There are some problems which still perplex historians, and will probably perplex them for many an age; and among those are, the good or evil predominant in the Crusades, the use of a Pope in Italy, (where he obviously offers, and must _always_ offer, the strongest obstacle to the _union_ of the Italian States into a national government,) the true character of Peter the Great, and the true policy of placing the capital of Russia in the northern extremity of the empire. It appears to be now at least approaching to a public question,—Whether Peter showed more of good sense, or of savage determination, in building a magnificent city in a swamp, where man had never before built any thing but a fisherman’s hut; and in condemning his posterity for ever to live in the most repulsive climate of Europe? Some pages in these volumes are given to the inquiry into the wisdom of deserting an ancient, natural, and superb seat of empire in the South, for a new, unnatural, and decaying seat of sovereignty in the vicinage of the Arctic circle; of retarding the progress of civilisation by the insuperable difficulties of a climate, where the sea is frozen up for six months in the year, and the rivers and land are frozen up for nine! The question now is, Whether Peter had not equally frozen up the Russian energies, impeded the natural prosperity of the empire, and flung the people back into the age of Ivan I.? Of course, no one doubts that the Russian empire is of vast extent and substantial power; but its chief power is in its central provinces, and in its faculty of expansion into the south. Its northern provinces defy improvement, and can be sustained only by the toil of government. The probable view of the case is, that Peter was deluded by his passion for naval supremacy. He had seen the fleets of Western Europe trained in their boisterous but ever-open seas; and he determined to have a fleet in a sea which, throughout the winter, is a sheet of ice, and where the ships are imbedded as if they were on dry ground. He had then no Black Sea for his field of exercise, and no Sebastopol for his dockyard. He touched upon no sea but the Baltic; and, under the infatuation of being a naval power, he threw the Russian government as far as he could towards the North Pole. Moscow should have remained the Russian capital. With an admirable climate, at once keen enough to keep the human frame in its vigour, and with the warm summer of the south, to supply all the vegetable products of Europe; its position commanding the finest provinces of Western Asia, Russia would have been mistress of the Black Sea a century earlier, had probably been in possession of Asia Minor, and have fixed a Viceroy in the city of the Sultans.