_She was never proud: to the meanest of her subjects always easy of access. Nor was she ever offended at hearing the unvarnished truth--witness her polemic with Von Viesing. She did not resent the most bitter criticism._ _By an ukase she put down a most horrible institution called Slovo-i-diélo,[1] which somewhat resembled the Star Chamber. So strict had the laws been that people could be brought to the torture for having whispered at their own tables one to another; for not having drunk the health of the reigning Sovereign; for having scratched out the Imperial name and rewritten it; for having dropped money on which was stamped the Imperial effigy. Very differently from one of her predecessors, Anna Johannovna, she did not exact that her courtiers should be sitting on baskets in rows along the rooms through which she had to pass from the chapel to her own rooms, and cackle like hens. Nor used she to slap her courtiers’ faces. She built no ice palace to marry her jester and jestress in; she allowed none of her favourites to blacken with soot the faces of the proud old aristocracy, “to make an empress laugh.” She was the first to teach her subjects self-respect. She wrote an excellent moral tale for her grandson, in which, admonishing him to shun flatterers, she told him that to be invulnerable to slander, “Do no ill, and the bitterest traducer will stand before the world a convicted liar.” She abolished torture on reading the interrogation of Volhynski, a Russian boyar, brought to torture for supposed treason, and in her testament she willed that her descendants should read that piece of conviction to stifle in them any inclination to cruelty._ _She was the first to divide the Russian Empire into provinces, and to give each province self-government. She opened the first national schools, cadet-corps, and two splendid half-school, half-convent-like institutions for the education of the daughters of the nobility. She promulgated an ukase allowing landlords to work the mines of gold and silver found on their own properties, which before had been strictly forbidden; and made all the rivers and seas free of access to every one--~i.e.~, every one might sail on them, use them for mills, etc. She tried to encourage weaving, spinning and sewing, science and commerce, and gave permission to all her subjects to travel--then an unknown liberty. It is the boast of Russians that in her reign no beggars were to be found, owing, no doubt, to her humane laws regarding the serfs. Every landlord was compelled to keep on his estate, and to provide for, every serf, whether the serf were able to work or not. It would, in fact, take too long to enumerate all the numerous acts of clemency, justice, and wisdom of this wise, prudent, and far-seeing empress. If her frailty as a woman calls for the world’s censure, no one, on reading her history, can forbear bringing to her feet the tribute she so well deserves as an empress._