their inability to make use of the opportunity thus afforded to them to obtain it. The nobles, it is true, did succeed, not in freeing themselves, but in rivetting the chains of the peasants; the usurper Boris bribing their connivance at his seizure of the Czarship, by the enactment of a law, which, binding the labourers to the soil, perpetuated and legalised the serfdom of the peasantry. It was not unnatural that the people, enraged at this increase of the power of the petty tyrants, should look back with regret to the days of the dreaded destroyer of the nobles; and hence the marvellous success of the false Demetrius, who professed to be a son of Ivan. The usurper fell before the impostor, but only to usher in a period of anarchy, during which the sufferings of the Russians from wars, both civil and foreign, must have reminded them of the times of the Tartars. The murder of the first Demetrius was succeeded by the endeavours of other impostors to imitate him. The Tartars, Swedes, Lithuanians, and Poles, all seized the opportunity to invade the country; the son of the Polish King was actually declared Czar, and though the Poles were driven out of Moscow, it was not until they had laid great part of it in ashes, and massacred many tens of thousands of its inhabitants.

No sooner was Moscow rescued from the invaders, than an assembly of notabilities was convoked from all parts of the empire in order to elect a Czar in the place of the hated Pole. Had there been the slightest capacity of freedom amongst the Russians, this would have been the time for its development. Never had the tone of the nation been more elevated. There had been a successful outburst of patriotism, in which all classes had combined; nor was the elevation of the new Czar or the establishment of the new Government, left in the hands of a clique or even of a caste. The high nobles, not daring to take the responsibility of the choice upon themselves, despatched letters to every town in the empire, commanding the clergy, nobility, and citizens to send deputies to Moscow, endowed with full power to form a national council; and in order to invoke the blessing of God upon the act of election, a fast of three days was at the same time decreed, and, according to contemporary records, rigorously observed throughout the country.

At this gathering of the States General, thus solemnly convened, Michael Romanoff, a boy of sixteen, was, after long debatings, unanimously chosen. It was a strange choice, thus to summon to the throne, from his mother's arms in a distant convent, an unknown youth, whose sole claims were that his great aunt had been the revered Anastatia, the first wife of Ivan the Terrible, and that his father was a patriotic bishop, especially

popular at that crisis, because he lay in a Polish prison.* But it is evident from a perusal of the few records of this election, that it was mainly to this seeming unfitness of its founder that the Romanoff dynasty owed its origin. The heads of the great families, the Galitzins, Troubetskois, &c., unable, by reason of their mutual jealousy, to grasp the prize themselves, hoped, each one of them, to rule in the name of the puppet Czar. Guarding, however, against his manhood, they obliged him, it is stated, to sign conditions which, if fulfilled, would indeed have changed the autocracy of Russia into an oligarchy, and made the Czar almost as powerless as the King of Poland; but so opposed were these conditions to the spirit of the nation, that if signed at all, they were merely so much waste-paper, no one even calling for their fulfilment. The fact of the formation of this Russian constitution has merely an antiquarian value; and antiquaries question even its existence. There can be no doubt, however, that the nobles overreached themselves; they thought to degrade the sovereign power by entrusting it to a parvenu, but they inflicted the severest possible blow on the principle of birth, their sole remaining defence. So long as the Czarship remained in the family of Rurik, every boyard could claim consideration from the Czar, in proportion to the propinquity of his descent from some other noble Northman. But when once the nobles had acknowledged as their ruler this youth, whose ancestor only three centuries before had been a Lithuanian heathen, they divorced power from birth, and overthrew that principle of legitimacy which modern Russian Emperors have been so eager to uphold, but which had no existence in Russia until after the establishment of the order of succession by Paul.

The march of young Romanoff from his mother's convent to the Kremlin was a triumphal procession, the people everywhere hailed him as a saviour sent from heaven, to deliver them not only from foreign invaders, but from domestic oppressors. He was sovereign by the choice-the will of the people; and the people willed him to be their autocrat, because they were serfs longing for a master of their masters; the autocracy of the parvenus speedily became more absolute than even that of the Ivans. The Ivans were feared, or, at most, honoured, because the sceptre, which was their birthright, was a sword to destroy and to defend; but the sceptre of the Romanoffs seemed to the people a gift of God, and they kissed it as the rod of a parent. They bowed down before their Czar as before their father,

* Schnitzler's Secret History, vol. i. Appendix, note 2.

calling him their 'Papa'-this is, their Pope,-the father of their wills, by virtue not of his birth, but of his office; and hence their submission, otherwise so inexplicable, to the two Catherines, neither of whom could have sat in the seat of a descendant of Rurik. So late as the reign of Alexis, the father of Peter the Great, women were almost as much secluded at his court as they had been in the camp of the Golden Horde; and in no one of his innovations had Peter to surmount more opposition, than in his determination to force the courtiers to admit their wives into society. Yet the Livonian peasant woman, who was suspected, though wrongfully, of having murdered him, and the German princess, who was known to have murdered his grandson, were each of them reverenced as sovereigns,-the undoubted murderess more especially as the mother of her people, not the less by reason of their usurpation, but rather the more, because their subjects fancied that by their connivance at this usurpation, they were again exercising the power so dear to slaves, because it is the sole power they can possess, that of choosing their masters. This reverence, however, of authority regardless of the mode by which it has been obtained, was dangerous to the continuance of a dynasty, though convenient to its foundation; hence the willingness of Paul and his sons to limit their power by the only law which binds a Czar,-that law of succession by which Paul decreed that the Czar cannot name his successor, but must be succeeded by his eldest son.

