THE ROMANOFFS. F, six hundred years ago, Russia had not already been behind all Europe in such civilization as Europe then possessed, the invasion of the Tartars in the thirteenth century would have sufficed to throw her and keep her back. But the cause of the slow progress of civilization in Russia, from the retreat of the Tartars in the fifteenth century up to the time of Peter the Great, must be looked for in the destruction of the Eastern Empire, in that same century, by Mohammed II. The fall of Constantinople, which, by driving so many Greek artists to Italy, brought about the æsthetic and intellectual movement in Western Europe known as the revival of arts and letters, produced in Russia a corresponding decline; for the Russian Church, as if with the view of preventing those schisms which have agitated and torn so many other nations, prohibited the Russians from visiting any country not professing the Greek faith; and no country professing the Greek faith existed outside Russia after the fall of Constantinople. VOL. LXVII-No. 397.-7 I. Apart from the minor princes who ruled those portions of Russia external to the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the republics of Novgorod and Pskov still at this time preserved their independence. But they were destined to fall beneath the attacks of Ivan, the first independent Tsar of Russia, and of Vassili, his son. It was not, however, until the accession of Ivan IV., surnamed the Terrible, that they were reduced finally to submission. Prosper Mérimée has said of this sanguinary monster that he was never "terrible" except to his own subjects. This is not strictly true, though it was by the tortures that he inflicted upon those over whom he had been called to rule that he gained the unenviable epithet affixed to his name. This prince was but four years old when he ascended the throne, and the government of the country was, until he became of age, carried on by the House of Boyards, under the direction of his mother, the Princess Helen, of the Polish family of Glinski. He was but thirteen when a political party, opposed to the more influential of | warded to Moscow, whence the Tsar wrote to Captain Chancellor, inviting him to come on to the capital. Chancellor accepted the invitation, and was brought into the presence of Ivan the Terrible. Ivan, under pretense of being a Christian, was always forming plans for mak the Boyards of whom the council was composed, suggested to him that he was quite old enough to govern alone, and that he would do well to disembarrass himself of his too officious advisers. The young prince had already given proof of some sagacity and of considerable vio-ing war upon the Turks, and he desired lence of temper, and he hastened to profit by the suggestions offered to him. From this moment every one trembled before the boy of thirteen. He terrified even the party which had so imprudently inspired him with the idea of liberating himself from his councillors. Direct accounts of Ivan's demeanor at court have been furnished by the English traveller Captain Chancellor, who, in his own words, "discovered" Muscovy, and by various envoys and visitors from Poland and Germany. But the evidence of his cruelties rests chiefly on the testimony of the Russian official historian Karamzin, who, in dealing with the tyrant of three hundred years before, was allowed to give full vent to the indignation with which Ivan's acts could not fail to inspire him. There is in some Russian gallery a picture representing Karamzin engaged in reading his history to the Emperor Alexander, who has been much praised for his magnanimity in tolerating the historian's fearless denunciations of his infamous predecessor on the throne. "The amiable Karamzin," wrote the late Alexander Herzen, "could not think it right that Ivan should have his enemies sawn from head to foot between two boards"; nor could the liberal Alexander well object to such performances being vigorously denounced. much to obtain the assistance of England toward that end. Indeed, his respect and love for England were so great that he proposed to marry Queen Elizabeth, and for some time would take no refusal. His letter containing the proposal was not, as in the case of King Theodore of Abyssinia, left unanswered. On the contrary, a special embassy was sent with the reply. The ambassador, Sir Jerome Bowes, gave some offense to the capricious monarch |-neglecting, it is said, to uncover before him; upon which Ivan is reported to have ordered that the envoy's hat should be nailed to his head. As Sir Jerome lived to return to England, and gave, on the whole, a rather favorable account of the Muscovite Tsar, it is to be presumed that the new form of capital punishment designed for him by his royal host was not inflicted. Ivan, however, possessed a grim humor, which sometimes manifested itself in a terribly tragic form. In his moments of gayety he would cause a number of persons who had or had not offended him to be wrapped up in bear-skins, and then set bear-hounds upon them to worry them to death. When the