city of Revel, he is holden captive of Mana. Thus sorrowfully closes the career of the Arthur of this primitive people. The German planted region was destined to be a thorn in the side of Russia. Protracted wars were maintained between the foreigners of the west and the Slavs of the realm. Four hundred years passed ere an appearance of tranquillity and of union was attained; and even now the governments of Esthonia and Livonia are not among the more trusted provinces of the empire. The people of that region, restive under absolutism, dimly conscious of rights withheld, and of oppressive restrictions, encourage the spirit of revolution, and invite to their sea-bordered home many of the malcontents of the empire. Up to the opening of the thirteenth century, Russian civilization had kept a relative pace with that of the east. Receiving industries, arts and religion from Byzantium, and civic form from Scandinavia, it had been united under Iaroslaf the Great, and had maintained with some degree of order feudal divisions corresponding to those of the other European nations in the same centuries. This relative development the empire bade fair to maintain without serious lapses, when a calamity utterly without precedent, immeasurably disastrous, suddenly fell upon the realm, and shattered her incipient civilization beyond the power of repairing. Nature has been a step-mother to Russia, says one of her native historians. Fate was a second, a harsher step-mother. “In those times, (1224) there came upon us, on account of our sins, unknown nations,” write the chroniclers. No one could tell their origin, whence they came, what religion they professed. “God alone knew who they were: God, and perhaps a few wise men learned in books.” All Europe was affrighted at the apparition of these Asiatic hordes. The Pope and the sovereigns prepared to meet them with combined forces. But upon Russia alone fell the shock, the subjugation, the humiliating servitude, imposed by these numberless and mysterious armies, whom it was whispered among the people were Gog and Magog, prophesied to come at the end of the world, when all things would be destroyed by anti-Christ.