In 1774 also, the empress-queen disgraced Gregory Orloff and raised to the post of favorite and chief minister, Potemkin, afterward Prince Potemkin, of infamous renown, who for more than twenty years held the highest honors of the empire. He was neither a great statesman nor a great general, but he was certainly an extraordinary man. He had all the petulance, audacity, and wilfulness of a spoiled boy, yet he possessed a genius fit to conceive and execute great designs. “His character displayed a singular union of barbarism and grandeur, and of the most inconsistent and apparently incompatible qualities. He was at once the most indolent and the most active man in the world; the most luxurious, and the most indefatigable; no dangers appalled and no difficulties repulsed him; yet the slightest caprice, a mere fit of temper, would cause him to abandon projects of vital importance. At one time he talked of making himself king of Poland; at another of turning monk or bishop. He began everything, completed nothing, disordered the finances, disorganized the army, depopulated the country. He lived with the magnificence of a sovereign prince. At one moment he would make an aide-de-camp ride two or three hundred miles to bring him a melon or a pineapple; at another he would be found devouring a raw carrot or cucumber in his own antechamber. “He scarcely ever opened a book, yet he learned everything, and forgot nothing; his wonderful quickness in appropriating the knowledge of others served him instead of study. Altogether his great qualities and his defects precisely fitted him to obtain the ascendency over such a mind as that of Catherine; she grew tired of others, but his caprices, his magnificence, and his gigantic plans, continually interested and occupied her.” Under his administration all things did not go on well, we may be sure but all _went on_, and the empress was content. The second Turkish war having ended in 1783 with the annexation of the Crimea and Kuban, under the classic names of Taurida and the Caucasus, Potemkin persuaded Catherine to go and admire herself in her new dominions, a thing which she was only too ready to do. So on the 18th of January, 1787, the imperial _cortège_ set out from St. Petersburg. There were fourteen carriages upon sledges for the empress and her court, and one hundred and sixty for the attendants and baggage. Five hundred and sixty relays of horses waited them at every post, and the luxurious carriages flew over the frozen plains at the rate of a hundred miles a day. Wherever they stopped, a temporary palace was erected for the empress, fitted with every luxury, and arranged, as much as possible, like her palace at St. Petersburg. When they arrived at Khief, the empress embarked on the Dnieper, and with a fleet of fifty galleys sailed down the river to Cherson.