d it rapidly declined. She,
however, continued to apply herself with great assiduity to public
affairs until the middle of April, when she was obliged to take her
bed. There is no "royal road" to death. After four weeks of suffering
and all the humbling concomitants of disease and approaching
dissolution, the empress breathed her last at nine o'clock in the
evening of the 16th of May, 1727, after a reign of but little more
than two years, and in the forty-second year of her age.

Upon her death-bed Catharine declared Peter II., the son of Alexis,
her successor; and as he was but twelve years of age, a regency was
established during his minority. Menzikoff, however, the illustrious
favorite of Peter the Great, who had been appointed by Catharine
generalissimo of all the armies both by land and sea, attained such
supremacy that he was in reality sovereign of the empire. During the
reign, of Catharine Russia presented the extraordinary spectacle of
one of the most powerful and aristocratic kingdoms on the globe
governed by an empress whose origin was that of a nameless girl found
weeping in the streets of a sacked town--while there rode, at the head
of the armies of the empire, towering above grand dukes and princes of
the blood, the son of a peasant, who had passed his childhood the
apprentice of a pastry cook, selling cakes in the streets of Moscow.
Such changes would have been extraordinary at any period of time and
in any quarter of the world; but that they should have occurred in
Russia, where for ages so haughty an aristocracy had dominated, seems
almost miraculous. Menzikoff; elated by the power which the minority
of the king gave him, assumed such airs as to excite the most bitter
spirit of hostility among the nobles. They succeeded in working his
ruin; and the boy emperor banished him to Siberia and confiscated his
immense estates. The blow was fatal. Sinking into the most profound
melancholy, Menzikoff lingered for a few months in the dreary region
of his exile, and died in 1729. Peter the Second did not long survive
him. But little more than two years elapsed after the death of
Catharine, when he, being then a lad of but fourteen years of age, was
seized with the small-pox and died the 19th of January, 1730. One
daughter of Peter the Great and of Catharine still survived.

Some of the principal of the nobility, seeing how many difficulties
attended hereditary succession, which at one time placed the crown
upon