Church of St. Basil the Blessed, the most original and fantastic if not the most beautiful church in Moscow, was finished, he sent for the architect, and asked him whether he could build another exactly like it, and receiving a triumphant answer in the affirmative, ordered the man's eyes to be put out, in order that the Church of St. Basil the Blessed might remain unique. But to return to Captain Chancellor, who, in the days of Edward VI., started on a voyage of discovery, bearing with him circular letters from the crown to the rulers of any strange lands that chance Ivan the Terrible has been compared or inclination might lead him to visit. by a recent historian of Russia to Henry Like many other explorers, he found VIII. of England; and though Henry can what he had not sought. He entered the not be fairly said to have resembled Ivan White Sea, where a ship had not been in any other respect, it is quite true that seen for upward of three hundred years, both sovereigns married more wives than cast anchor opposite the monastery of St. custom allowed. In Russia it is permitted Nicholas, disembarked at a place where to wed three times-a dispensation, hownow stands the city of Archangel, and be-ever, being granted to the determined maring called on by the authorities to make known his intentions, declared, with great presence of mind, that he had come to conclude a treaty of commerce between England and Russia. The news was for rier who, wishing to take a fourth wife, chooses a Jewess for his bride, and converts her to the Christian religion. Ivan the Terrible married no Jewess. The wife who exercised the greatest influence over him was of the Mohammedan religion; and besides marrying two of his Russian subjects, he was willing to contract an alliance now with the Protestant Queen of England, now with the daughter of King Sigismund of Poland, who was a Roman Catholic. The negotiations for the hand of the Polish princess and of the English queen seem, oddly enough, to have been carried on almost simultaneously; and this, together with the absence of positive evidence of the fact in the correspondence between Ivan and Elizabeth, preserved in the archives of the Kremlin, has led Mr. George Tolstoi, in his lately published work on the early relations between Russia and England, to maintain that the tradition as to Ivan's intended marriage with Elizabeth is without foundation. The legend on the subject, based on reports brought home by English travellers of the period, is that Ivan IV. made a formal offer to Elizabeth, which the Virgin Queen declined on the ground that she was firmly resolved not to enter the married state; and that on Ivan's declaring that he was determined, if the queen would not have him, at least to marry some lady of her court, the daughter of the Earl of Huntingdon, Lady Mary Hastings, was proposed to him as a willing bride. The young English girl, however, could not have been very anxious to become the sixth wife of a Tartar-like monster who was already upward of fifty years of age; and nothing came of the affair. The ambassadors from England who from time to time visited Russia did their best to maintain the Tsar in his delusion that an English wife of high degree would really be sent out to him; and this high diplomatic flirtation gave results in the form of commercial treaties and special privileges for English merchants, who, for instance, were allowed by one special permit to seize all the foreign shipping in the White Sea, and confiscate it, on condition of giving half the proceeds to the Tsar Ivan. The reign of Ivan the Terrible-apart from the striking and appalling character of Ivan himself, whom Mickiewicz, the Polish poet, calls, in his lectures on MICHAEL FEODOROVITCH. the Slavonians, "the most finished tyrant known in history-frivolous and debauched like Nero, stupid and ferocious like Caligula, full of dissimulation like Tiberius or Louis XI."-is interesting as marking the beginning of the intercourse between Russia and Western Europe, and especially between Russia and England. The natural approach to Russia from the west was, of course, through Poland; but the Poles impeded systematically, and for political reasons, the introduction of arts and artificers into Russia, and Sigismund wrote a letter to Elizabeth, warning her against the Muscovite power as a danger to civilization, only not formidable for the moment because it was still semi-barbarous. Ivan the Terrible was the third of the independent Tsars; and already under Ivan, sometimes called the "Great"-to whom, indeed, belongs the honor of having finally liberated Russia from the Tartar yoke-endeavors had been made to enter into relations with various European nations. Foreigners, too, were encouraged to visit Russia and settle there. The movement of foreigners toward Russia increased with each succeeding reign; and beginning with the first Tsar of Muscovy, it 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 Godounoff, 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 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 |