run down a hare and
are engaged in picking nice morsels from its bones. If Russia was
getting more than her share, the Turks would be incited by Austria or
Prussia to attack her in the South; and many times did Catherine's
armies desert Poland to march down and defend the Crimea, and her new
fort at Sebastopol, and her fleet on the Black Sea. In 1787,
accompanied by her grandsons, the Grand Dukes Alexander and
Constantine, she made that famous journey down the Dnieper; visited the
ancient shrines about Kief; stood in the picturesque old capital of
Sarai, on the spot where Russian Grand Princes had groveled at the feet
of the Khans; and then, looked upon Sebastopol, which marked the limit
of the new frontier which she had created.

The French Revolution caused a revulsion in her political theories.
She indulged in no more abstractions about human rights, and had an
antipathy for the new principles which had led to the execution of the
King and Queen and to such revolting horrors. She made a holocaust of
the literature she had once thought entertaining. Russians suspected
of liberal tendencies were watched, and upon the slightest pretext sent
to Siberia, and she urged the King of Sweden to head a crusade against
this pestilential democracy, which she would help him to sweep out of
Europe. It was Catherine, in consultation with the Emperor of Austria,
who first talked of dismembering Turkey and creating out of its own
territory a group of neutral states lying between Europe and the
Ottoman Empire. And Voltaire's dream of a union of the Greek peoples
into an Hellenic kingdom she improved upon by a larger plan of her own,
by which she was to be the conqueror of the Ottoman Empire, while her
grandson Constantine, sitting on a throne at Constantinople, should
rule Greeks and Turks alike under a Russian protectorate.

Upon the private life of Catherine there is no need to dwell. This is
not the biography of a woman, but the history of the empire she
magnificently ruled for thirty-four years. It is enough to say she was
not better than her predecessors, the Tsaritsas Elizabeth and Anna.
The influence exerted by Menschikof in the reign of Catherine I., and
Biron in that of Anna, was to be exerted by Alexis Orlof, Potemkin, and
other favorites in this. Her son Paul, who was apparently an object of
dislike, was kept in humiliating subordination to the Orlofs and her
other princely favorites, to whose councils he was neve