WHEN the present generation of readers was young the French books put into its hands were naturally few. We can remember during our own tender years having had our choice between Telemachus, with his island-goddess, Paul and Virginia, with their palmetto-groves, and Elizabeth, in the snows of her Siberian exile. As we followed her footsteps along the weary versts that separated her from St Petersburg and from the presence-chamber of the Tzar, we wept over her sorrows; and when we thought of the hunger and cold, the wolves and the snowdrifts, it was only the more harrowing to be told that the tale of the "Siberian Exile" was founded on fact. It was during the reign of Paul that the incident occurred which Madame Cottin has made immortal. A young girl, Prascovia Lopouloff by name, obtained leave from her parents to start for St Petersburg on foot. She believed that she could thus obtain the pardon of a father who had been for sixteen years a Siberian exile. After innumerable dangers, and after an exposure to cold at Christmas so intense that at Ekaterinenburg she was found motionless in the bottom of a sledge, she found a protector in Madame Millin. Her new friends detained her with them till spring returned, and then sent her on her way to the capital. She was presented to the Empress - Mother, and the pardon she sought was granted. Madame Cottin, at this part of the story, introduces a hero and a love match. The "ower true" tale is a much sadder one. Prascovia's

health broke down from the excessive hardships of her journey, and after entering a convent at Nijni, she died of consumption in 1809ignorant, no doubt, of the celebrity which her filial piety was to obtain under the disguise of Elizabeth, or the Exiles of Siberia.'

Another Elizabeth was in the first quarter of this century curiously connected with Siberia. When Madame Speransky-Bagréeff the novelist was seven years old, her father, M. Michael Speransky, Secretary of State to Emperor Alexander, was exiled to Perm, and in 1818, she was again separated from him when he was sent as Govvernor-General to Siberia. Unlike Prascovia Lopouloff, the real prototype of Madame Cottin's heroine, this young girl never lived in the country, for her health was so delicate that M. Speransky would not allow her either to share his banishment, or to accompany him in his honourable mission. But Siberia was associated with all her joys and sorrows; she was sent to St Petersburg, with the petition which was to procure a pardon, or at least an inquiry into her father's case, and we shall see that these Siberian associations left their marks on Elizabeth's genius, and gaye a very original colouring to her best works.

Elizaveta Michailovna Speransky was the Minister's only child, by an English wife, a Miss Stevens, whom he had married when his foot had already mounted some steps of the ladder of success, and whom he lost only too soon. Madame Speransky died almost immediately after the

birth of her child. Elizabeth was reared by her maternal grandmother, but through all the vicissitudes of his career, the statesman's first thought was ever for his little girl.

These vicissitudes make up a page of Russian history, new probably to some of our readers, but a page not the less illustrative of Russian political life at the time of the peace of Tilsit, and very typical of the reign of the Tzar, Alexander, surnamed the Blessed.*

Michael Gramatine was born in 1771, at Vladimir, in the government of Podolia, and was the son of a priest.

The families of the white or secular clergy of Russia form a large body in society, and are almost, so to speak, its Levitical class. The son of a pope or priest generally becomes a priest in his turn, and it is as likely as not that he will also select the wife, who is essential to his taking orders, out of another priestly house. But the young Michael, in his seminary at Vladimir, had aspirations reaching far beyond the post of a village pastor. That he had ever ambitious hopes is evident from the surname which he adopted, Speransky being but a Russianised form of the Italian word Speranza, or hope. For the monastic life he had no vocation, even should bishoprics loom in the distance for a servant of S. Basil; but after filling the chairs of Mathematics and Physics, in the Newsky Academy of St Petersburg, he became Secretary to Prince Alexis Kouriakine. Thanks to the good offices of this eccentric patron, he found himself in 1801, a Secretary of State, and thus, at the age of thirty, able to put in execution some of the plans formed in his ambitious youth and boyhood.

This was in 1801; and Speransky,

as Assistant Minister of Justice, as Governor of Finland, as Privy Councillor, and as Secretary of State, continued in office and in favour till 1812. His master was his junior by six years. Alexander Pavlovitch had also begun life with aspirations and projects, perhaps it should be said with dreams. Among European sovereigns even at that momentous epoch-the close of the eighteenth century-Alexander was a man of mark. Among Muscovite Tzars he was as novel as a phoenix. He possessed taste, virtue, generosity, and ability. He saw that a great inheritance had fallen to him-not only great in a material sense, as representing the eighth part of the habitable globe, but great in a moral and political point of view. The sceptre just wrested from the crazed hands of Paul had been intended by Peter the Great to be that of no mere barbarous empire. It is true that its boundaries had been enlarged since then by conquest and treaties, and that Catherine II. had kept up its prestige; but the eccentricities of Peter III. and of Paul I. had threatened to obliterate the Tzars of Russia from the list of the great Western potentates. Of these princes, the second, like the first, had just lost his life at the hands of a band of noble conspirators; and Alexander Pavlovitch had to face the nobility of his kingdom in all the attitudes of turbulence or of intrigue. The prestige of Alexander's crown abroad and at home was at stake, and the result must depend on his own firmness, and perhaps even more on his choice of friends.

