with which Iván IV., in the midst of the most revolting atrocities and
debaucheries, broke down the power of the aristocracy, prostrated the
energies of the nation, and paved the way for successive usurpations--the
skilful and crafty policy, and the unscrupulous means by which Boris
raised himself to the throne, after he had destroyed the last
representatives of the direct line of Rurik, which, in all the
vicissitudes of Russian fortune, had hitherto held the chief place in the
nation--the taint of guilt which poisoned and polluted a mind otherwise
powerful, and not without some virtues, and made him at length a
suspicious and cruel tyrant, who, having alienated the good-will of the
nation, was unable to oppose the pretensions of an impostor, and swallowed
poison to escape the tortures of an upbraiding conscience--the successful
imposture of the monk who personated the Prince Dimítri, one of the
victims of Boris' ambition, and who was slaughtered on the day of his
nuptials at the foot of the throne he had so strangely usurped, by an
infuriated mob; not because he was known to be an impostor, but because he
was accused of a leaning to the Latin church--the season of anarchy that
succeeded and led to fresh impostures, and to the Polish domination--the
servile submission of the Russian nobility to Sigismund, king of Poland,
to whom they sold their country; the revival of patriotic feelings, almost
as soon as the sacrifice had been made--the bold and determined opposition
of the Russian church to the usurpation of a Latin prince, the
persecutions, the hardships, the martyrdom it endured; the ultimate rising
of the Muscovite people at its call--the sanguinary conflict in Moscow;
the expulsion of the Poles; the election of Michael Romanoff, the first
sovereign of his family and of the reigning dynasty--the whole history of
the days of Peter, of Catharine, and of Alexander, and even the less
prominent reigns of intermediate sovereigns--are full of the interest and
the incidents which are usually considered most available to the writers
of historical romance.