"MY VERY DEAR BROTHER,--I received yesterday, with feelings of profound sorrow, intelligence of the death of our adored sovereign, and my benefactor, the Emperor Alexander. In hastening to assure you of the painful feelings this misfortune has excited in my mind, I do only my duty in announcing to you that I have forwarded to her Imperial Majesty, our august mother, a letter, in which I declare, that in consequence of the rescript I obtained from the late Emperor, bearing date February the 2d, 1822, permitting my renunciation of the throne, it is now my unalterable determination to give up to you all my rights to the Empire of Russia. I entreated, at the same time, our beloved mother, to make this declaration public, that the same may be put into immediate execution. After this declaration, I regard it as a sacred duty to beseech your Imperial Majesty to receive the first from me, the oath of fidelity and submission, and to permit me to say that I do not aspire to any other title or dignity than that of Czarowitz, with which my august father deigned to honor my services. My solo happiness, hereafter, will consist in giving your Imperial Majesty continual proofs of my unbounded devotion and respect for your person, of which thirty years of constant and zealous service to the Emperors, my father and brother, are the pledge, in which sentiments I wish to serve your Imperial Majesty, and your successors, until the end of my life, in my present situation and functions. "I am, with the most profound respect, "CONSTANTINE." Upon the receipt of the dispatches which followed this letter, the Grand-duke, called to reign over a vast Empire, by the repeated abdication of his brother of the rights of primogeniture, no longer hesitated,--he published the former correspondence between the Emperor Alexander and the Grand-duke Constantine, with the document already quoted upon the 25th of December, 1825, and fixed the morrow for his recognition as their sovereign by his people.