you see it, from the time of the prince till our time."

"May I see it, papa? What a very clear hand! but you must translate it for me."

"Then here it is:-'To the father and master of the family of Lorraine, whoever shall be in the year, according to Christian computation, 1811,Agasicles Syennesis, the Carian, bids hail. Do thou, on the 18th day of June, when the sun has well descended, or departed '- decesserit, the word is-send thy eldest daughter, without any companion, to the astronomer's coenaculum'why, he never ate supper, the poor old fellow, unless it was the one he died of and there let her search in a closet or cupboard '-in secessu muri, the words are, as far as I can make out and she will find a small document, which to me has been in great price. There will also be something else, to be treated pro re nata'—that means according to circumstances' and according to the orders in the document aforesaid. The virgin will be brave, and beautiful, ready to give herself for the house, and of swiftly-growing prudence. If there be no such virgin then the need for her will not have arisen. It is necessary that no young man should go, and my document must lie hidden for another century. It is not possible that any one of uncertain skill should be certain.

But there ought to be a great comet also burning in the sky, of the same complexion as the one that makes my calculations doubtful. Farewell, whosoever thou shalt be, from me descended, and obey me.'"

me.

"Papa, I declare, it quite frightens How could he have predicted me, for instance, and this great comet, and even you?"

"Then you think that you answer to your description! My darling, I do believe that you do. But you never shall give yourself for the house,' or for fifty thousand houses. Now, will you have anything to do with this strange affair; or will you not? Much rather would I hear you say that you will have nothing to do with it, and that the old man's book may sleep for at least another century."

66

'Now, papa, you know how much you would be disappointed in me. And do you think that I could have any self-respect remaining? And beside all that, how could I hope to sleep in my bed with all those secrets ever dangling over me?"

"That last is a very important point. With your excitable nature you had better go always through a thing. It was the same with your dear mother. Here are the keys, my daughter. I really feel ashamed to dwell so long on a mere superstition."

sperity," of the "United Sclavonians," with others rejoicing in such ominous names as the "Polish Patriots," and the "Reapers." In November 1825, the Emperor Alexander died at Taganrog, and an oath of allegiance was then taken all over the kingdom to his eldest brother Constantine Pavlovitch. It was not the less well known in St Petersburg that the sceptre of empire was not destined for this, the eldest of the Grand Dukes, but for Nicholas, the greatest and ablest prince of the Romanoff dynasty. Constantine had abdicated, and though the use made of his name by these conspirators may have made him later an object of suspicion to his brother, Nicholas, in November 1825, had no reason to doubt the good faith in which the formal abdication had been made. The eccentric Grand Duke had been wont to say that the crown would never suit him; that, as the nation had only allowed his father to live for three years, they would certainly not endure his rule for three months; and that, as he preferred to preserve his life, he meant to abide by his resolution of never reigning in Russia. That he was now put forward by the Dekabrists was owing to his peculiar incapacity only it was such that they hoped to have him first as the tool and afterwards as the victim of their projects and moreover, his seniority was a powerful engine in their hands for preventing the accession of the too capable Nicholas. On the morning of the 14th December, Madame Speransky - Bagréeff drove out in her sledge, but on reaching the Admiralty Square, she found a great crowd assembled there; her horses' heads were turned by two friends; and by the time that she reached her house a rattle of musketry was au

dible, and the rebellion had become an undeniable fact. The army had revolted. The ringleaders were leavened through with the liberal ideas of which we have spoken; but they had appealed to the soldiers in the name of legitimacy; and persuaded as these were that Constantine was being robbed of his birthright, regiment after regiment had refused to take the oaths to Nicholas. While Elizabeth hurried home, her father had to gallop to the scene of action, where, confronting his revolted legions, stood their new, terrible, and Jove-like Tzar.

By three o'clock that short December day was drawing to its close

the darkness was approaching; still in the great Square, and on the Isaac Bridge, the insurgents made good their stand. Not that they were undismayed. Prince Serge Troubetzkoi, who was to have headed them, was absent; and Obolensky, who replaced him, was neither a warrior nor a strategist. Two Metropolitans in full canonicals had already implored them to lay down their arms; shots had been fired, and Miloradovich and Stürler had fallen on the one side and on the other. At this moment Count Toll* galloped up to the Emperor, and said to him, "Sire, command that the place be swept by cannon, or resign your throne." The guns were fired; and when the day was done, Nicholas returned to his palace, and to a trembling wife, and to a boy of seven years old, whom he could now first greet as the Tzarévitch of all the Russias. The revolt was quelled; then came the trial, the sentence, and the execution of the conspirators.

At the head of the list was the name of Prince Serge Troubetzkoi, of the Preobrashensky regiment of Body-Guards; but it included. other officers of the Guards, privy

councillors, secretaries, and members of nearly all the noblest families of Russia and Lithuania. Now comes the question, What knowledge, if any, had Speransky of all this mischief? On the night of the 13th December, through what one of his biographers calls a "fatalité déplorable," several of the conspirators were dining in his daughter's house. But it is still more remarkable that in the original plan drawn up by the conspirators in Prince Obolensky's house, and on no more remote a day than the 12th December, Speransky was named by them as a member of the provisional government which they intended to establish. Admiral Mordvinof was to have been associated with him.

