The Works of Voltaire, Vol. 34

Bücher

Angebote / Angebote:

Excerpt from The Works of Voltaire, Vol. 34: A Contemporary Version Who could have pretended to say, in the year 1700, that a magnificent and polite court would be formed at the extremity of the Gulf of Finland? that the inhabitants of Solikamsk, Kazan, and the banks of the Volga and Sok, would be ranked among our best disciplined troops, and gain victories in Germany, after defeating the Swedes and the Turks, that an empire two thousand leagues in length, almost unknown to us before, should in the space of fifty years become a well-governed state, and extend its influence to all the European courts? and that in 1759, the most zealous patron of learning in Europe, should be a Russian? Any one who had said this would have passed for the most chimerical mortal on earth. Peter the Great, therefore, who singly planned and executed this amazing and altogether unforeseen revolution, is, perhaps, of all princes, the one whose deeds are most worthy of being transmitted to posterity. The court of St. Petersburg has furnished the historian, charged with compiling this work, with all the authentic documents. It is said in the body of this history, that these memoirs are deposited in the public library of Geneva, a well-known and frequented city, in the neighbor hood of which the author lives, but as the whole of the instructions and journal of Peter the Great have not yet been communicated to him, he has thought proper to keep these records at his own house, where the curious may have a sight of them, with as much ease as from the library-keepers at Geneva, and the whole shall be deposited there as soon as the second volume is finished. The public already has several pretended histories of Peter the Great, most of them compiled from newspapers. That which was published at Amsterdam, in four volumes, by Boyard Nestesuranoy, is one of those impositions of the press, which have become too common among us. Of this kind are the "Memoirs of Spain, " by Don Juan de Colmenar, and the "History of Louis XIV., " compiled by La Motte, the Jesuit, from pretended papers of a minister of state, and ascribed to La Martiniere. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.