t, see
_Memoirs of the Princess Daschkaw_, Vol. I. p. 383.]

She seemed to go farther: she issued a decree prohibiting the
enslavement of serfs. But, unfortunately, the palace-intrigues, and the
correspondence with the philosophers, and the destruction of Polish
nationality left her no time to see the edict carried out. But Europe
applauded,--and the serfs waited.

Two years after this came a deed which put an end to all this
uncertainty. An edict was prepared, ordering the peasants of Little
Russia to remain forever on the estates where the day of publication
should find them. This was vile; but what followed was diabolic.
Court-pets were let into the secret. These, by good promises, enticed
hosts of peasants to their estates. The edict was now sprung;--in an
hour the courtiers were made rich, the peasants were made serfs, and
Catharine II. was made infamous forever.

So, about a century after Peter, there rolled over Russia a wave of
wrong which not only drowned honor in the nobility, but drowned hope in
the people.

As Russia entered the nineteenth century, the hearts of earnest men must
have sunk within them. For Paul I., Catharine's son and successor, was
infinitely more despotic than Catharine, and infinitely less restrained
by public opinion. He had been born with savage instincts, and educated
into ferocity. Tyranny was written on his features, in his childhood. If
he remained in Russia, his mother sneered and showed hatred to him; if
he journeyed in Western Europe, crowds gathered about his coach to jeer
at his ugliness. Most of those who have seen Gillray's caricature
of him, issued in the height of English spite at Paul's homage to
Bonaparte, have thought it hideously overdrawn; but those who have seen
the portrait of Paul in the Cadet-Corps at St. Petersburg know well
that Gillray did not exaggerate Paul's ugliness, for he could not.

And Paul's face was but a mirror of his character. Tyranny was wrought
into his every fibre. He insisted on an Oriental homage. As his carriage
whirled by, it was held the duty of all others in carriages to stop,
descend into the mud, and bow themselves. Himself threw his despotism
into this formula,--"Know, Sir Ambassador, that in Russia there is
no one noble or powerful except the man to whom I speak, and while I
speak."

And yet, within that hideous mass glowed some sparks of reverence
for right. When the nobles tried to get Paul's assent to more open
arrangements fo