A singular and complex character was that of this famous despot, this "Semiramis of the North." Never more than a half-educated woman--and in that she corresponded with her empire--she learned her politics from Montesquieu, drew her philosophy of life from Voltaire, and shaped her morals after Brantôme! A creature of singular contradictions, she loved liberty, favored the struggle of the United States, and ruled an absolute despot; she wrote charming fairy tales for children and rode horseback astride like a man; she was one of the greatest sticklers for morals--in other people--the world has ever known, and yet was herself one of the most colossal examples of unblushing and shameless professional sensuality that ever sat upon a throne. Other rulers and sovereigns have had their favorites, she alone made favoritism a state institution. "What has ruined the country," she naïvely writes, "is that the people fall into vice and drunkenness, and the comic opera has corrupted the whole nation!" As a corrupter by example she surpassed all the comic operas ever written. The morals of Russia, in her day, were rotten from the head downward. Yet in spite of all this she was a great princess. She was allowed to occupy that throne because she made Russia greater with each successive year; not alone by force of arms either, and the Russian destiny makers loved her. Education, the arts, and sciences, all felt the stimulus of her interest and responded to her efforts. Progress was the word of this imperious woman. She had a faculty for ruling as remarkable as her exploitation of favoritism. Yet she governed her empire with a sublime indifference to public opinion, and squandered its revenues in a shameless prostitution of her own person, which ceased only with her death, in 1794, at the age of sixty-five! The fact that Catherine made an official business out of favoritism, and that she was so utterly oblivious to the moral inconsistency of it--for she was a faithful member of the Holy Orthodox Church--seems to lift it upon a plane of its own, so simple and brazen was it.