The author commences with the reign of Alexander, and gives a just panegyric to the kindliness of his disposition, the moderation of his temper, and his sincere desire to promote the happiness of his people. Nothing but this disposition could have saved him from all the vices of ambition, profligacy, and irreligion; for his tutor was La Harpe, one of the savans of the Swiss school, a man of accomplishment and talent, but a scoffer. But the English reader should be reminded, that when men of this rank of ability are pronounced hostile to religion, their hostility was not to the principles of Christianity, but to the religion of France; to the performances of the national worship, to the burlesque miracles wrought at the tomb of the Abbé Paris, and to that whole system of human inventions and monkish follies, which was as much disbelieved in France as it was disdained in England. In fact, the religion of the gospel had never come into their thoughts; and when they talked of revelation, they thought only of the breviary. The Empress Catherine, finding no literature in Russia, afraid, or ashamed of being known as a German, and extravagantly fond of fame, attached herself to the showy pamphleteers of France, and courted every gale of French adulation in return. She even corresponded personally with some of the French _litterateurs_, and was French in every thing except living in St Petersburg, and wearing the Russian diadem. She was even so much the slave of fashion as to adopt, or pretend to adopt, the fantasies in government which the French were now beginning to mingle with their fantasies in religious. She wrote thus to Zimmerman, the author of the dreamy and dreary work on “Solitude,” “I have been attached to philosophy, because my soul has always been singularly _republican_. I confess that this tendency stands in strange contrast with the unlimited power of my _place_.” If the quiet times of Europe had continued, and France had exhibited the undisturbed pomps of her ancient court, Alexander would probably have been a Frenchman and _philosophe_ on the banks of the Neva; but stirring times were to give him more rational ideas, and the necessities of Russia reclaimed him from the absurdities of his education. La Harpe himself was a man of some distinction—a Swiss, though thoroughly French and revolutionary. After leaving Russia, he became prominent, even in France, as an abettor of republican principles, and was one of the members of the Swiss Directory. La Harpe survived the Revolution, the Empire, and the Bourbons, and died in 1838.