It has been said poetically, and yet truthfully, that the young Emperor of Russia has inherited from his father ” a legacy of sadness.” Alexander certainly commences his career with a load of responsibility that has seldom fallen to so young a ruler. The war in the Crimea, however, is not the most oppressive thing which Alexander inherited from Nicholas. The routine of the stern father is by necessity demanded of the son. Nicholas, of all men, was the most restless, and the least given to personal self-indulgence. He knew that upon himself the fate of every enterprise depended—the centre of all hopes—the object of all anxieties: it was therefore that he increased his moral weight, by appearing conspicuously simple, yet sudden and unexpected, among his people. He was often supposed to be in Moscow, when the heavy clank of his iron step, upon the corridor of his palace at St. Petersburgh, would first announce his presence. Even through the crowded streets of the capital, he seldom moved less than fifteen miles an hour, and in his longer journeys his road was often strewn with dead horses, killed from exhaustion. Alexander—phlegmatic, really German instead of Russian—adopts the rapid movements of his illustrious father as far as in him lies, and he is to be seen rushing through the streets of St. Petersburg in his simple drosky and driver, the Emperor, and as such, beloved by his people, yet still but an inferior representative of the ambitious, grasping despot so recently consigned to the tomb.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, New York, NY, January 19, 1856
