by seeking instruction abroad. He labored with his own hands as a common artisan in Holland and England, that he might return and teach his subjects how ships, commerce, and civilization could be acquired. There is a degree of heroism here superior to any thing that we know of in the Macedonian king. But Philip's consolidation of the long-disunited Macedonian empire; his raising a people, which he found the scorn of their civilized Southern neighbors, to be their dread; his organization of a brave and well-disciplined army instead of a disorderly militia; his creation of a maritime force, and his systematic skill in acquiring and improving sea-ports and arsenals; his patient tenacity of purpose under reverses; his personal bravery, and even his proneness to coarse amusements and pleasures, all mark him out as the prototype of the imperial founder of the Russian power. In justice, however, to the ancient hero, it ought to be added, that we find in the history of Philip no examples of that savage cruelty which deforms so grievously the character of Peter the Great.
In considering the effects of the overthrow which the Swedish arms sustained at Pultowa, and in speculating on the probable consequences that would have followed if the invaders had been successful, we must not only bear in mind the wretched state in which Peter found Russia at his accession, compared with her present grandeur, but we must also keep in view the fact that, at the time when Pultowa was fought, his reforms were yet incomplete, and his new institutions immature. He had broken up the Old Russia; and the New Russia, which he ultimately created, was still in embryo. Had he been crushed at Pultowa, his immense labors would have been buried with him, and (to use the words of Voltaire) "the most extensive empire in the world would have relapsed into the chaos from which it had been so lately taken." It is this fact that makes the repulse of Charles XII. the critical point in the fortunes of Russia. The danger which she incurred a century afterward from her invasion by Napoleon was in reality far less than her peril when Charles attacked her, though the French emperor, as a military genius, was infinitely superior to the Swedish king, and led a host against her, compared with which the armies of Charles seem almost insignificant. But, as Fouché well warned his imperial master, when he vainly endeavored to dissuade him from his disastrous expedition against the empire of the Czars, the difference between the
