kind, he began well-perhaps sincerely. Probably his head was turned by the possession of power. Men are not born demons, though they may become really worse than any demons imagined by good men like Milton, by giving way to their evil passions. The deeds of Ivan are so spoken of by historians, that those of Tiberius, Nero, and Christian of Denmark seem the freaks of froward children in comparison. Having been ill-used when a child by the council of nobles into whose power he had fallen in the first years of his reign, he seemed determined in after years to have his full swing of vengeance on mankind. Nor was the retribution entirely undeserved by some of those who felt it, for they had encouraged the evil propensities of the young prince with a view of keeping him longer in a state of tutelage. Notwithstanding this, when he first vindicated his own power, he achieved from the strength of his will, not yet perverted, much that was great and useful. It was at the age of sixteen that he assumed, with the Asiatic title of Tsar, which may have sometimes been borne by his predecessors, but not by authority, a crown which had once been sent to Vladimir Monomachus by the Emperor of Constantinople. He was crowned by the metropolitan, and saluted by the Byzantine title of Autocrat. Thus it seems that he wished to be recognised as the heir of the defunct Greek sovereignty, and the master de jure, if not de facto, of Byzantium. These are important facts, because they show that the idea of the acquisition of Turkey does not merely date from the time of Peter, but has been a fixed principle of action with Russian sovereigns ever since the fall of the Lower Empire. We cannot help considering the other encroachments of Russia on the map of Europe as in a measure incidental, brought about often by an unforeseen concurrence of circumstances, at the same time eagerly caught at by the nation as a means to this one great end, the possession of Constantinople, and the centralisation of all the Russias and their dependencies in the great capital on the Bosphorus. This has been and is the one definite and distinct

object of the ambition of the Tsars, the avarice of the courtiers, and the fanaticism of the people. That Russia or her sovereigns ever had any distinct design of conquering and absorbing the West of Europe we can hardly believe, although such would doubtless be to her a consummation devoutly to be wished. For instance, Germany was divided, bribed, and overawed, not with a view to immediate conquest, but with a view to silencing her protest against Russian aggression; and here Russia has fully gained her point. Only one thing was wanted, the revival of the old antagonism between England and France-a thing which seemed the easiest of all, but turned out, contrary to all expectation, the most difficult-that Constantinople should be once again the capital of the Eastern world.

"Ibi omnis Effusus labor."

The last link in the chain was wanting. As for Russia's views upon Asia, of course aggrandisement to any extent or in any direction would have suited her, but her actual conquests seemed always to bear a primary reference to the absorption of Turkey. Turkey absorbed, all the rest would follow, and we must soon have been obliged to keep a sharp look-out for British India. As it was, Russia was getting all round Constantinople in the Danubian principalities, by protection and occupation; in Greece, by intrigue; in Asia, by conquest. Could England and France but have been kept quiet, or bribed into disunion, the city of the Golden Horn would have dropt into Russia's open mouth, as the bird is said to drop from the bough into the mouth of the serpent who watches and fascinates it.

We should be going wide of the mark here, were we to dwell at any length on the misdeeds of Ivan the Terrible. His character seems to have changed for the worse on the death of his first wife Anastasia, who, while she lived, had the singular merit of keeping quiet, by an enchantment which had the contrary effect to those of Circe, who changed men into brutes, the evil propensities of this human tiger When she died, his madness-or badness, for the two words differ by a letter only, and are often convertible

broke loose. He is said to have married seven wives. An English lady, nearly allied to Queen Elizabeth, the Lady Mary Hastings, had a narrow escape from being the eighth; for Elizabeth, in her admiration of power in a sovereign, had formed a friendship with Ivan, and actually proposed to send her friend to the den of this Bluebeard. His death saved her. But Ivan, not contented with putting his wives to death, used to pretend that they were murdered, and made every new bereavement of his own an excuse for numberless executions. One thing that strikes us most among the horrors of his reign, is the extreme ingenuity with which he devised the machinery of his wickedness. To do evil as well as he did, one of those Old Bailey physiognomies, with low forehead, wide mouth, and bull-neck, the type of Caracalla, would never have sufficed. Ivan was a genius. His words and letters are as clever, as cutting, and insulting, as if the tongue and the pen had been his only weapons. Nothing delighted him more than making butts of those who suffered impalement, or some other horrible torture, before his eyes. He was not born a demon, but became more emphatically one by education than if he had been. Nor was he without his fits of ferocious tenderness. He loved his wife Anastasia, and because her Maker called her away, he revenged himself on the human race, more especially on those of the same sex as his first wife. He loved the son that she bore him as he did her, and he slew him in a fit of fury. For this alone of his deeds he was inconsolable, and remorse for it hunted him to the grave. Strange to say, he died in his bed. The reign of Ivan the Terrible is historically most valuable as illustrating that quality in the character of the Russians which makes them so formidable as enemies. Nero and Domitian became the more unpopular the more they slew their subjects; and the latter, although he was enabled to butcher the nobles with impunity (not that that proved their love for him, but only their pusillanimity), cecidit, postquam cerdonibus esse timendus incipit"-"fell when the cobblers began to fear him." The Romans were ever and anon revolt

