[Footnote 10: The gallant acts of the Finlanders and the brutality of the Russians are brought forward in Arndt's "Swedish Histories."] [Footnote 11: When regent, on the death of Gustavus III., he had spared his murderers and released those criminated in the conspiracy. On the present occasion, he yielded in everything to the aristocracy, and voted for the dethronement of his own house, which, as he had no children, infallibly ensued on the exclusion of the youthful Gustavus.] [Footnote 12: An extremely suspicious accident, which gave rise to many reports.] [Footnote 13: Vide Posselt's Sixth Annual.] [Footnote 14: This castle was haunted by the ghost of King Eric XIV., who had long pined here in close imprisonment, and who had once before, during a sumptuous entertainment given by Gustavus Adolphus IV. to his brother-in-law, the Margrave of Baden, struck the whole court with terror by his shrieks and groans.] [Footnote 15: Wimpfen, History of Schleswig.] CCLIX. The Russian Campaign An enormous comet that, during the whole of the hot summer of 1811, hung threatening in the heavens, appeared as the harbinger of great and important vicissitudes to the enslaved inhabitants of the earth, and it was in truth by an act of Divine providence that a dispute arose between the two giant powers intent upon the partition of Europe. Napoleon was over-reached by Russia, whose avarice, far from being glutted by the possession of Finland, great part of Prussian and Austrian Poland, Moldavia, and Wallachia, still craved for more, and who built her hopes of Napoleon's compliance with her demands on his value for her friendship. Belgrade was seized, Servia demanded, and the whole of Turkey in Europe openly grasped at. Napoleon was, however, little inclined to cede the Mediterranean to his Russian ally, to whose empire he gave the Danube as a boundary. Russia next demanded possession of the duchy of Warsaw, which was refused by Napoleon. The Austrian marriage was meanwhile concluded. Napoleon, prior to his demand for the hand of the archduchess Maria Louisa, had sued for that of the grandduchess Anna, sister to the emperor Alexander, who was then in her sixteenth year, but, being refused by her mother, the empress Maria, a princess of Wurtemberg, and Alexander delaying a decisive answer, he formed an alliance with the Habsburg. This event naturally led Russia to conclude that she would no longer be permitted to aggrandize herself at the expense of Austria, and Alexander consequently assumed a threatening posture and condescended to listen to the complaints, hitherto condemned to silence, of the agricultural and mercantile classes. No Russian vessel durst venture out to sea, and a Russian fleet had been seized by the British in the harbors of Lisbon. At Riga lay immense stores of grain in want of a foreign market. On the 31st of December, 1810, Alexander published a fresh tariff permitting the importation of colonial products under a