By much the greater part of what has been said, may appear to vindicate Catherine’s title to be called a good, as well as a great sovereign. Such, no doubt, had her moral faculties been better educated, she might have been: but her reign was vitiated, and her talents rendered comparatively useless to her subjects, by one prevailing fault of selfishness. Her temper was averse from wanton cruelty; she loved to see prosperity around her; she loved, still more, the glory of being reputed the author of that prosperity. But she loved to see others happy, not for their sakes, but for her own; we seek in vain in the records of her life for that laborious and self-denying spirit, which is ready to sacrifice its own will for the good of others. Hence the multiplicity of her plans, and the inconstancy of her purposes: she persevered in no task which had lost the excitement of novelty, or no longer nourished the craving appetite for praise. She was too eager to build, to allow the requisite time for laying foundations: and the consequence was seen, even before her death, in the ruined and neglected state of establishments on which she had prided herself, and which men who were no flatterers had regarded as the marks of a new era of civilization in Russia. A French writer, in the Biographie Universelle, says, “Legislation, colonies, education, institutions, canals, towns, fortresses, every thing had been begun, and abandoned before completion.” This passion of Catherine, for sketching every thing and finishing nothing, is well characterised by a saying of Joseph II. In her journey to the Crimea, she invited him to lay the second stone of Ekaterinoslaf, of which she herself had just laid the first. Joseph said, after his return, “The Empress of Russia and I completed a great undertaking in one day: she laid the first stone of a city, and I the last.”