This fact rests on the evidence of a military man present at the arrangement.*

Now we may imagine, and it is possible to do so, that Speransky knew nothing of this flattering but highly dangerous preference for himself, and that he was ignorant of the honour in store for him: still it inflicts a shock on the mind when one finds him taking up a high moral and political attitude, and sitting on the tribunal before which these Dekabrist conspirators, young and old, were arraigned. Nicholas Tourgenieff, Confidential Secretary to the Imperial Council, and one of the first batch of thirty-one victims sentenced to be beheaded, thus comments on the fact: "One of the members of the supreme tribunal was Speransky, said to be the cleverest of them all. This is the same man of whom I have spoken in another place. He became, so to speak, the factotum of the trial; and he it was who presented the final report to the Emperor, in which his Majesty was begged not to pardon the con

Speransky,

demned. to whom no one can deny many other qualities, did not possess that of courage: in defending me he feared to seem to defend some Liberal principles; and what frightened him most was the fact that, in the eyes of many persons, he was already suspected of entertaining them."

After reading the above, it is difficult not to say to one's self, that if Mademoiselle Speransky had once been ready to act the pretty part of "Elizabeth, the exile of Siberia," her father showed on this occasion his fitness for the less elevated role of the celebrated "Vicar of Bray." The explanation of the situation seems to be this: Speransky, the priest's son, had started in life as a theoretical but ambitious Liberal. Between such theories, fostered by the philanthropy of a Tzar, and the secret practices of a conspiracy, whose ends were clearly revolutionary, he became aware of a great and judicious difference; and, moreover, the liberal Tzar, who was wont to say of himself that he

was a happy accident" in Russian history, was dead. The Dekabrists, on their side, had heard of the fame of Speransky's early theories, of his disgrace, and of his banishment. Nay, more-they may have picked up in his daughter's salon some of his latest sentiments, such as "my real friends are the poor and lowly, prisoners and exiles;" and they may have been led to reckon on his help in opposing the reactionary rule of Nicholas.

Of course it is understood that the conspirators had cherished no abstract feeling of devotion to Constantine, but were simply determined to oppose the accession of the younger man, who would have but one remedy for Liberal sentiments, and who would set himself once and for all above all

laws, ancient or recent. But Speransky, whatever sympathy he might have had with exiles, had had too much personal experience of Siberia ever to put himself again dans cette galère. Accordingly he sat on the supreme tribunal, saw five young lives pay the penalty of rebellion, and a long train of political criminals, one hundred and sixteen in all, wend their way to the snowy prison which he knew only too well. Among them was his own secretary, a lad whom the Governor had brought from Siberia with him, and whom he had since treated almost as a son, Madame Speransky-Bagréeff petitioning in vain for his pardon. In the eyes of the new Tzar, M. Speransky at any rate happily contrived to appear perfectly innocent; and being a very valuable public servant, he continued in harness till his death-one asks one's self, at what sacrifice to self-respect or to principle? since the policy of Nicholas was eminently antipathetic to the ideas he had once entertained. "No dreams, gentlemen, no dreams," the new Tzar had said to the Polish nobles whose heads Alexander had filled with the semblance of a constitution, and with visions of indulgence for their national spirit. If the same words were not precisely addressed to the Russian Liberals, the same idea was often conveyed to them in very cogent methods; and such dangerous topics as the emancipation of the serfs had to be dropped sine die.

The old Russian party was now flattered by a Tzar who desired his nobility to speak Russian, who patronised the national dress, and who encouraged a good deal of PhiloSclavonic literature and fashion, provided always these were kept free of Neology and of Liberalism.

Nicholas loved Russia: he believed in himself as her visible head, as the fountain of honour, and as the dispenser, not of justice, but of favour.

He

He was the very embodiment of autocracy, for he had its majesty, its grace, its charms, and its caprices. There have been many more tyrannical sovereigns in Russia than Nicholas Pavlovitch, but there never has been a Tzar so perfectly arbitrary. Like his brother, the Grand Duke Michael, he had a passion for soldiering in all its details, and he was a martinet in discipline; but he sometimes showed mercy, and he took pleasure in doing so, because such clemency is but another kind of power. acted and looked his part as no crowned monarch ever has done before or since; and he did it consciously, enjoying the effect which he produced on the mind of the spectator. "Have you no fear?" he once asked a very young maid of honour, whom he found, on the first morning after her introduction to her duties at the palace, perched upon a window-sill, and reading a novel of Mrs Gaskell's aloud to a laughing companion, who seemed to enjoy the jokes in "Cranford" as much as herself. The great Tzar expected to have made more impression even on two young girls! Some such jealous vanity made him very harsh even with women, when they had displeased him. For example, he abhorred Madame Swetchine, on account of her wandering tastes and generally Western habits of thought. A still more serious crime was her apostasy to the Church of Rome, when she became the leader of a faction which sent more than one Russian nobleman into the ranks of the Order of Jesus. Madame Speransky-Bagréeff found him also eminently unfriendly through all the vicissitudes of her career; and in all probability the fatalité déplorable of her ill-selected dinner-party of the 13th December was never forgiven by him.

Once that period of intrigue, disorder, and anxiety was outlived, the literary circle which surrounded the