Nevertheless, though the circumstances attending the elevation of the Romanoffs contributed to make their rule more autocratic than that of their predecessors, these circumstances alone would hardly have sufficed, had not the early monarchs of this race been men exactly fitted for the task. The wonderful deeds of Peter I. have diverted the attention of strangers from his father and grandfather; but no one who has studied the reigns of these two princes will deny that the energy of Peter would have failed in the social revolutions. and administrative reforms which he attempted, had not his subjects been prepared to submit to them, by the firm moderation of Michael, and the stern, but wise and just rule of Alexis. The great Czar himself, innovator though he was, and constant as were his efforts to force his subjects into a premature civilisation, owed his vast personal influence to the exact adaptation of his character to their virtues and their vices. In his barbarism and imitativeness, his generosity and cruclty, his combination of passion and profligacy with energy and endurance, Peter the Great was the very personification of Russia as she then was, and even as she is now.

VOL. CI. NO. CCVI.

M M

Perhaps the two chief events of Peter's reign were his destruction of the two remaining restraints on the will of the Autocrat; his massacre of the Strelitz, and his abolition of the Patriarchate. The first of these deeds, ferocious as was its mode of execution, was hardly less conducive to the interests of his subjects than to the preservation of his own prerogative; for the Janissaries of Moscow were no champions of freedom; when not the instruments of tyranny they were tyrants themselves, and the sole revolution which they could have effected, would have been a military reign of terror. Whether the other and yet more important act, the assumption by the Czar of the headship of the Church, has been of advantage to the empire, it is more difficult to determine. Doubtless it left no mediator between the ruled and the ruler; but so despotic was the ecclesiastical discipline of Russia, so thoroughly was it framed in imitation of the political system, that it is probable the Patriarch would have become, instead of a mediator, little better than a rival tyrant. Accidental circumstances had made this conflict of the spiritual with the temporal power no impossible result.

Philaretes, the father of Michael Romanoff, was made the Patriarch of Moscow, after the accession of his son, and it was not unnatural that the son should associate with himself in his imperial duties the wise and patriotic father, to whose popularity he was so much indebted for his elevation. He was in fact coregent, the ukases were issued in the joint names of Michael Feoderovitch, Sovereign Czar and Grand Prince, and his Father Philaretes, mighty Lord and most holy Patriarch-sometimes even in the sole name of the Patriarch. The Patriarchal power, thus accidentally exalted, culminated in the reign of Alexis, in the person of the Russian Wolsey, the able but ambitious Nikon. At first the minister and confident of Alexis, Nikon rose so high, that the son of the Patriarch of Antioch writes of him with wonder and envy, as feared by the grandees by many degrees more' than the Czar,-standing in no want of money, as how should he? in a town of this magnitude (Moscow) 'governed only by two persons, himself and the Emperor.' The jealousy of Alexis was excited: he succeeded, though with difficulty, in deposing this proud Patriarch; and Peter was but fulfilling the policy of his father, when, taking upon himself the functions of the Patriarchate, he abolished, or rather suspended, the office itself; but the independence which has been so jealously preserved in the other Churches of the East was extinguished, and the powerful engines of Church govern

6

* Macarius's Travels, books ix. x.

ment and superstition lent their force to the autocracy of the Czars.

As to the injurious effect of another of Peter's innovations there can be little question. He issued two edicts, by one of which he made the landowner responsible for the capitation tax on his serfs, and by the other, for the required levies of recruits. In order to meet these obligations it was necessary that the power of the serf-owner over his serfs should be increased, so that in fact it became unlimited. The boyard was allowed to exact what he pleased from the mujik in return for his undertaking the office of state overseer, - that is, of driving him to pay his quota of money or blood. Thus the increased facilities of the state for raising men and money were gained at the cost of individual liberty; while the Czar became more powerful, the people became more enslaved.

For a description of what Russia was at that time, we must refer our readers to one of the books mentioned at the head of these pages, the Mémoires Secrets of the Sieur de Villebois. This French favourite of Peter the Great was the De Grammont of his court, for a Breton smuggler found his fit sphere at St. Petersburgh as easily as the polished Count mixed in the society of London. Very curious it is to mark the resemblance in amount, but the contrast in character, of the profligacy of the courts of Russia and England -- the worn-out licentiousness, utterly heartless, though outwardly elegant, in the one case, and the savage outburst, more cynical, though hardly more coarse, of youthful appetite in the other. De Villebois' stories are as piquant as De Grammont's, and probably as exaggerated; but in spite of this doubt, there is hardly one of them of which we have not some confirmation; and the general impression produced by them is probably correct, though their authenticity has been questioned. The old idea of the great Czar, as a selfdenying patriot, sacrificing every personal feeling for the sake of his country, if in any minds it has survived the closer study of his character which late events have caused,-will vanish before a perusal of this gossip: nevertheless, our respect for his abilities is not diminished; for though he gratified every whim and every passion with all the force of his wonderful energies, he used these very gratifications as means to gain his political ends. The orgies in which he revelled were as reckless and abandoned as those of his contemporary the Regent d'Orleans; but no one save Peter would have employed them to arrive at the hidden thoughts of his courtiers. De Villebois tells us that he was in the habit of inviting men whom he secretly disliked, in order that he might carefully note down the words which