Indies, and which may be considered in the light of adjuncts to the great continent of America. No sooner was this discovery made, than the same Spaniards, who had hitherto proved so dissatisfied and refractory, worshipped their leader almost as a god, and joyfully swore to obey him as the representative in the new world of their majesties of Spain. After a short stay, to gratify the curiosity of his people, and refresh them after the fatigues and anxieties of their voyage, he visited several of the other West India Islands, and, having settled a colony in Hispaniola, set sail for Spain, where he arrived, (in the port of Palos,) on the fifteenth of March, 1493.

Astonishment and admiration followed the intrepid navigator wherever he went after his return. Ferdinand and Isabella honoured him with a private audience, at which he was solicited to narrate his most remarkable adventures, and treated him with the most marked distinction. Yet, not long subsequently, having carried over, by the royal authority, a number of colonists to his discoveries, he was sent back by them in chains, on a charge of cruelty in the administration of his government. Though permitted to prove his innocence, and consequently liberated, he was now deprived of all power, and never could obtain from the throne

of Spain the fulfilment on its part of the compact, in virtue of which he had first prosecuted his enterprise. Stung with this injustice, and the slights of his original patrons, he died May the twenty-fifth, 1506: when their Spanish majesties, as though to make some amends for their past neglect, directed his interment with funeral honours in the cathedral of Seville; in which edifice an epitaph records his addition of "a new world to the kingdom of Castile and Leon."

PETER THE GREAT.

Peter the Great, Czar of Russia, a man of truly wonderful composition and character, was born May the thirtieth, 1672, being the son of the czar Alexis Michaelowitz by a second wife. He was raised to the throne, on the death of his father, when only ten years old, in conjunction with his brother John; but the latter, a very weak prince, dying eight years afterwards, he became sole monarch.

This most extraordinary of sovereigns was tall in stature, well formed, and of a noble, animated countenance: his constitution robust, and fitted to endure every species of exertion and fatigue; his mind endued with the sound and discriminative spirit, that is the foundation of all true talent, and which, mingled as it was in him with unbounded activity, led him to dare every thing and accomplish every thing. He owed much less to education than to genius: the interest of those who early surrounded him, was to leave him in ignorance, and abandon him to the excesses, which youth, his daring turn, the influence of custom, and the hereditary dispositions of rank, rendered him but too soon familiar with. Yet, in spite of pleasure, he applied himself to