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, assumed the garb of a pilot, put
down his name on the list of workmen, wielded with his own hand
the caulking iron and the mallet, fixed the pumps, and twisted
the ropes. Ambassadors who came to pay their respects to him were
forced, much against their will, to clamber up the rigging of a
man of war, and found him enthroned on the cross trees.

Such was the prince whom the populace of London now crowded to
behold. His stately form, his intellectual forehead, his piercing
black eyes, his Tartar nose and mouth, his gracious smile, his
frown black with all the stormy rage and hate of a barbarian
tyrant, and above all a strange nervous convulsion which
sometimes transformed his countenance during a few moments, into