was to marry his eldest son to the Princess Elizabeth, afterwards Empress, and his daughter to the Duke of Holstein, afterwards Paul III.; and, if the Empress had lived a few years longer, he would probably have accomplished his design. As regent, his haughtiness, bloodthirstiness, and greed grew unbearable. He gave himself the title of Imperial Highness; fixed his salary at half-a-million roubles a year; and condemned to the knout or to the mines of Siberia all whom his army of spies reported to be inimical to him. He treated. the parents of his sovereign with such brutality that they placed themselves at the head of a conspiracy for his overthrow. Several stormy scenes occurred between them and Bieren. The Regent accused them of fostering disaffection, although they had vowed to be loyal to him. "There is no agitation that I know of that will hurt either the Emperor or the Empire." "It is my business," said Bieren, "to place the Empire in such a situation that nobody will be able to hurt it, and I alone in Russia am able to do it." "The nobles must assist you," was the retort; "and you and they alike must answer to the Emperor." "What!" exclaimed the Regent; "have I not unlimited power? Such opinions as yours, sir, will foment commotions, and if these arise, do you know what will happen?" "Yes!" said Prince Anthony, small of stature yet full of impulse and daring, drawing his sword; "somebody will be massacred! You are Regent by forgery! The Empress never signed the testament you produced." "I will report your language to the Cabinet, sir," said the Duke, leaving the room. He summoned the Cabinet, the Senate, and the nobility, and acquainted them with this conversation, furiously denouncing the Prince as a liar. A fortnight later, Duke Bieren was on his way to Siberia. In the dead of the night, a band of soldiers with loaded muskets, led by Marshal Munnich, repaired to the Summer Palace, where the Regent was residing. Colonel Mannstein, at the head of twenty men, was told off to enter the palace and seize the Duke, and assassinate him in case of resistance. Without awaking suspicion he passed the guards, who knew him well, and got as far as the bed-chambers without difficulty. Not daring to ask any of the servants to point out the Duke's bedchamber, he tried all the doors till he came to a locked one. It was a folding one, and, the bolts at top and bottom being left unsecured, was easily forced. In this room he found the Duke and Duchess asleep, and whispered low in the Duke's ear that he was wanted. Alarmed, the Regent jumped up and tried to creep under the bed. Mannstein sprang round and seized him and summoned his soldiers, while the Duke struck out savagely with his fists. The soldiers knocked him down with the butt-end of their muskets, gagged him, tied his hands behind, led him naked to the guard-room, where they threw a soldier's cloak round him, and then hurried him off. The Duchess in her shift followed as far as the street. A soldier was ordered to carry her back to bed; he threw her into a snow-drift and left her there. The Regent was tried and condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted into banishment to Siberia. A house designed by Marshal Munnich was built there specially for him. Within a year he was recalled, and poetic justice sent Munnich to occupy it, where he cked out his allowance of sixpence a day as a dairyman and infantschool teacher. Count de Hordt saw Bieren in St. Petersburg during the reign of Catherine III., and found him, though upwards of eighty years, "preserving a fresh ruddy complexion and a presence of mind rare at his age." He had been the cause of countless deaths-about 15,000-and innumerable cruelties, yet he was happy, untroubled, with a conscience as peaceful as that of a sleeping child. No pang of remorse ever gave him a bitter hour. In what a small degree is conscience an attribute of man! We impose on ourselves when we conceive the guilty haunted by the avenging spirits of those they have murdered. It is questionable if Shakespeare's representation of the couch of the Hunchback as surrounded by the ghosts of his victims is true to fact. They that are guilty know not of their guilt, but only they that are good. The enormities of her reign are undoubtedly to be ascribed to the bloodthirsty disposition of the Duke of Courland, but that she allowed herself to become an instrument of evil in his hands is no palliation of her guilt. Of the 30,000 souls banished to Siberia during her short reign of ten years, no trace of 5,000 could be found at her death, and these are supposed to have been secretly murdered in Russia. Her womanly feelings often rose in protest against the cruel decrees her lover extorted from her. "I have often seen her," said Count Munnich, "weep bitterly when she interceded with Bieren, who stormed and raved at her reluctance to sacrifice his enemies." The gentle, compassionate creature could not bear the thought of human suffering; her queenly pride and reserve broke down, and her breast heaved with many sobs. She often told Bieren that he was making her name infamous in history, and as history confesses to no feelings of chivalry, and calls Here is a story or two illustra crimes crimes, even though a woman in love do them, her prophetic estimate of her reign has proved true. tive of what is called her " clemency," from which the temper of her cruelty may be inferred. Count Wolinski, a member of her cabinet, -impetuous, reckless, and defiant,-born with a wit that was a little too caustic and biting for a despotism, for having incurred the Duke's displeasure was sentenced to have his tongue cut out, his right hand taken off, to be broken alive on the wheel, and to have his head fixed on a pole. Anne graciously commuted the sentence to amputation of the right hand and decapitation, weeping bitterly as she signed the death-warrant. The day after Wolinski's execution the Duke accused Count Puskin of a similar offence-of having publicly said that the favourite and his mistress would not always live, and that their tyranny would come to an end. This bold statement of an unquestionable fact of nature almost cost him his life. This time Her Majesty affixed her signature to the death-warrant without the wonted tribute of a tear. When the sentence was announced to him, Puskin uttered such invectives that he had to be gagged. A messenger from the Czarina told him that she had resolved to spare his life, that he should only lose his tongue and be banished to Siberia. The executioner arrived before the retreating footsteps of the messenger had re-crossed the threshold. Puskin used his mischief-making member in discoursing freely on the moral relations of the Empress and the