An awkward, ardent, but helpless kind of Peter, with vehement desires, with a dash of wild magnanimity even: but in such an inextricable element, amid such darkness, such provocations of unmanageable opulence, such impediments, imaginary and real,--dreadfully real to poor Peter,--as made him the unique of mankind in his time.

He 'used to drill cats,' it is said, and to do the maddest-looking things (in his late buried-alive condition);--and fell partly, never quite, which was wonderful, into drinking, as the solution of his inextricabilities.

Poor Peter: always, and now more than ever, the cynosure of vulturous vulpine neighbors, withal; which infinitely aggravated his otherwise bad case!-- "For seven or eight years, there came no progeny, nor could come; about the eighth or ninth, there could, and did: the marvellous Czar Paul that was to be.

Concerning whose exact paternity there are still calumnious assertions widely current; to this individual Editor much a matter of indifference, though on examining, his verdict is: 'Calumnies, to all appearance; mysteries which decent or decorous society refuses to speak of, and which indecent is pretty sure to make calumnies out of.' Czar Paul may be considered genealogically genuine, if that is much an object to him.

Poor Paul, does not he father himself, were there nothing more?
Only that Peter and this Catharine could have begotten such a Paul.
Genealogically genuine enough, my poor Czar,--that needed to be garroted so very soon! 2.