princeling had not, since the death of his mother, spent a very happy or altogether comfortable childhood. The chief boyarins and their followers appear to have treated their Sovereign with a curious mixture of neglect, disrespect, and superstitious awe. Surrounded exclusively by the partisans of whichever faction happened to be uppermost, the friendless orphan could only brood in silent resentment over the wrongs he sustained at the hands of his temporary masters. The rude-mannered, tyrannical, gold-greedy Ivan Shouyskie was an especial object of his dislike. A letter written by the monarch in after days to Prince Andrei Kourbski, comments bitterly on the fact that though, in the lifetime of the Princess Elena, Shouyskie had possessed only one cloak, green silk trimmed with marten fur, “and that a very old one,” during his regency he was able to have cups of gold and silver fashioned him, with his initials graved thereon.[137] The despotic jealousy of Shouyskie and of his supporters in the State Council robbed the young Ivan of friends as well as treasure. For one of their number, a boyarin named Vorontzov, the Prince had betrayed a marked partiality, a dangerous compliment, which brought down on the recipient’s person the practically-expressed dislike of his fellow-councillors. In solemn conclave, and in the presence of Prince and Metropolitan, the angry men of State fell murderously upon the courtier whom the Sovereign had delighted to honour, and Ivan’s entreaties, backed up by those of Makarie, could scarcely obtain a mitigation of his fate to one of exile and imprisonment. The amusements of the boy Prince, besides religious devotions, at which he was an adept, and the more legitimate forms of hunting, consisted in chasing dogs and cats over the battlements of the Kreml, and in wild gallops with his allotted companions through the streets of Moskva, in which the old and unwary were ruthlessly trampled underfoot.[138] The days of his repression were, however, drawing to a close. The fearsome Regent Ivan died in 1543, and left a commission of his sons and relatives to replace him. But the reign of the Shouyskies was doomed. The manly exercise of the chase is a valuable school for inculcating self-reliance and a will to overcome the obstacles of life. It was straight from a day’s sport in the woods of Vincennes that the grand young Louis, whip in hand, strode in upon the Parliament of Paris and quenched it with an epigram; it was after the autumn hunting at Voloko-Lamsk that Ivan Vasilievitch first showed his teeth and gave evidence of that cold-blooded severity which was to gain for him the distinctive adjective “Groznie” (Terrible). At Moskva, where the Court had assembled for the festival of Noel, the Prince suddenly accused the ruling boyarins of misgovernment and abuse of their powers; many had been guilty, but he would content himself with one example. Calling to his kennel-men he bade them seize Andrei