When we contemplate those financial embarrassments which arose from half a century of almost universal war, and those awful burdens which bent to the dust, in suffering and shame, the whole people of a great country; when we consider the absurd and wicked distinctions which separated man from man, and the settled hostility of the clergy to all means of intellectual and social improvement; when we remember the unparalleled vices of a licentious court, the ignominious negligence of the government to the happiness and wants of those whom it was its duty to protect, and the shameless insults which an infamous woman was allowed to heap upon the nation; and then when we bear in mind all the elements of disgust, of discontent, of innovation, and of reckless and impious defiance,--can we wonder that a revolution was inevitable, if society is destined to be progressive, and man ever to be allowed to break his fetters? On that Revolution I cannot enter. I leave the subject as the winds began to howl and the rains began to fall and the floods began to rise, and all together to beat upon that house which was built upon the sand. AUTHORITIES. Lacretelle's Histoire de France; Anquetil; Henri Martin's History of France; Dulaure's Histoire de Paris; Lord Brougham's Lives of Rousseau and Voltaire; Memoires de Madame de Pompadour; Mémoires de Madame Du Barry; Revue des Deux Mondes, 1847; Château de Lucienne; L'Ami des Hommes, par M. le Marquis de Mirabeau; Maximes Générales du Gouvernement, par Le Docteur Quesnay; Histoire Philosophique du Règne de Louis XV., par le Comte de Tocqueville; Mémoires Secrets; Pièces Inédites sous le Règne de Louis XV.; Anecdotes de la Cour de France pendant la Faveur de Madame Pompadour; Louis XV. et la Société du XVIII. Siècle, par M. Capefigue; Alison's introductory chapter to the History of Europe; Louis XV. et son Siècle, par Voltaire; Saint Simon; Mémoires de Duclos; Mémoires du Duc de Richelieu. PETER THE GREAT. A. D. 1672-1725. HIS SERVICES TO RUSSIA.