Their ser

ing against their chains. vility was always hypocritical; not so that of the Russians. We cannot sympathise with them in their maltreatment, for they love it. They love Ivan the Terrible because he decapitates, impales, and breaks them on the wheel. One poor wretch that he fixed on a stake in the presence of his wife and children, is said to have exclaimed nothing but "God bless the Tsar" through his twenty-four hours' agony; and that very son Ivan, whom he slew, died with prayers and blessings in his mouth for his fathera conduct we should think heroic and Christian did we not suspect that its source was an innate and fanatical servility. But the Russians were not content with showing their servility to the sacred Tsar himself. For this Ivan was not satisfied with tyrannising in his own person, but he must organise a body of guards, called the Opritchini (the Elect or Covenanted), selected sometimes from the lowest of the people, and on account of their vices, which made them the readier instruments of despotism. These swore implicit obedience to the Tsar, and in return were not only chartered libertines, but chartered robbers and assassins. Each of them exercised a despotism (and they were a thousand at first, and became several thousands afterwards) as odious as that of the Tsar, though not in all cases so ingenious; and so effectually, that things accounted generally the good things of this life-rank, virtue, riches, beauty-became a terror to the possessors of them. These Elect were the nucleus of a new kind of nobility, the nobility of function and government employ, which has now nearly, if not quite, superseded the hereditary nobility of Russia for all practical purposes, and thus extinguished the last remnant of her at first imperfect chivalry. That their requisitions were submitted to almost without a murmur, and that the monarch who let loose such a pack of wolves and such a Pandora's box of misfortunes on his subjects should have been worshipped as a god in his life, and revered like a saint after his death, would tend to shake our belief in the cessation of the age of miracles. It appears the more wonderful when we

consider that there was scarcely any set-off of national glory to the tyranny of Ivan. The military successes of the early part of his life were clouded by the reverses and disgraces of his latter years, brought on in a measure by the misconduct and cowardice of the Tsar himself, who on one occasion fled from Moscow before an army of Tartars, and left it to perish in the flames without attempting a blow to save the scene of his pride and his enormities. It is this monomania for submission in the Russian character that makes them so formidable in war. If a dog, the most submissive of animals to legitimate power, is cruelly and unjustly beaten, he will turn sometimes on his master; not so a Russian—he will kiss the knout that flays him. If acting in obedience to orders, he is much more dangerous than a wild beast.

The Spanish bull in the arena may be diverted from his mark, by his attention being turned away to some other source of persecution; an Arctic voyager or sportsman, when he sees a wounded bear bearing down on him, may throw down his weapon or his glove to save himself from hugging; but woe be to him against whom a mass of Russians is impelled. They are as passive and as merciless as a locomotive. On they go, one over another, like the buffaloes in the Western prairies. If the foremost perish, the hindmost will not turn back, but make a bridge of their bodies, and thus the buffaloes get over the rivers and the chasms, and the Russians over the obstacles in their campaigns. It is, certainly, a serious thing to fight with a nation with whom men are of no more account than gabions and fascines: and it is well for us that it is not so much by loss of men as by loss of money that the fortunes of the war will be decided.

As for expecting that such a people would listen to reason, or give up an inch of ground from which they were not driven by positive pounding, such an idea could only have entered into the heads of those who sent Lord John Russell to waste his own and the nation's time and money at the Vienna conferences. The Russian nation we should not suppose very much changed since the time of Ivan the Terrible, if

it is true that the Grand-duke Constantine could, to show off the submissiveness of the Russian soldier to a stranger, while standing at a review, pass his sword through the foot of an officer and withdraw it, without exciting remonstrance or cry of pain, or even, as is said, without his victim flinching. This is reported to have happened at Warsaw in the nineteenth century, and in the reign of the mild Alexander. The reign of Ivan, however, in most respects humiliating to Russia, was still the beginning of her greatness as a nation. In this reign she ceased to act on the defensive, and assumed the offensive; from this time forth she begins a course of advan tages over her old enemies and oppressors, the Tartars, which ends at a later date in the submission of their most powerful tribes. It was in this reign, too, that Siberia, that vast and dreary state-prison, was annexed to Russia by accident. A Cossack chief, of the name of Jermak, having committed robberies about the Volga, was hunted out of Russia by the troops of Ivan into Siberia. Here, with a handful of his followers, he succeeded in doing what Pizarro did in South America: he laid the foundation of the subjugation of the country, and then solicited pardon of the Czar on the strength of what he had done, laying at his feet the new acquisition. Of course his offer was not refused, and Siberia became Russian.

It was by Ivan that the Strelitz, a kind of militia or national guard who existed from old times, were organised into bands of a more prætorian character, so as to be available for the personal service of the sovereign. They were used, no doubt, originally against the nobles, but in after time became, probably from their local sympathies, unmanageable, and Peter the Great was obliged to disband them, and substitute an army even less of a feudal character. However, no standing army of any kind seems to have existed before the time of Ivan, and without this it would be difficult in most nations, whatever may have been the case in Russia, to perpetuate a pure absolutism in the person of the sovereign. Although as yet the Tsars of Russia for some time to come do not seem to have pursued the definite