sentiments; a proceeding which, though out of keeping with the Tzar’s general methods, was too thoroughly akin to Moskovite traditions to be unhesitatingly set down as fable. Boris was, however, wise enough to see that he must stand or fall by Russian disposition alone, and the loyal offer of assistance made him by the Duke of Sudermanland, now King of Sweden, was declined. In possession of the throne and the immense treasure appertaining thereto, enjoying the support of the Hierarchy, feared, if not loved, by the boyarins and voevodas, and held in esteem by the Courts of Austria, England, and Sweden, the Godounov Tzar might well have stood his ground against the doubtful rival whom he had hemmed into a corner of the Sieverski province. Every year that he reigned made people more accustomed to the new dynasty, made them look more naturally to his son Thedor as their future sovereign. If the Ljhedimitri had secret well-wishers at the Court, if there were within the Kreml’s precincts men who fancied Boris guilty of reaching the throne by a hidden crime, it was by the same means that they must vanquish him. That such a design existed would not be much to say; that it was ever put into practice there is no proof. History merely records that the Tzar, after transacting business all the morning, dined in the “gilded room” in his palace, and was suddenly stricken with a mysterious malady, of which he died two hours later (13th April 1605). So, working and ruling to the last, passed away the great boyarin, who, with all his faults, gave Russia one of the noblest of her Tzars. His great crime in the eyes of the people who had chosen him to reign over them was that he did not belong to the sacred House of Rurikovitch, but for all his Tartar extraction he was more western in his ideas than any of the sovereigns of Moskovy who had gone before him, and the fifteen-year-old son whom he had educated to succeed him gave promise of being an enlightened and gracious ruler. Since the vaunted Dimitri Donskoi, he was the first Gosoudar who had put himself at the head of an army to meet a Tartar invasion, and Russia was less troubled by Krim inroads during his reign than she had been since the alliance of Ivan III. with Mengli-Girei. As the sorrowing Patriarch escorted his dead friend across the Kreml square, awake with the young pulse-life of an April day, into the chill shadows of the beautiful Cathedral of the Archangel, he might know that he was burying more than the corpse of a monarch. With Boris had gone the peace of an empire.