OF JAMES HARRIS, FIRST EARL OF MALMESBURY; CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF HIS MISSIONS TO THE COURTS OF MADRID, AND OF HIS SPECIAL MISSIONS TO BERLIN, BRUNSWICK, AND THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. EDITED BY HIS GRANDSON, THE THIRD EARL. VOL. II. LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET, LONDON: Printed by S. & J. BENTLEY, WILSON, and FLEY, Bangor House Shoe Lane. LIBRAR Leland Stanford, Jr. NIVERSITY DIARIES AND CORRESPONDENCE. RUSSIA. EXTRACT OF A DESPATCH FROM SIR JAMES HARRIS TO LORD GRANTHAM. Petersburg, 14th, 25th October, 1782. I HAVE very little to trouble your Lordship with in figures. Prince Potemkin is extremely satisfied with his journey, but convinced by experience that his new-built town of Kerson is only proper to be a trading, not a military post, and the idea of reducing it to this seems now resolved on. He saw the deposed Khan on the frontiers of the Crimea for two hours. I understand he thinks very meanly of him, and that he is a wild, injudicious character. The Prince has confirmed the Empress in all her projects, and the steps necessary to their execution are going on with unremitting activity. DESPATCH FROM SIR JAMES HARRIS TO LORD MOUNTSTUART, TURIN. Petersburg, 14th, 25th October, 1782. MY LORD, AS this is properly my first ministerial despatch to you, I shall take up my tale ab ovo, and bring it down to the present times. I wish I could boast my mission had, in any proportion, been as successful as it has been fatiguing and eventful. VOL. II. At home, from the beginning of our disasters, our rulers ever looked up to this great Lady for relief. In better times, and when she wanted us, she had promised it us; and a reliance on these promises, joined to the intimate union both of the commercial and political interests of the two Empires, made them sanguine in their hopes. Experience, however, soon taught them on how sandy a foundation these hopes were grounded. Our requisitions for succours were at first evaded, then declined, and at last rejected without ceremony. Our proposals for an Alliance for purchasing these succours by adequate compensations, shared universally the same fate; and we uniformly have met reserve, coolness, and even something worse, where we expected, and with so much reason, at least invisible, if not ostensible, acts of friendship and support. The motives of this conduct, as contrary to the real interests of Russia as derogatory to the character of its Sovereign, must not be sought for in the abstruse mazes of diplomatic intrigue, they arise from prejudice and human weakness; for this great Lady, with many eminent and superior qualities, frequently degenerates into an ordinary woman, and she often plays her fan when she thinks she is wielding her sceptre. France had learnt the art of cajoling her, and she was afraid of incurring the displeasure and censure of a nation who writes memoirs and epigrams. She also, with all her boasted strength, dreaded standing forth, and to commit her glory to the hazard of a general quarrel; and perhaps too (for it is nature, particularly female nature) she was, notwithstanding the near relation our interests bear to hers, not sorry to see us humbled, imagining, perhaps, she grew comparatively greater as we grew less. It is for these reasons, more difficult to combat than any which the opposition of my enemies could throw in my way, that all my efforts to engage the Empress in our behalf have been fruitless. I have, indeed, more than once brought her to the very verge of declaring in our favour, but her resolution failed in the moment |