Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/454

432 P A U P A U and afterwards banished the empire for ever. The chief ministers of the new emperor were Rostopchin and Arak- cheeff. Paul now gave signs of a benevolent disposition ; among other acts of generosity he set at liberty Kosciusko, who had been detained a prisoner at St Petersburg. He, however, revived many obsolete imperial privileges which were offensive to the nobility, and became unpopular by introducing German regulations into the army. He altered the ouJcaz (ukase) of Peter the Great which made the succession to the throne dependent upon the will of the reigning sovereign, and declared it inherent in the eldest son. In 1798 he was appointed grand master of the order of the Knights of Malta. Alarmed at the progress of the French Republic, he joined Turkey, England, Austria, and Naples in a coalition against Bona parte. To command the Russians, the veteran Suwaroff was summoned from his rural retreat, to which he had been banished in consequence of making some satirical verses on the new regulations which had been introduced by Paul. For the campaigns of the Russian general, the article RUSSIA may be consulted. It may suffice to say here that he, triumphant at first, w r as eventually compelled to retreat, and was recalled by Paul. He died in disgrace in the year 1800. Soon afterwards the capricious emperor completely changed his plans. Having been flattered by Bonaparte, he secretly made overtures to him and quarrelled with England, seizing English vessels and goods which hap pened to be in the Russian ports. Bonaparte now entered into an agreement with Paul, whereby they should simul taneously invade the English possessions in India. But the coalition was broken up by the assassination of the Russian emperor in the night of 23d to 24th March 1801, which Bonaparte had the meanness to declare in the Moniteur had been planned by the English. The story of his death is well known : he was strangled in the Mikhailovski Palace by Zouboff, Pahlen, and other conspirators. Their original object appears to have been only to make him abdicate. An interesting account of the events immediately preceding the emperor s death has been given by General Sabloukoff, who was on duty that evening at the palace. The empress Maria survived till 1828. The solution of the incongruities of the character of Paul seems to lie in the fact that he was more or less insane. Hence his outbursts of cruelty in such cases as those of the pastor Seidler and Kotzebue, alternating with generosity, as in his treatment of Kosciusko and other Poles. Englishmen are familiar with some of his mad pranks from the highly interesting travels of Edward Clarke, who suffered from the despot s caprice. Among other whimsicalities, Kotzebue tells us that he seriously proposed that the sovereigns of Europe should settle their differences by single combat. He had so imperilled the position of the country by his extravagance and eccentric policy that his death, however unjustifiable the means, seemed almost a necessity. All Russia breathed afresh when Alexander II. ascended the throne. The only event of the reign of Paul of permanent im portance to Russia was the annexation of Georgia in 1799. PAUL, ST VINCENT OF. See VINCENT OF PAUL, ST. PAULDING, JAMES KIKKE (1778-1860), in his day a successful politician, and a writer of some distinction, was born in Dutchess county, New York, United States, on 22d August 1778, and, after a brief course of edu cation at the village school, removed to New York city in 1800, to reside with his brother-in-law, William Irving, a brother of Washington Irving. In connexion with the latter Paulding began in 1807 a series of brief lightly humorous articles, which, under the title of "The Salmagundi Papers," soon became popular, and continued to appear until 25th June 1808, when they terminated with the twentieth number. Six years later he published a political pamphlet, The United States and England, which attracted the notice of President Madison, who in 1814 appointed the author secretary to the Board of Navy Com missioners. Subsequently Paulding was for twelve years navy agent in New York city, and from 1837 to 1841 secre tary of the navy, under President Van Buren. Although much of his literary work consisted of political contributions to the press, he yet found time to write a large number of essays, poems, and tales. His marriage in 1818, the death of his wife, and his own withdrawal from public life in 1841, with his death on 5th April 1860, comprise the chief remaining facts of his useful, honourable, and uneventful career. From his