Autocratess

On all of these vessels is the following inscription: “By the most high and god-loving order of the most pious great Gosudarina Catharine II., Empress and Autocratess of all Russia, this vessel was made to be used for the boiling of the holy oil, in the sixth year of her majesty’s prosperous reign, and from the birth of Christ the Saviour, the 1767th year.”

Who has not heard of Melonia, widow Coutts and Duchess of St. Albans, that spirited great personage, Autocratess of Madeira, Countess of Nantz and Baroness Cogniac,—who as well as the late more severely virtuous Countess of Derby, the less oftener engaged in her time, but ever engaging Miss Brunton, Countess Dowager of Craven, and some other peeresses of equal celebrity we all know walked the ſtage for several years to the delight both of ruſtic and metropolitan audiences.

But it is precisely because he is too far removed from the English, both by that native amiability which continually gains an involuntary conquest over his ‘Anglo manie’, and by his German cordiality, that he excites their envy rather than their admiration; and though ‘recherché’ by most, because he is the fashion, remains a strange meteor in their system, whom they attack where they can, and whom, at all events, they cannot take to their hearts as they do their own Jupiter Ammon, nor acknowledge in him ‘autorité sans replique’ with that blind submission they pay to their Autocratess.

It was the fashion to be a member of the Omnibus, because the numbers were limited—because it enabled a man to cut his mother’s family box, to get rid of his wife’s set, or to have a house of refuge against the necessity of occupying his own high-paid place in the box of some autocratess of fashion, to which it is a distinction to subscribe and a bore to be confined.

The wives and daughters of the oldest provincial gentry, with pedigrees traced up to the Heptarchy, have been seen humbling themselves by the lowest acts of degradation to soften the obdurate autocratesses; […]

Russia, indeed, made rapid progress in arts, civilization, and power, under autocrats and autocratesses that were libertines in practice, and infidels in principle.

Much has been said of the “despotism of the autocratesses,” of their personal dislikes, political biases, individual prejudices and partialities.

[…] we believe, without attributing too much greatness and spirit to Pitt, that he would not, upon any paltry conditions, have permitted a repetition of the disgraceful scenes of 1772-3, nor have made England stand by a quiet spectatress while Russia established a maritime influence in the Archipelago, and thereby dismembered the Ottoman empire. If there were any predilections in favour of the autocratess they were nourished rather by Fox than by Pitt.