The news of his death was announced to the empress as she was on the point of holding her court, but, as the proper precautions had not been taken, she did not choose to make it public, and went on with her audience with every appearance of cheerfulness and tranquillity. On the following day, while dining in public, the death of the Czar was formally announced; and immediately she rose from the table, all bathed in tears, and retired to her apartment, where for several days she feigned the greatest grief. She afterward published a manifesto, in which she announced to her subjects “that it had pleased Almighty God to remove the late Emperor Peter the Third from this world, by a violent attack of a malady to which he had heretofore been subject, and desiring them to consider it as an especial act of Providence working in her favor.” None were stupid enough to believe this monstrous lie, and none were bold enough to contradict it, and this was answer sufficient for the Empress Catherine II. But “what a sight for the nation itself, a calm spectator of these events! On one side, the grandson of Peter I. dethroned and put to death; on the other, the grandson of the Czar Ivan languishing in fetters; while a Princess of Anhalt usurps the throne of their ancestors, clearing her way to it by a regicide.” As a sovereign, Catherine displayed marked ability. She effected several useful reforms, established important institutions, encouraged national intercourse, founded schools and hospitals, and erected arsenals and manufactories. During her lifetime she published a list of two hundred and forty-five cities which she had founded in her dominions. This sounds very grand; but we may look as vainly for her cities as for those of Babylonian Semiramis. In some instances she merely indicated the spot where she intended a city should be erected; in others, she gave the name of a city to some hamlet or village. When she made her famous voyage down the Dnieper, in 1787, Joseph II. accompanied her to lay the foundations of a city to be called, after her name, _Ekaterinaslof_, and which, in her imagination, already rivalled St. Petersburg. The empress laid the first stone with great pomp, and the emperor laid the second. On returning from the ceremony, Joseph remarked, in his dry, epigrammatic manner: “The empress and I have this day achieved a great work; she has laid the _first_ stone of a great city, and I have laid the _last_.” His speech was prophetic. The city never proceeded farther, nor was it thought of again.