last letter of M. Drouyn de Lhuys to the French ambassador at St Petersburg. We believe the Emperor of Russia to have been led into his present difficult position—a position from which escape, unless through a disastrous war, seems almost impossible—by the erroneous information he received with respect to the state of public feeling in France and England, from “antiquated imbecilities” of both countries. In ordinary times it would be no easy task to so impose on any person of intelligence, even much inferior to that of the Emperor Nicholas; and his facility of belief in the present instance can only be explained by the social and political complications supposed to exist in a country which has gone through so many violent changes. Under the regime of Louis Philippe, the female diplomatists of the Rue St Florentin were enabled to ascertain with accuracy, and communicate with fidelity, the secret policy of the Tuileries. In the Russian _salons_ of Paris, the centre of the more important _espionage_, were nightly assembled ministers, ex-ministers, functionaries past and present, and, in fine, all who, in official parlance, were supposed to represent France. The secrets, the gossip, the scandal of every political coterie in the capital, were discharged, there, as in one common reservoir; and were thence transmitted for the information, or amusement, of the Imperial Court of Russia. The ministers of the citizen-king were too eager to propitiate the favour of the northern Court, to withhold their confidence from any of the Czar’s agents, official or non-official. The revolution of February rudely interfered with that machinery, directed by a well-known _intrigante_. Attendance at a half-dozen saloons no longer sufficed to obtain a knowledge of the state of the country. Whilst a dozen dowagers of the old schools, and as many retired, discontented, or broken-down statesmen, and a few amateur republicans, were indulging in reveries of a restoration, or the re-establishment of a convention, with its appendages of committees of public safety, the dream was broken by the acclamations of millions, who bestowed absolute power on the only man capable of saving them. The Cabinet of St. Petersburg could not be expected to know more about the country than those who had for so many years administered its affairs. The agents of Russia beheld the struggle that had been going on so long among political coteries, the selfish disputes of discarded placemen, and their ephemeral and hollow reconciliations; and they supposed that, because adventurers quarrelled, or political coteries made war on each other, the nation was similarly divided. The diplomatic communications of that period must be curious; and we confess we should like to be permitted a perusal of the confidential correspondence of the well-known _diplomate_ in petticoats, who for so many years was the pet agent of the Czar, and for whom existence was valueless unless passed in the