Galitzin

Galitzin, also GALLITZIN, GALYZIN, or GOLYZIN, one of the most powerful and distinguished Russian families, whose members, too numerous to catalogue, have been equally prominent in war and diplomacy from the 16th century downwards.—VASILI, surnamed the Great, born in 1643, was the councillor and favourite of Sophia, the sister of Peter the Great, and regent during his minority. His great aim was to bring Russia into contact with the west of Europe, and to encourage the arts and sciences in Russia. His design to marry Sophia, and plant himself on the Russian throne, miscarried. Sophia was placed by her brother in a convent, and Vasili banished (1689) to a spot on the Frozen Ocean, where in 1714 he died.—DIMITRI (1735—1803), Russian ambassador to France and Holland and intimate friend of Voltaire and Diderot, and the Encyclopædists, owes the preservation of his name mainly to his wife, the celebrated AMALIE, PRINCESS GALITZIN (1746—1806), daughter of the Prussian general, Count von Schmettau. She was remarkable for her literary culture, her grace and amiability of disposition, her sympathetic relations with scholars and poets, but, above all, for her ardent piety, which found in Catholicism its most congenial sphere. Having separated from her husband, she took up her residence in Münster, where she gathered round her a circle of learned companions, including for a longer or shorter time Jacobi, Hemsterhuis, Hamann, and Count Stolberg.—DIMITRI AUGUSTINE, son of the foregoing, was born at the Hague, December 22, 1770. He became a Roman Catholic in his seventeenth year; and, through the influence exercised over him by a clerical tutor during a voyage to America, he resolved to devote himself to the priesthood. In 1795 he was ordained a priest in the United States by Bishop Carroll of Baltimore, and betook himself to a bleak region among the Alleghany Mountains, in Pennsylvania, where he was known as 'Father Smith' (Smith being originally a corruption of Schmettau). Here he laid the foundation of a town, called Loreto, where he died 6th May 1841. He declined to return to Russia on his father's death, and as a Catholic priest was adjudged to have lost his right of inheritance. He was for some years vicar-general of the diocese of Philadelphia. He was austere in his mode of life, but liberal in the highest degree to others, and an affectionate and indefatigable pastor. He wrote various controversial works, including a Defence of Catholic Principles (1816), Letter to a Protestant Friend (1820), and Appeal to the Protestant Public (1834). See the Lives by Heyden and by Brownson.