing as has proved most disastrous to modern Europe, and which still menaces it with a formidable future. But for this, it is probable that the eastward march of Russia would have been arrested for ever at this moment.

To insure a powerful diversion, the sultan had engaged the military co-operation of Sweden. Sweden had been forcibly

deprived of Finland by the Czar Peter the Great, and she longed to recover it. She had a brave army, but no money. The grand Turk, to enable her to commence the enterprise, had sent her a present of money, amounting to about four hundred thousand pounds sterling. Sweden put her fleet in preparation in all haste, and had Pitt merely allowed the Russian fleet to quit the Baltic, there was nothing to prevent the execution of the Swedish design on Finland, nor, indeed, of marching direct on Petersburg in the absence of the army.

But the English measures detained the Russian fleet in the Baltic with Greig at its head, and Russia was saved from her due chastisement. The king of Sweden, indeed, landed an army of thirty-five thousand men in Finland; and his brother, the duke of Sudermania, appeared in the Baltic at the head of a strong fleet. Nothing could have prevented Gustavus from marching directly upon the Russian capital, and Petersburg was consequently thrown into the wildest alarm. But Gustavus was only bent on recovering the provinces which Russia had reft from Sweden. He advanced successfully for some time, the Russians everywhere flying before him; but Russian gold and Russian intrigue soon altered all this. Catherine ordered her fleet, which was in the gulf of Finland, with Greig at its head, to bear down on the Swedish fleet, and, at the same time, emissaries were sent amongst the officers of Gustavus's army with plenty of gold, and letters were sent to the states of Sweden, calling on them to disavow the proceedings of the king. Before Gustavus had quitted Sweden with his army, her minister, passing over the king himself, had made similar communications to Gustavus's proud and disaffected nobles, and Gustavus had ordered him out of the country. The Russian and Swedish fleets now came to an engagement in the straits of Kalkbaden. The battle was desperate; the Swedes fought with their accustomed valour; and the Russians, under the management of Greig and the English officers, showed that they were apt scholars. The two fleets separated, after doing each other great mischief, each claiming the victory. Catherine immediately rewarded Greig with a letter of thanks, written by her own hand, and with the more substantial present of a large sum of money, and a good estate in Livonia. But the partial success of Russia by sea had the effect of encouraging the corrupted officers of Gustavus to refuse to proceed further in Finland. He was about to commence the siege of the important city of Fredericksham; but the officers laid down their arms, on the plea, put into their mouths by Russia, that the war was not undertaken by the consent of the states.

Gustavus seized and sent the chief mutineers under arrest to Stockholm; but he found those who remained equally infected. In fact, the whole of the Swedish aristocracy had long aimed at usurping the entire powers of the state, and of dictating to the king. Whilst thus suddenly disabled, the men themselves, in a great measure, assuming the language of their officers, Gustavus found that Sweden itself was menaced with an invasion of the Danes from the side of Norway, at the instigation of Russia. It was necessary to hurry home, leaving the portion of the army in Finland, which remained subordinate, under the command of his