Читать книгу The Secret Dispatch; or, The Adventures of Captain Balgonie онлайн

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And it was in the service of this charming people,

"——this new and polished nation,

Whose names want nothing but pronounciation,"

—a people, who, in the arts of peace, were little better than the Scots when James I. was butchered in the Black Friary at Perth, or the men of "Merry England" when her crook-backed Dick was smothering the royal babies in the Tower—that, by an adverse fate, our hero found himself a soldier of fortune, when, as before stated, old George III. was King of the British Isles, and "the first gentleman in Europe" was a sinless infant on his mother's knee.

After Peter was laid in his grave, and Catharine was firmly seated on his throne, her conduct was cautious and judicious, and, as even her enemies admitted, at times magnanimous; yet frightful atrocities were committed during her reign when she degenerated into ferocity and debauchery.

The captivity of the young and innocent Ivan in Schlusselburg, in charge of the unscrupulous Bernikoff, Captain Vlasfief, and a Lieutenant named Tschekin—three officers in whom Catharine had implicit reliance—seemed more hopeless now than ever when the sceptre was in her firm grasp.