Not content with modelling the army after his own notions of elegance, his meddling spirit exerted itself in the most vexatious and tyrannical interferences with the freedom of private life. The dress, the colour of carriages and liveries, the method of harnessing horses, everything was matter of rule, and woe to him who met the Czar with anything about his equipage contrary to etiquette. One day he saw Count Razumoffski’s sledge standing in the street without the driver, and ordered it to be immediately broken in pieces. It was of a blue colour, and the servants wore red liveries: upon which he issued a proclamation forbidding the use of blue sledges and red liveries in any part of the empire. He waged a crusade against round hats, which he thought a mark of jacobinism, the object of his greatest hate and fear. If any person appeared in one, it was taken from his head by the police; if he resisted, he was well beaten. The cocked hats in St. Petersburgh were of course soon exhausted, and then round hats were metamorphosed into three–cornered hats, by pinning up the sides. The emperor himself is said to have stopped persons and pinned up their hats with his royal hands, to show his people how a loyal subject ought to be dressed. An order against wearing boots with coloured tops was no less rigorously enforced. The police officers stopped a gentleman driving through the streets in a pair. He remonstrated, and said he had no others with him, and certainly would not cut off the tops of those; upon which the officers, seizing each a leg as he sat in his droski, pulled them off, and left him to go barefoot home. Coming down a street, the emperor saw a nobleman who had stopped to look at some workmen planting trees by his order. “What are you doing?” said he. “Merely seeing the men work,” replied the nobleman. “Oh! is that your employment? Take off his pelisse and give him a spade. There—now work yourself!” Once, when he met an officer going to the palace wrapped in his cloak, a servant following with his sword, he gave the servant his master’s commission, and reduced the officer to the ranks.