To friendship the heart of this Tzar was singularly inclined-and he found friends not unworthy of himself. History remembers his devotion to Prince Adam Czartorisky,

and the mystical intimacy that sprang up later between himself and Madame de Krüdener. Other ties again were formed with foreigners. There was La Harpe, his former tutor, Sir Alexander Crichton, Sir James Wylie, and Dr Leighton, Scotch physicians, placed by him respectively at the heads of civil, military, and naval departments. Of Russians there were Count Stroganoff, a brave and honest soldier; Admiral Mordvinoff, a Minister whose clemency many an accused had reason to bless; Novossiltzoff, a commissioner long remembered in Poland; and Michael Speransky, who perhaps more than any others shared the philanthropic plans of the Tzar.

Paul, in the earlier part of his reign, had made some not unsalutary reforms, measures which had had their rise assuredly not in philanthropy, but more likely in a spirit of contradiction to the policy of his mother. Alexander determined to do far greater things for the country, and as one of his first steps he adopted a determination to have ministers for the different branches of administration.

The officers so created were eleven in number, and Alexander honestly wished to give them the responsibility which he declared them to possess. Unfortunately, responsible ministers are compatible only with representative governments, and are incompatible with an autocracy; but the Tzar was perhaps the only person, who, enamoured with this new idea and this novel creation, failed to see a want of logic in a responsible (?) Cabinet, which is liable at any hour to the intervention of an imperial ukaze. An ukaze would override all decisions and statutes, and could not require the signatures of the Ministers. Once before in Russian history had Empress Catherine II. attempted a

similar travesty of liberal institutions. She once convoked at Moscow a meeting of deputies, and there she invited them to compose a constitution called "the fundamental legislation." A Tartar hearing the fame of these new orders, naïvely inquired whether, when the new constitution began to work, ukazes would still be in force should they continue to appear? He was told that they would, and he then expressed as his opinion that it was much the same thing to him whether the "fundamental legislation" was made or let alone. For Alexander, in quest of the best of governments, and believing firmly in his new Cabinet, Michael Speransky was a fitting Minister. His own policy, if a Russian statesman may be said to have a policy, was tentative and progressive. His mind, naturally inquisitive and speculative, was not bounded by a purely Russian horizon, and he possessed along with these more imaginative qualities a genuine power of organisation.

It is impossible in this place to enter on any detailed account of the projects which he formed for altering at once the spirit, the mechanism, and the details of government. It would interest none but his countrymen, and of Russians only those who have studied the subject enough to be able to compare Speransky's proposals with Speransky's actions, and the measure of reform as planned by him prior to 1812, with the measure since granted to the country by another Alexander. It is enough to say of it that it was intended to comprise a national assembly of representatives, and that he paid great attention to the department of finance, which he proposed to subdivide into four bureaux, those of Finance proper, the Treasury, the Control, and the Civil List. Much of this constitution has remained

an absolute dream, and some of it, though existing on paper, has unfortunately become as good as a dead letter.

Speransky's ecclesiastical reforms gave the greatest offence. Not that he was singular in them; for Basil Drosdov, so celebrated as Philarète, the eloquent Metropolitan of Moscow, was, in 1812, one of the most influential members of the committee for the reform of religious schools. Like Speransky, Philarète was a priest's son, like Speransky, a member of the Bible Society, and engaged in pressing on a translation of the Scriptures out of the old Sclavonic into the vulgar tongue. But, unlike the Secretary, Philarète was not an envied Minister, nor did he offer the same points of attack to bigoted cavillers. For example, Speransky's wife had been a Protestant, his child was being brought up by a Swiss grandmother, and his own extensive circle of friends already included Quakers, like Wheeler the engineer, Scotchmen, Calvinists, renegades, Lutherans, and foreigners of markedly rationalistic tendencies. His financial operations had been, however, very much to the point, and they were also successful.