Duke before he lost it for ever. Here are an incident and an extract which offer the reader a contrast on which he can make his own reflections. They give an estimate of Anne from antipodal points of view-the one that of her subjects, whose lives were as breath in her nostrils, the other that of the wife of a British resident, far beyond the reach of her cruelty. To the former she was a death's head; to the latter, an earthly Providence. The incident is the following:-Some mischievous persons broke into her Winter Palace, and, selecting some of the finest pictures in her collection, cut them out of their frames and tore them in pieces, putting in their stead representations of racks, gibbets, and other instruments of torture. With the impression created by this fact fresh on the imagination, read the following:-"I have often seen her Majesty affected horror at any mark of cruelty, that her mind seems composed of the most amiable qualities that I have ever observed in any person, melt into tears at a which seems a melancholy story, and she shows such un possessed of such power." We make from within us the people we particular mark of the goodness of God, as she is TOL. CCXLVII. NO. 1796. own imaginations. This lady's nearness to the throne had evidently bewildered her moral perceptions, and thrown her eyes off the straight line of moral vision. The fierce light that beats upon a throne beats, it is to be feared, not to bring its shadows into clearer outline, but to blind those that gaze upon it. The grim humour of her uncle-in which, however, there was a scintilla of cruelty, a suspicion that the fun was more delicious from the fact that the feelings or flesh of others was lacerated-was on one or two occasions manifested by Anne. As a punishment for his religious apostasy, she nominated Prince Gallitzin, a nobleman of middle age and the wearer of an historic name, court page and court buffoon. There are few men heroic enough to prefer death to life on dishonourable conditions when one or other of the alternatives must instantaneously be chosen; and this prince was of opinion that even the life of a public butt was better than life in Siberia or no life at all. Indignant that he wore the cap and bells with a smiling face and showed no sense of humiliation, the royal humourist, with a broad grin on her broad face, and a malicious twinkle in her blue eye, ordered him to marry a girl of low degree, promising to superintend and pay the expenses of the marriage festivities, and to present him with a palace of great brilliance and beauty. The one she gave him was brilliant enough when the sun shone on it! The festivities were conducted on a scale of national magnificence. More than 300 men and women were ordered up from the several provinces of the empire to St. Petersburg to attend the nuptials of the prince, and commanded to come in the peculiar dress and costume of their districts. On the wedding day the motley mob was assembled in the courtyard of the palace, where the babblement of many tongues and the want of a common dialect almost drove the responsible managers of the rejoicings to distraction, and whence the wedding guests started in procession through the principal streets of the city. At their head marched the happy pair, locked together in a cage. perched on the shoulders of an elephant. The guests, brought from their far glens and hills to make an hour's fun for a queen, followed on sledges drawn by all manner of beasts-swine, calves, dogs, reindeer, and bears. Some from far Archangel were hoisted on the backs of camels, fierce monsters of whose existence they wot not, and spent an hour of concentrated agony there; their reluctance to mount having been overcome by fierce objurgations which fell harmlessly on ears blissfully ignorant of their meaning, and by the free use of the cudgel, to the persuasive power of which they responded. A salute of guns announced to the citizens the departure of the procession from the palace; it was fired from four small cannon and two mortars. The cannon could only hold half an ounce of powder without bursting, and the mortars threw little wooden shells hardly as dangerous as a boy's squib: for the murderous weapons were made of ice. Dancing and drinking were kept up till an early hour in the morning, when the bride and bridegroom were conducted home by a military escort to the mansion the Empress had promised them. It was a chamber of two apartments, built of ice. The furniture was of ice; the marriage bed was of ice, and into it the young couple, in obedience to orders from headquarters, after being stripped, were duly placed, and guards stood sentry all night at the door to prevent them seeking warmer shelter. Her Majesty's habits of life were very regular. Her Ministers arrived at the palace every morning, summer and winter alike, at 9 o'clock, to transact affairs of State, before which hour she had breakfasted. She dined at noon with the Duke of Courland. On public occasions she dined in public, and then she sat on a throne under a gorgeous canopy, the Grand Duchess Anne and the Princess Elizabeth being the only guests at the table at which she presided, and the Lord High Chancellor acting as waiter. After a light supper she retired to rest at 11. Not even in the Court of France was ostentation and display carried further than it was by Anne. People who came to Court twice in the same dress were disgraced; and many of the ladies and gentlemen of the palace seriously impaired their fortunes in their anxiety to gratify the Czarina's ambition that her Court should be the most brilliant in Europe, the salaries she gave them being quite inadequate. Yet incongruity ran through all their grandeur; vulgarity and refinement kissed each other. You would see brilliant rings on unwashed fingers with a large tract of soil under the nails. Rich fabrics were cut into clothes that hung loose on the body like sacks. A nobleman wearing a beautiful costume would have his head covered with a filthy wig. This was the result of Peter's efforts to force external civilisation on his subjects without the preliminary preparation of inward culture and refinement of mind and spirit. Yet she herself was thrift personified. Her own apparel was ever the poorest and the plainest. A silk handkerchief round her head, a scarlet jacket and a black petticoat were her usual morning dress; and she always wore a plain long gown in the afternoon. There was no more constant visitor to the auction rooms where drapery goods were sold than the Czarina; and when a piece of silk or article of vertu was put up, the royal lips would often lisp out a bid; and it was well understood that no frown suggestive of Siberia would overcast her Majesty's |