text: " "All true; but remember the striking commencement of Voltaire's Memoir of Peter--'Who could have pretended to say in the year 1700 that a magnificent and polished court would be formed at the extremity of the Gulf of Finland; that the inhabitants of Cazan and the banks of the Wolga would be ranked among disciplined warriors and after beating the Turk and the Swede gain victories in Germany? That a desert of two thousand leagues in length should in the space of fifty years extend its influence to all the European courts; and that in 1759 the most zealous patron of literature in Europe should be a Russian sovereign? The man who had said this would have been regarded as the most chimerical mortal on earth