The glory of the Russian arms, the splendor of the Russian State, attained their maximum in the reign of the great Iaroslaf. Its form of government continued to retain the Variag-Slav elements, but was compacted and confirmed by the ideas brought into the country with the influx of Greek priests and men of letters. The prince long remained, as in the primitive times, first among his equals, the drujina—the head and chief of a family of soldiers. He had great respect for the counsels, and for the demands of these. Vladimir’s men complained, in that they had to eat from wooden bowls. He forthwith provided them with silver ones. “I can not buy myself a drujina with silver and gold,” he said, “but with a drujina I can obtain silver and gold, as did my father and my grandfather.” The Roman empire of the east represented another form of government. Its sovereign was the heir of Constantine and of Augustus; the vicar of God upon earth, the human representative of the Sovereign of the universe. The Greek emperor derived his power, not from the consent of his subjects—a phrase unknown in his dominions,—but rather from the Being who conferred it as a prerogative, a divine right. His person, his regalia, were sacred. The populace of Constantinople believed that when God gave the empire to their city, he gave it also the regal vestments at the hands of an angel. Leo, king of the Kazarui, was said to have been smitten with a fatal ulcer for his temerity in putting the Byzantine crown upon his head. This Roman, and antecedently Asiatic conception of government, as vested in the person of the imperator who made the laws, executed justice, received the adoring homage as well as the unquestioning obedience of his subjects, essentially modified the nobler, freer idea of government, as held by the Variag princes; but the change was wrought gradually, and was hardly perceptible during the epoch of the ascendency of the Russia of the steppes, the supremacy of Kief. It came into prominence, as we shall see, in the Russia of the forests, when Suzdal, and later Moscow, became the nuclei, the centers of the realm in a subsequent epoch. Iaroslaf compiled a code of laws, the Russkaia Pravda, the Russian right, or verity, a code that, though subsequently modified by Byzantine influence, remained for centuries the basis of the national jurisprudence. The laws of the Pravda are in effect those of ancient Scandinavia. Private revenge and avenging are recognized, as are also the judicial duel and the ordeals; fines are fixed for various crimes. The primitive form of trial by jury is established, but none of the harsher penalties are prescribed that were introduced later by the corrupted Greeks. Prisons, torture to wring confession, corporal cruelties, flogging and capital punishment were unknown in the Russia of the eleventh century. Its laws were milder, more humane than those of Charlemagne. The Slav had not become debased by the vices of the