became much more marked under the third, that Ivan the Terrible under whose reign the mariners in the service of the English company of "merchant adventurers" entered the White Sea, and, in their own language, "discovered" Russia. Russia was, indeed, until that time, so far as Western Europe was concerned, an unknown land, cut off from Western civilization for political and warlike reasons by the Poles, and for religious reasons by the Catholic Church.

Nineteen years have yet to pass before the election of the first of the Romanoffs to the throne; for, strange as it may seem, the first member of the dynasty of the Romanoffs was chosen and appointed to the imperial rule by an assembly representing the various Estates. Meanwhile the order of succession had been broken. Several pretenders to the throne had appeared, one of whom, Demetrius, distinctively known as the "Impostor," attained for a time supreme power. Demetrius, married to a Polish lady, Marina Mnis

On the 18th of March, 1584, Ivan was sitting half dressed, after his bath, "sol-zek, was aided by her powerful family to lacing himself and making merie with pleasant songs, as he used to doe," and calling for his chess-board, had placed the men, and was just setting up the king, when he fell back in a swoon, and died. The government now passed into the hands of five lords whom he had named guardians of his weak-minded son Feodor.

The death of Ivan was followed by strong demonstrations of dislike against the English at Moscow; and the English diplomatist and match-maker Sir Jerome Bowes, after being ironically informed that "the English king was dead," found himself seized and thrown into prison. He was liberated through the representations of another envoy, who pointed out that it would be imprudent to excite Elizabeth's wrath; and though for a time intercourse between Russia and Western Europe seemed to be threatened, through the national hatred of foreigners as manifested by the councillors of the late Tsar, yet when the weak-minded Feodor fell beneath the influence of his brother-in-law Boris Go• dounoff, the previous policy, soon to become traditional, of cultivating relations with Western Europe, was resumed.

Elizabeth responded warmly to Boris Godounoff's advances, and in a letter addressed to him spoke of "his noble lineage, great wisdom, and desert, which had made him the principal councillor and director of the state of so great a monarch." From this time (1593) there was an end to the disputes previously so numerous between English merchants and Russian officials, and Boris Godounoff having attained supreme power, nothing happened to disturb between the Queen and the Tsar "that amity and love which had been betwixt her and his most noble father of famous memory, John Bassilievitch, Lord Emperor and Grand Duke of all Russia."

maintain his position in Moscow, and the Mniszeks assembled and sent to the Russian capital a body of 4000 men. Then Ladislas of Poland interfered, and after a time Moscow fell beneath the power of the Poles.

Soon, however, the national feeling of Russia was aroused. A butcher, or cattle dealer, of Nijni-Novgorod, named Minin, whose patriotism has made him one of the most popular figures in Russian history, got together the nucleus of a national army, and appealed to the patriotic nobleman Prince Pojarski to place himself at its head. Pojarski and Minin marched together to Moscow, and their success in clearing the capital of the foreign invaders is commemorated by a group of statuary which stands in the principal square of Moscow, and in a minor way by the finely painted drop-scene of the Moscow opera-house, which represents the joint national leaders whose names are now never dissociated.

The period of the Polish occupation and of the ultimate delivery of Moscow has been further celebrated by what may be called the national opera of Russia, Glinka's Life for the Tsar, in which the brilliancy and arrogance of the Poles are contrasted with the more solid qualities of the honest but humble-minded Russians, and in which the peasant hero Ivan Sousannin, seized by a party of Poles, who are in search of the Tsar Michael, and forced by them to act as guide in a pathless wood during a severe snow-storm, leads his capturers easily to destruction, but himself perishes at their hands.

The Tsar thus saved was Michael Feodorovitch, first of the line of the Romanoffs.

The whole of this critical period of Russian history has lasting memorials in one central spot within the city of Mos

cow. From the Kremlin battlements the remains of Demetrius the Impostor were fired out of a cannon in the direction of Poland. Beneath its walls stands the animated group, already mentioned, which marks the place where the last decisive victory of Pojarski and Minin was gained. It was through the Kremlin's Holy Gate, which faces the group, and beneath which no one may pass without uncovering, that Prince Pojarski made his triumphal entry after driving out the Poles. The exact spot is shown where Demetrius the Impostor is alleged to have fallen in jumping from one of the windows at the back of the old palace; and it is certain that on the threshold of the Assumption, the most renowned of the three cathedrals clustered together in the Kremlin, the first of the Romanoffs received the oath of allegiance from the people by whom he had just been elected.

Peter the Great-a name which at once brings us down to modern times, and to a comparatively modernized Russia. Alexis Michailovitch, like all his predecessors, except those who were too much occupied with internal matters to be able to look across the frontier, gave encouragement

ALEXIS MICHAILOVITCH.

