MOSCOW. 
too 
CHAP. 
V. 
' v ' 
Assassina- 
tipn of an 
Arch- 
bishop. 
be shut. The Emperor Paul, from a determi- 
nation to undo every thing that his mother had 
done, and to do (as much as possible) that 
which she would not have done, caused it to 
be again opened ; although it were well known 
in Russia, that the merchant, after the church 
had been shut by the Empress’s order, frequently 
avowed, and laughed at, the fraud he had com- 
mitted 1 2 . Much after the same manner, during 
the plague in Moscoiu, about thirty years ago, 
a picture was placed in one of the streets of 
the city, to which the people eagerly thronged, 
upon the earliest intelligence of its arrival. 
The archbishop Ambrose, finding that the danger 
of spreading infection increased as the people 
crowded to this picture, ordered it to be re- 
moved, and concealed in a church , but the 
doors of the church were forced open by the 
populace; and the venerable prelate, being 
dragged from the convent of Donskoy, was in- 
humanly put to death. The late Empress, in 
her correspondence with Voltaire, gave an ac- 
count of this event; recommending it to him 
as a supplement to the article Fanaticism, in the 
French Encyclopedia 4 . 
(1) Paul published an ukase, in the Imperial Gazette of Peters- 
burg, upon the 17th of December 17.98, canonizing the new Saint. 
(2) Lcttres de l*Imp£r« de Russie, &c. Lett. 94. 
