but they could only be scattered, not destroyed; and in later days were to assume a great prominence in Indian affairs.  A detailed account of the incompetent successors of Bahadur Shah would be superfluous.  The outstanding features of the period was the disintegration of the central Government and the development in the south of two powers; that of the Marattas and that of Asaf Jah, the successor of Daud Khan, and the first of the Nizams of the Deckan.  The supremacy among the Marattas passed to the Peshwas, the Bramin Ministers of the successors of Sivaji, who established a dynasty very much like that of the Mayors of the Palace in the Frankish Kingdom of the Merovingians.  But the final blow to the power of the Moguls was struck by the tremendous invasion of Nadir Shah the Persian, in 1739, when Delhi was sacked and its richest treasures carried away; though the Persian departed still leaving the emperor nominal Suzerian of India.  Before twenty years were past the greatest of all revolutions in India affairs had taken place; and Robert Clive had made himself master of Bengal in the name of the British East India Company.

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VOLTAIRE

Russia Under Peter the Great

Francois Marie Arouet, known to the world by the assumed name of Voltaire (supposed to be an anagram of Arou[v]et l[e] j[eun]), was born in Paris on November 21, 1694.  Before he was twenty-two, his caustic pen had got him into trouble.  At thirty-one, when he was already famous for his drama, “OEdipe,” as well as for audacious lampoons, he was obliged to retreat to England, where he remained some three years.  Various publications during the years following his return placed him among the foremost French writers of the day.  From 1750 to 1753 he was with Frederick the Great in Prussia.  When the two quarrelled, Voltaire settled in Switzerland and in 1758 established himself at Ferney, about the time when he published “Candide.”  His “Siecle de Louis Quatorze” (see ante) had appeared some years earlier.  In 1762 he began a series of attacks on the Church and Christianity; and he continued to reign, a sort of king of literature, till his death, in Paris on May 30, 1778.  An admirable criticism of him is to be found in Morley’s “Voltaire”; but the great biography is that of Desnoiresterres.  His “Russia under Peter the Great” was written after Voltaire took up his residence at Ferney in 1758.  This epitome is prepared from the French text.

I.—­All the Russias

When, about the beginning of the present century, the Tsar Peter laid the foundations of Petersburg, or, rather, of his empire, no one foresaw his success.  Anyone who then imagined that a Russian sovereign would be able to send victorious fleets to the Dardanelles, to subjugate the Crimea, to clear the Turks out of four great provinces, to dominate the Black Sea, to set up the most brilliant court in Europe, and to make all the arts flourish in the midst of war—­anyone expressing such an idea would have passed for a mere dreamer.  Peter the Great built the Russian Empire on a foundation firm and lasting.