Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/245

Rh were informed that the empress Catherine was proclaimed their sovereign; which they no sooner heard, than they flocked in crowds to the palace to take the accustomed oaths, crying out as they went, "If our father is dead, our mother still lives!"

Her first care was to pay the last duties to her husband's ashes, with a pomp becoming the greatest monarch that Russia had ever known; and though there is no court in Europe where splendour and magnificence is carried to a greater height, on these occasions, than in that of Russia, it may with great truth be said, that she even surpassed herself in the funeral honours paid to her great Peter. She purchased the most precious kinds of marble, and employed some of the ablest sculptors of Italy to erect a mausoleum to this hero, which might, if possible, transmit the remembrance of his great actions to the most distant ages.

Catherine reigned two years and three months, in a manner which became the wife of so great a man; took all proper steps to secure the quiet of her dominions, to find out the revenues of the clergy, and to settle the succession. She established the academy of sciences at Petersburgh, increased her marine, and carried on the project of discovering the north-east passage to China. A cancer and dropsy accelerated her death, and she expired on the 17th of May, 1727, in about the 40th year of her age.

She was, in her person, under the middle size, and in her youth delicate and well formed, but inclined to