As to Patiomkine himself, the world did not know whether he was a genius or a madman. At times he seems to have passed over that slender line which divides these two antitheses of character, and appears now on one side, now on the other. Personally he was a man of huge bulk and great strength, with the natural instincts of an animal and a veneer, more or less strong on occasion, of refinement. He, too, typified Russia, a giant rising through barbarism into the civilization of the century--and not yet arrived, either--now inclining to the one side or the other. Catherine usually chose her favorites among men of great physical vigor. Patiomkine was a giant in size. His vast frame was capable of sustaining the most tremendous hardships. He was a black-haired, swarthy, hot-tempered man, not pleasant to look upon, for he had lost an eye in a fist fight after a drunken revel with the Orloffs. He squinted with the other, and even had not a figure to redeem him, for he was markedly knock-kneed. He, like his mistress and his country, was a creature of contradictions. In his palace in St. Petersburg we find him trifling with the most delicate creations of the most skilled _chef_, and on his journeys eating rapaciously of anything that came to hand. He sent his adjutants thousands of miles for perfumes which caught his fancy, and galloped madly himself across half Europe without rest or sleep for days in pursuance of duty, and then spent weeks in dalliance with his harem. With the one hand he wrote poetic letters that quiver and thrill with tenderness and beauty, pathos and passion, and with the other he calmly consigned thousands of people to death. One day we find him raging because his soldiers are not better cared for, and on the next day remarking cynically, when the absence of ambulances was brought to his notice, that so much the better--they would not have to bother with the wounded! Sometimes cowardly, sometimes bold to the point of recklessness; atheist and devotee, debauchee and ascetic, coarse and refined, imperious and cringing, brutal and gentle, king and slave, Christian and pagan--his life remains a mystery. After he died of a frightful attack of indigestion, brought on by gorging himself with coarse food, Catherine's son, upon succeeding to the throne, treated his body with great indignity; and it was not until seventy years later that his remains were discovered and interred in the Cathedral of Kherson. Prince of Taurida, the conqueror of the Crimea, and under Catherine the originator of that tremendous and irresistible Russian policy which will some day replace the Greek cross upon the temple of Justinian in Constantinople, Patiomkine is one of the most remarkable figures in the history of the world.