Produced by Brendan OConnor, Jonathan Ingram, David King, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Library of Early Journals.) BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE. BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE. No. CCCLXXXVIII. FEBRUARY, 1848. VOL. LXIII. EDINBURGH: WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET; AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON. PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH. CONTENTS. The Russian Empire 129 Autobiography of a German Headsman 148 Edinburgh after Flodden 165 Subjects for Pictures 176 Jerusalem 192 My English Acquaintance 194 Our West Indian Colonies 219 Now and Then 239 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE. (_Secret History of the Court and Government of Russia, under the Emperors Alexander and Nicholas._ By H. SCHNITZLER. Two vols. Bentley: London.) Russia is the most extraordinary country on the globe, in the four most important particulars of empire,—its history, its extent, its population, and its power. It has for Europe another interest,—the interest of alarm, the evidence of an ambition which has existed for a hundred and fifty years, and has never paused; an increase of territory which has never suffered the slightest casualty of fortune; the most complete security against the retaliation of European war; and a government at once despotic and popular; exhibiting the most boundless authority in the sovereign, and the most boundless submission in the people; a mixture of habitual obedience, and divine homage: the reverence to a monarch, with almost the prostration to a divinity. Its history has another superb anomaly: Russia gives the most memorable instance in human annals, of the powers which lie within the mind of individual man. Peter the Great was not the restorer, or the reformer of Russia; he was its moral _creator_. He found it, not as Augustus found Rome, according to the famous adage, “brick, and left it marble:” he found it a living swamp, and left it covered with the fertility of laws, energy, and knowledge: he found it Asiatic, and left it European: he removed it as far from Scythia, as if he had placed the diameter of the globe between: he found it not brick, but mire, and he transformed a region of huts into the magnificence of empire.