oth the imperial ladies were apt pupils in the school
of political intrigue, and, in the last years of the emperor, endeavored
to utilize their influence over him to the detriment of the
heir-apparent and the elevation of Anna and her husband, the Caesar
Nicephorus. They accordingly formed a plot, during Alexius's last
illness, to dispossess the eldest son John, that the three might share
the government among them.

The empress introduced soldiers into the palace, and in the closing
hours of the emperor's life sought to prevail on him to pronounce the
words which would bring about the change in the succession. But the
astute emperor realized his son's eminent fitness to wear the crown, and
was not in sympathy with the ambitions of his learned but unscrupulous
daughter. To all the entreaties of the empress he but cast his eyes
heavenward and remarked on the vanities of human greatness. Despairing
and enraged, the empress at last hastily left the room with a parting
thrust at her imperial consort, which might fitly have been inscribed as
an epitaph on his tomb: "You die as you lived--a hypocrite!" Meanwhile,
during her absence, John entered the room, and, with the tacit consent
of his dying father, removed from his finger the signet which gave him
command of all the forces of the palace; and crushing, in their
inception, the plots of the empress and her daughter, he was solemnly
crowned the moment his father breathed his last.

John proved to be the most amiable character that ever occupied the
Byzantine throne. But all his virtues did not suffice to quell the
malice and disappointed ambition of his imperial sister. In spite of the
failure of the first conspiracy, the Princess Anna, "whose philosophy
would not have refused the weight of a diadem," entered into another
plot to dispossess her brother--already secure in the confidence of
courtiers and subjects--and to elevate her husband, whom she felt sure
of ruling. As John was already on the throne, however, the only way by
which he could be disposed of was to have his eyes put out or to resort
to the still worse crime of secret assassination. When her mild and
gentle husband recoiled at the thought of such cruelty, Anna made to him
the memorable response that Nature had mistaken the two sexes and had
endowed him with the soul of a woman, contemptuously contrasting what
she termed his feminine weakness with her own manly inhumanity.

This conspiracy, however, was also r