“Charles XII. of Sweden delighted in war, and never did warrior surpass him in daring; but he was reckless almost to insanity. At the battle of Narva, with only twenty thousand men, he defeated the Czar, Peter the Great, who had, it is said, one hundred thousand; but at the battle of Pultowa in Russia, Peter the Great overcame him, when he fled for safety to the dominions of the Turk. He died in the trenches of Frederickshall in Norway, some say by a cannon shot, but others say by the pistol of one of his own soldiers.
‘His fall was destined to a distant strand,
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand:
He left the name at which the world grew pale
To point a moral, or adorn a tale.’”
“Great as Charles thought himself in the field, Peter the Great was too much for him at last.”
“Peter the Great of Russia was a most extraordinary man, and a warrior of no common order. He came over to England and worked in the dockyard at Deptford as a shipwright, to improve himself in the building of ships for his navy; he learned the trade of a smith, and forged a bar of iron at Olaneta in Russia, which weighed a hundred and twenty pounds. What think you, boys, of a mighty monarch working as a blacksmith, and making his nobles blow the bellows for him?”
“There are very few monarchs that would do that.”
“Peter the Great won many battles, but the victory of Pultowa over his rival in arms, Charles XII. of Sweden, ruined the latter. Peter died in the fifty-third year of his age, and the great monument at Petersburgh, erected to his memory, is a prodigious work of art. The pedestal is a single stone of red granite, weighing more than fourteen hundred tons. Peter is represented on horseback, crowned with laurel, and sitting on a housing of bear-skin. The horse, a fiery courser, stands on his hind feet, as if resolved to arrive at the pinnacle of the rock.”
“It must be a grand monument, but how the Russians could contrive to take that big stone to the place where it was to be set up, is a puzzle.”