their duties were neglected, we have to go back to our own history of the middle 18th century. Sturmer, as Prime Minister, habitually met Rasputin in midnight conclave, and was known to favour the cause of the enemies whom his country was fighting. After Rasputin had been killed, the leading Minister of State professed to commune nightly with his spirit; and its emanations guided the policy of the Empress and of Russia. Sazonoff, Kokovtsoff, the Grand-Duke Nicholas, and other honourable and patriotic men owed their dismissal directly or indirectly to the peasant adventurer. Not that Rasputin was (in the British Ambassador's judgment) a German agent. But he was a reactionary; and in that way was identified with the German cause, which was militaristic autocracy. Moreover, he was financed by certain Jewish bankers who themselves were, to all intents and purposes, agents of Germany. As he always spoke freely in his cups, and frequently swilled in the company of his Hebrew friends after visits to Tsarskoe Selo, much useful information reached the Germans through this indirect channel.

That the Tsaritsa was entirely free from proGermanism is by now well established, and her unhappy influence over the Tsar was directed by the desire to conserve the autocratic regime, without which she believed-not without some justification-that Russia would fall to pieces. The Tsar was never himself directly under the sway of Rasputin, but was at one with his wife in wishing to hand on the personal power which he had inherited from his father unimpaired to his son.

The Tsar, as he appears in these pages, is an effete scion of the moribund race of autocratic kings, his monarchical virtues refined to the point of foibles, his despotic acts no longer the spontaneous outbursts of a dominant nature. The kings of Europe have been a race apart. Raised upon an artificial pedestal of supremacy they had come to claim hereditarily, as a corollary to the political authority with which their fellow-men had invested them, a personal superiority which they did not, as a rule, actually possess. Pampered from their youth, as kings on the Continent of Europe have frequently been, they lost physical vigour, and have had few occasions to show moral fortitude; until, maybe,

such obstinate folly certainly qualified him for deprivation of his throne.

If, however, the Spartan spirit is apt to become eliminated from the character of royalty, heredity and upbringing usually bestow upon it certain compensating qualities-good nature, affability, readiness of address, and also a high sense of honour. All these endowments Nicholas possessed. He had an amiable graciousness of manner which endeared him at once to those who were presented to him; and Sir George Buchanan admits that the Tsar won his own personal affection and devotion. He stoutly defends him from the charge of falsity, which has been rather freely—and we may add naturally—made against His Majesty. The Emperor was in the habit of dismissing by letter Ministers with whom he had less than twenty-four hours before been in confidential conversation, without then imparting to them the slightest inkling of his intentions. Sir George remarks that most of us dislike giving our servants notice, and the Emperor preferred to convey in writing to his victims what he had not the moral courage to tell them to their faces. This unamiable trait was possibly the resultant of something deeper than moral cowardice, of which the subsequent conduct of the Tsar does not convict him. To the Emperor of All the Russias it probably did not seem wrong, or even extraordinary, that he should dispense with the service of his Ministers at any moment and in any manner that he chose. They had no rights in such matters. His will was and ought to be supreme. personal superiority was unquestioned in his own mind; it derived from the Divine will which had placed him where he was, and to which he bowed himself in profound and unquestioning humility. He shared the fatalism of his own simple, docile peasants, who saw in success and failure merely manifestations of divine favour and divine retribution. When the hour of his own dismissal came he accepted it without protest, the surface of his impassivity hardly ruffled.

His

Another European sovereign, in some respects a contrast to Tsar Nicholas, is depicted for us in these pages. Sir George Buchanan, M. Paléologue, and M. Nekludoff were all three representatives of their countries at Sofia, and their observations on Ferdinand I of