1831.] The Hanse Towns. 515 



wandering traffickers who still survived in the desert, it rapidly rose 

 into a city, the wonder of surrounding barbarism. Its duke or 

 sovereign was soon forced to limit his tyranny, and was finally com- 

 pelled to surrender all but the shadow of power into the hands of the 

 general assembly of the citizens, by whom the hereditary succession 

 was changed into the elective, and the barbarian despot into the limited 

 and responsible magistrate of a republic. With wealth, its commercial 

 enterprize, its population, and its rank as a government rapidly in- 

 creased, until in the fifteenth century its population was said to amount 

 to half a million ; its fairs were the emporium of Asia, and the north of 

 Europe ; the German, the Italian, and the Chinese met in the streets 

 of this famous and flourishing city, and the admiration of the surround- 

 ing provinces, to which its strength and opulence must have looked 

 like something fallen from Heaven, could find no other language than 

 that of idolatry : " Who can resist God, and the mighty Novorogpd ?" 



But the usual fate of republics was not to be averted. The citizens, 

 grown ambitious as they grew opulent, fell into faction, and were sur- 

 prised by the wild invasion of the neighbouring barbarians. Ivan the 

 Fourth, a brutal savage, looking with a greedy eye on the arts and 

 wealth, which he had neither the taste to cultivate, nor the industry to 

 acquire, suddenly rushed on the city with a host of savages, as furious, 

 greedy, and blood-thirsty as a life of savagery could prepare for plunder 

 and massacre. The overthrow was complete. An immense multitude 

 were destroyed by the indiscriminate havoc of the Russian pike. A 

 still greater multitude fled from a spot where nothing but security could 

 have reconciled men to the ungenial climate, and the remoteness from 

 the general intercourse of Europe. They never returned. The furious 

 feuds of Russia, alternately torn by revolt, and trampled by the Tartars, 

 extinguished all hope of personal safety, and Novorogod never reco- 

 vered the blow. The transfer of the seat of government to the mouth 

 of the Neva, by Peter the Great, and the change of the route of com- 

 merce to the cities on the Euxine, were new impediments, which even 

 the tendency of all great places of commerce to resume their original 

 strength, was not able to resist ; and Novorogod has long since dwindled 

 down into a provincial city, with a feeble and idle population of a few 

 thousands. 



The Hanseatic Factory among ourselves would deserve a history of 

 its own, from the singular vigour of its system, its perpetual encroach- 

 ments on what, even in the darkness of the middle ages, we had already 

 discovered to be the rights of trade, and the perpetual and stubborn 

 resistance with which its monopoly was met, and by which that mono- 

 poly was finally abolished. The whole detail would give a striking 

 proof of our early sense of justice, the clearheadedness in com- 

 mercial principles which distinguished the British merchant, and the 

 public and personal evils that must arrive in this country from any 

 system of favouring strangers at the expence of the nation. While 

 the English monarch s were poor, and their thrones unsteady, the Hanse 

 Towns were lords of the trade of England. But as England began to 

 feel her strength, the privileges of the foreigner declined. As her kings 

 became more secure, and were less compelled to lean on foreign influ- 

 ence, the natural rights of their people took the lead, the cessation of 

 the York and Lancaster wars prepared the Hanseatics for their fate, 



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