Here money, provisions, and troops had been conveyed from every part of the empire. The Borysthenes was covered with magnificent galleys; a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers were newly equipped; deserts were peopled for the occasion, and palaces reared for the empress queen in the midst of trackless wilds. The king of Poland came to do her homage, and the Emperor Joseph was content to mingle among the herd of her courtiers and swell the splendor of her state. Catherine herself scattered diamonds and honors with her usual liberality. “In her travelling-carriage she had a large, green sack, full of gold coins, and her courtiers were kept busy throwing handfuls out of the window to the people, who lay grovelling on the earth as her carriage passed by.” After six months spent in this sort of travelling, the empress returned to St. Petersburg. As a refuge from the cares of state, Louis XIV. had built his Trianon, and Frederick the Great his Sans-Souci, and Catherine II., oppressed like them, reared the splendid palace of the Hermitage, within whose portals she laid aside the imperial diadem of all the Russias, and became a patron of literature and the fine arts. Beneath a great portal, supported by colossal granite giants, is the entrance to this Hermitage, over whose steps have often passed those discarded favorites of the empress-queen, smothering under forced smiles and honeyed words their inward rage and indignation; for when Catherine wearied of her favorites she sent them an order to travel. “I am tired of him,” she would say; “his ignorance makes me blush. He can speak nothing but Russian. He must travel in France and England to learn other languages.” The courtier who received this intelligence was not long in preparing his travelling-carriage. At the Hermitage, Catherine surrounded herself with men of letters. Here were Lomonozof, the poet; Sumorokof, the dramatic author; Kheraskof, the writer of tragedies; Sherebetoff, the historian; and Pallas, the naturalist. She especially affected the friendship of French writers. She entertained Diderot with royal magnificence, and purchased his library; she gave the education of her grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, to the care of the republican Laharpe; and she kept up a constant correspondence with Voltaire. Catherine, herself, had no real love for the arts; but she patronized them all as subservient to her glory and her power. “Thus she not only had no taste for music, but she was destitute of ear to distinguish one tune from another, as she often frankly acknowledged; but nothing less would serve her than an Italian _corps d’opera_ attached to her domestic establishment. She had no taste for painting, yet she purchased at a high price some beautiful collections, and in the gallery of her palace of the Hermitage hung some magnificent specimens of the Italian and Flemish schools, purchased in France and Italy.”