It has been already said that the half-crazy Emperor of Russia had taken up a violent personal admiration for Buonaparte, and, under the influence of that feeling, virtually abandoned Austria before the campaign of Marengo. Napoleon took every means to flatter the Autocrat and secure him in his interests. Paul had been pleased to appoint himself Grand Master of the ruined Order of the Knights of St. John. It was his not idle ambition to obtain, in this character, possession of the Island of Malta; and Buonaparte represented the refusal of the English government to give up that stronghold as a personal insult to Paul. Some 10,000 Russian prisoners of war were not only sent back in safety, but new clothed and equipped at the expense of France; and the Autocrat was led to contrast this favourably with some alleged neglect of these troops on the part of Austria, when arranging the treaty of Luneville. Lastly, the Queen of Naples, sister to the German Emperor, being satisfied that, after the battle of Marengo, nothing could save her husband's Italian dominions from falling back into the hands of France (out of which they had been rescued, during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, by the English, under Lord Nelson), took up the resolution of travelling in person to St. Petersburg in the heart of the winter, and soliciting the intercession of Paul. The Czar, egregiously flattered with being invoked in this fashion, did not hesitate to apply in the Queen's behalf to Buonaparte; and the Chief Consul, well calculating the gain and the loss, consented to spare Naples for the present, thereby completing the blind attachment of that weak-minded despot. At the same time when Nelson delivered Naples from the French, a party of English seamen, under Commodore Trowbridge, had landed at the mouth of the Tiber, marched to Rome, and restored the Pope. The French army, after the great victory which gave them back Lombardy and Piedmont, doubted not that the re-establishment of "the Roman Republic" would be one of its next consequences. But Buonaparte, who had in the interim re-opened the churches of France, was now disposed to consider the affairs of the Pope with very different eyes. In a word, he had already resolved to make use of the Holy Father in the consolidation of his own power as a monarch; and, as the first step to this object, the government of the Pope was now suffered to continue--not a little to the astonishment of the French soldiery, and to the confusion, it may be added, and regret, of various powers of Europe.