over a glowing furnace, with other implements of punishment, met the Tzar’s eye as he rode with Maluta Skouratov and other yet surviving favourites on to the scene of execution. But one important item was lacking; where were the onlookers? The great square was deserted, for the Moskvitchi had hidden themselves away from the alarming spectacle which the Gosoudar had prepared for them; there was no knowing where the matter would stop. Ivan sent his soldiers to summon his subjects to the show, and even went in person to beat up the skulking citizens, who flocked with quaking hearts to the various coigns of vantage round the Red Place. The audience having been secured, the prisoners were marched out in a long file to the scene of their punishment. The crowd, scanning the wan faces of the victims, missed that of Viazemskie, who had died under torture, and the Basmanovs were also absent. A crowning horror was reserved for them. But see, the Tzar speaks. Raising his voice that all might hear, he demanded of the people of Moskva if the tortures and executions they were about to witness seemed to them just? They did, they did. No shred of hope could the doomed men grasp from that hoarse murmur of servile approbation. Like beaten gladiators, reading their fate in the upturned thumbs and hard faces of the onlookers, they stood unfriended before that vast multitude. I.H.S. has taken the place of the S.P.Q.R., but fifteen hundred years have not materially removed Christian Moskva from the ethic-level of pagan Rome. Up to the mounted monarch was led the first victim, Viskovatui, whom Ivan accused of treasonable correspondence with the King of Poland, with the Sultan, and with the Krim Khan, emphasising his accusations by slashing the boyarin’s face with his whip. Bound, gagged, and hung by the feet, he was forthwith hacked to pieces; Maluta Skouratov, descending from his horse, sliced off an ear by way of a beginning. Founikov was dispatched by alternate drenching with boiling and iced water, and “expired in horrible torments.” Others, to the number of about 200, were put to death in various manners, the Tzar himself having the credit of impaling one old man on his lance.[161] On what evidence, if any, these men were found guilty of treason and disloyalty it is impossible to know, but this at least may be remarked, that, enjoying as they did the Tzar’s favour and patronage, they had scarcely a motive for wishing to overturn or undermine his authority. The executions on the Red Place, renewed after an interval of a few days, were not the only outlet for the monarch’s anger or blood-thirst; other evil deeds are related of this reign of terror, this running amok of a human being among his unresisting fellows. It was said that Ivan forced Thedor Basmanov, the “angel-faced,” to kill his own father: a ghastly deed which did not save the perpetrator from a death by torture, and which at least need not be unreservedly believed in. Torture was also