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They were works of no mon difficulty. After the peace of Tilsit, it was to M. Speransky that the task was intrusted of meeting the financial difficulties of the country at the close of her war with France. We see then that no small demands must have been made upon his ingenuity and upon her resources. The budget of 1810 had presented a deficit of no less than 105,000,000 roubles; but, thanks to the novel methods of taxation indicated by this Minister, the receipts of 1812, (the year of his disgrace!) showed an increase of 175,000,000 roubles, by which the kingdom was saved from bankruptcy. The plan of Speransky

had been submitted by the Tzar to a special committee, meeting at the house of the Finance Minister, and both there and in the Council it had been carried through by a powerful majority.

All this might have led the ingenious statesman to look for the gratitude of the Emperor and of the empire. But envy was more powerful than gratitude or public spirit at the Court of Alexander, and secret denunciations were already preparing the way for a catastrophe.

Meantime the cabinet of M. Speransky continued to be crowded with applicants, clients, and flatterers, and in his cabinet a little girl was generally to be found playing.

Elizabeth adored her father, and she followed him about as Geraldine Necker had followed hers; only when a visitor was announced this shy little child would often retreat, and hide herself behind a pair of globes at the further end of the room.

One morning in March 1812, Elizabeth was suddenly awakened by a servant, and a pencilled note was put into her hands. "I am exiled," it began, "and I have only half an hour in which to prepare for my departure. I have been twice to thy door, but finding thee always sleeping I did not care to awaken thee. I bless thee from afar; and I bid thee join me, with thy grandmother, at Nijni - Novgorod, as soon as everything can be arranged in the house.-Thy father."

The banishment of an officer of State, or of a favourite, was no novelty in Russia; and sudden dismissal from the capital is always a feature of such a fall from favour. Speransky, as he travelled away to Nijni, may have remembered more than one such precedent. Compared with the fate of Count Golovkin, who was banished by Empress

Elizabeth Petrovna to Nijni Kolymsk, or with that of the first Menschikoff, in his distant grave at Berezov, his own case presented, however, some hopeful features. He was told that "when the situation of public affairs was less critical, the Tzar would take a year or two to examine the data collected with regard to him ;" and at Nijni he was received with considerate kindness by all the best families of the province. Elizabeth soon joined him; the climate suited her, and her studies were resumed. In short, father and daughter might have had a great deal of happiness in each other's society, had not an order been sent out, to the effect that M. Speransky's banishment was to be prolonged, and that its place was to be Perm, on the very confines of Siberia.

An enemy had done this,-or rather it was the work of the clique of which Armfeld and Balachèff were the leaders, representing, as they did, the whole reactionary party, and one which Speransky could never hope to please.

His birth alone was obnoxious to their exclusiveness. His financial operations, his intimacy with Fessler, and with the Illuminati, and his Protestant marriage, were all so many rocks of offence to them. His policy was contrary to the system which they understood, and which they still regretted. What Speransky called "the chaos of ukazes was not incongruous with their notions of government, but all innovations were; for them banks, Lancastrian schools, Bible societies, and reforms in communes and courts of justice, had no charms. They had been accustomed to intrigues for place, to great profits when in place; so they praised the old Russian or "Moscow" system, while they deprecated the more progressive or "Petersburg" policy,

with its ideas borrowed from Western countries. Of course there were honourable exceptions to such a way of thinking; for example, the lycées of Prince Bézborodko at Nijni, and of Prince Demidoff at Yaroslav, date from the reign of Alexander: but not the less did the educational measures of 1802 disgust many, and Speransky's enemies identified him with this inauspicious march of intellect.

When they represented Speransky as a traitor to the country, as an associate of "secret societies," it must, however, not be forgotten that secret societies did exist, and that alongside of the imperial theories and practice of progress in Russia, there already ran a stream of ultra-liberalism, which gave some grounds for the alarms expressed by the old country, or Moscow, party. Such secret associations they believed to possess the sympathy of Alexander's Secretary of State. Conspiracies with which they were more familiar had pre-engaged their own; and the fact that M. Speransky had in 1807, bestowed a bishopric on Fessler, the renegade Capuchin, while it allowed them to suspect his orthodoxy, furnished them with a new ground of complaint.

It was time for Speransky, when he saw himself thus pursued by the ill wishes of Armfeld and of his party, to put in a word in his own defence, and to plead for a mitigation of a sentence now become so severe. Perm is on the western frontier of Siberia; the latitude of 70° was sure to be fatal to Elizabeth's health, whose chest had always been delicate, for there dreary marshes and great expanses of snow anticipated all the features of Siberian life. Moreover, the Secretary of State was ruined. His private fortune was originally nil, his income had ceased, and the strictest economy had now become necessary.

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