Among the tombs of the metropolitans buried in this cathedral are those of Philaret and Hermogenes, who were thrown into prison by the Poles for refusing to consent to the accession of Ladislas, the Polish prince, to the Russian throne. Hermogenes died | to visitors from abroad; and he considersoon after his arrest. Philaret, at the ex- ed himself so entirely a member of the pulsion of the Poles, was carried away European family of kings that he maincaptive by them in their retreat from tained an intimate correspondence with Moscow (1612), and was kept nine years Charles I.-still preserved in the archives a prisoner in Poland. On his return to of the Kremlin-and gave that sovereign Russia he found his son Michael Feo- many proofs of sympathy during his time dorovitch elected to the throne. The of trouble. belief then of the Russian people in Michael's patriotism seems to have been founded on a knowledge of the patriotism of his father. The surname of the metropolitan who had defied the Polish power and had suffered nine years' imprisonment in Poland was Romanoff; Philaret was the name he had adopted on becoming a monk. His baptismal name was Feodor, and hence the patronymic Feodorovitch attached to the name of Michael, the first of the Romanoffs.

There is little to say about the reign of Michael Feodorovitch, the circumstances having once been set forth under which he was elected to the vacant throne; and his son and successor Alexis Michailovitch is chiefly remembered as father of

After Charles I.'s execution, Alexis offered money and men to the future Charles II., in view of a restoration. When, more than half a century before, Ivan the Terrible had, in his letters to Elizabeth, suggested that each monarch, in case of distress, should be considered free to seek an asylum in the dominions of the other, the proposed arrangement must, to the English of those days, have seemed onesided. But the treaty of mutual safety offered to Elizabeth might have been of use to more than one of her successors. It was partly, however, from kindness of heart, but also and above all from indignation at the idea of violent hands being laid upon the "Lord's anointed," that Alexis tendered to the Stuart family as

sistance which they would have been un- | the power of her great hereditary enemy;

able to turn to account, and a home which it would have suited neither their interests nor their tastes to accept.

which did not, however, until about a century later, in the person of the Empress Catherine, deprive it, as punishment for rising in rebellion, of its much-prized liberties. Thus the period in which Sobieski liberated Vienna from the Turks, by whom it was so seriously menaced, was that which witnessed the cession of the Cossack country, or Ukraine, to Sobieski's Russian contemporary and foe, Alexis Michailovitch.

The next Tsar worth mentioning at length, after Alexis the son of Michael, is Peter the son of Alexis, better known in Western Europe as Peter the Great. The immediate successor, however, of Michael Feodorovitch was Peter's elder brother Feodor, who again, before Peter ascended the throne, was followed by another bro

Alexis Michailovitch, like so many of the Russian sovereigns before and after him, cultivated politics on a large scale. The idea of driving the Turks out of Europe must have been cherished by the Tsars of Russia from the days when Ivan, the first of the independent Tsars, married Sophia, niece of the last of the Palæologi, and invited to Russia the architects, artists, and artificers who had taken flight from Constantinople after its capture by the Turks. But Ivan the “Great” had to free himself from the Tartars; Ivan the Terrible had to complete the consolidation of the Muscovite power by reducing to subjection (through wholesale massacres) the still independent republics of Nov-ther, Ivan. gorod and Pskov. Then came the disputed succession, the appearance of Demetrius the Impostor, the difficulties with Poland, and the occupation of Moscow by the Poles. When the second sovereign of the Romanoff dynasty ascended the throne there was nothing more to fear from the Tartars in the east, while on the western side the Poles had in their turn been driven back. Alexis Michailovitch then turned his attention toward the south, and proposed to form a league of European princes, with the view of expelling the Turks from Europe.

The Turks were at that time a real menace to European civilization. They held Hungary in their possession, and Buda was governed by a Turkish pasha. But such was the jealousy between the European states that the combination proposed by Alexis Michailovitch - from which, had it been adopted, it is quite possible that he might have derived greater benefits than any one else-had no chance of being realized. Poland, in particular, declined to co-operate with him, and it was ultimately at the expense, not of Turkey, but of Poland, that Alexis Michailovitch increased his dominions.

The Cossack country known as Little Russia, with Kharkov and Kiev as its chief towns, professing the same Greek religion as Muscovy, or Great Russia, had, in order to free itself from the ties which bound it to Catholic Poland, placed itself under the protection of the Russian Tsar. Worsted in the field, Poland saw her border territory, or Ukraine, pass beneath |

At this time, and until the reign of Paul, at the end of the last century, the succession in the reigning family of Russia was very irregular. Instead of descending, as at present, directly from fathers to sons, it passed at times from father to son, at others from brother to brother, and Peter Alexievitch, before reigning alone, was associated in the imperial dignity first with Ivan, his brother, and afterward with Natalie, his sister.

Peter the Great is a many-sided figure, and such a huge one that to view him from all points would involve the making of a very considerable circuit. It would be easy to show that he was a coarse sensualist, and he had undoubtedly many of the tastes of a mere barbarian. He drank to excess, and delighted in such practical jokes as serving up live rats and mice in a pie-dish covered over with the usual paste. When he was in England his favorite exercise consisted in charging with a wheelbarrow a trimly cut quickset hedge, which had at one time formed the joy of its garden-loving proprietor. not only sentenced to death, but apparently himself killed, the disaffected son whom he had thrown into prison, and who perished there.

He

If you inquire in the museum of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg who carved those wooden figures, who turned those ivory ornaments, who made that pair of boots, who built that boat, the answer is always, "The Tsar Peter." Inquire further who reformed the old Slavonic alphabet by introducing into it the symbols of