father, who was an active revolutionary patriot, Fauld- ing inherited strong anti-British sentiments, which colour much of his satire, but otherwise he was a just and genial critic, and a deli cate and kindly humorist. Of a reserved disposition and hasty temper, with many prejudices, and of extreme political views, he was yet an eminently upright man ; of an affectionate nature and a forgiving disposition ; a hater of debt, lies, and shams ; and an absolutely incorruptible official, who, in every relation of life, was inspired by a lofty, if sometimes mistaken, sense of honesty and honour. In literature he merits notice chiefly as a pioneer, and, though his place was never high, and will certainly not be per manent, he was among the first distinctively American as opposed to English writers, and protested more vigorously than any of his contemporaries against intellectual thraldom to the mother-country. As a prose writer he is chaste and elegant, with a fine negligence, which is sometimes the result of art, more frequently of haste ; and, while not so elaborate as Irving, so diffuse as Cooper, or so frank as Neal, he is generally just, neat, fanciful, and realistically descrip tive. Among his short stories perhaps the best are Di/sjwpsy and The Politician, among the long The Dutchman s Fireside. As a poet he is gracefully commonplace, a weak reflexion of Thomson, with a dash of the prairie and the backwoods. His longest ami most ambitious poem is or was, for it is now forgotten The Back woodsman, which is ill-constructed and tedious, and the only lines of Paulding s which survive in popular memory are the familiar " Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers ; Where is the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked ? " which may be found in Koningsmarke. The following is a list of his writings : The Diverting History of John Hull and Brother Jonathan (1812); The Lay of the Scottish Fiddle; a Tale of Havre de Grace, supposed to be written by Walter Scott Esq. (1813), a good-natured parody on The Lay of the Last Minstrel written with the special intention of ridi culing certain American follies and exposing the excesses of the British in the Chesapeake ; The United States and England(l814) ; Letters from the South (1817) ; The Backwoodsman; a Poem (1818); Salmagundi, second series (1819-20); A Sketch of Old England, by a New England Man (1S22) ; Koningttinarke, the Long Finne (1823), a quiz on the romantic school of Scott; John Bull in America; or the New Munchaiisen (1824), a broad caricature of the early type of British traveller in America ; The Merry Tales of the Three Wise Men of Gotham (182ti) ; The New Mirror for Travellers (1S28) ; The Tales of the Good Woman, by a Doubt ful Gentleman, otherwise James K. Paulding (1829) ; Chronicles of the City of Gotham, from the papers of a retired Common Councilman (1830) ; The Lion of the West; a Comedy (1831) ; The Dutchman s Fireside (1831) ; Westward Ho ! (1832) ; A Life of Washington (183o), ably and gracefully written ; Slavery in the United States (1836) ; The Book of Saint Nicholas, a series of stories of the old Dutch settlers (1837); A Gift from Fairyland .(1838) ; The Old Continental; or the Price of Liberty (1846) ; American Comedies, the .joint production of himself and his son William J. Paulding (1847) ; and The Puritan and his Daughter (1849). The same son also published a posthumous volume by his father, entitled A Book of Vagaries, which is included in an edition of Paulding s Select Works (4 vols., 1867-68), and a most unsatisfactory biography, mostly made up of long extracts from Paulding s writings, called Literary Life of James A . 1 auhliiuj (1807). PAULI, REINHOLD (1823-1882), historian, was born at Berlin on 25th May 1823. From his mother, Avho was of Huguenot descent, he derived a vivacious temperament ; from his father, a minister of the Reformed Church, sprung of a family of clergymen and theological professors, he inherited strong religious convictions. He spent his boy hood in Bremen, from whose republican citizens he early imbibed a hearty admiration of liberal self-government, moral discipline, and extensive sea-trade. With the ex ception of two semesters when he heard Dahlmann at Bonn, he studied at the university of Berlin (1842-46), where he acquired a lifelong predilection for the Hohenzollerns and for the civil service and army of Prussia. Ranke was young Pauli s model historian, but he had far too much individu ality to bind himself slavishly to any school. After having taken his degree and passed the public schoolmaster s ex amination, he became in 1847 private tutor in the family