Firmly established at the Kreml, after a campaign of almost unexampled good fortune, the new Sovereign commenced to display characteristics disconcerting alike to his subjects and to future students of his personality. His idiosyncrasies were not those of the House whose scion he professed to be, but neither were they those of a partially-educated adventurer. The boyarins of the leading families of Moskva, encased in the complacent conceit of ignorance, were aghast at being told by this newly-appeared Gosoudar that their great need was schooling. Boris had talked of colleges as a desirability; Dimitri spoke of them as urgent necessities. For their part the boyarins were of opinion that the Tzar himself had much to learn in the way of conforming with the manners and customs of the Moskovites. His behaviour was a growing source of scandal to his Orthodox subjects; his hair was not dressed in the Russian fashion; he never slept after dinner; he sat down to dine to the sound of music instead of prayer; and he ate veal. He drilled his soldiers himself--a thing which no Moskovite sovereign had ever done--and he slew bears with his own hand instead of seeing them killed from a safe distance. The precedent of David, King of Israel, might have been quoted in extenuation of this unbecoming hardihood, but nothing could excuse the erection of a statue of Cerberus in front of the Tzar’s pleasure-house in the Kreml, a locality hitherto graced only with the representations of Bogoroditzas, or at most a saint-mastered dragon. The clergy were offended by the scant consideration with which they were treated, by the toleration shown to Catholics and Lutherans, and above all by a disposition which Dimitri showed to divert some of the hoarded wealth of the monasteries to the public treasury. The strielitz were piqued by the open acknowledgment which the Tzar made of the superior merits of the foreign soldiery, the boyarins resented the subordinate part they were compelled to play at the Court of this man of new and unpalatable ideas. All this gives a glimpse of a strong personality, an enlightened mind, healthily contemptuous of the foibles and superstitions with which it came in contact, and a vigorous faculty for reform and organisation. A rare character in the long list of Moskovite sovereigns. Such a one recurs some ninety years later and creates a new Russia. The Ljhedimitri, himself a man of straw, appears to have tried to cram into a few months the patient efforts of a lifetime. Probably the fact was that the extraordinary facility with which his enterprise had been carried to a triumphant conclusion gave him a false idea of his own powers and of the dispositions of the Russians. In one respect only do his transactions approach, at one and the same time, to the childish arrogance of the legitimate Moskovite Sovereigns and the petulant vanity which might be expected of a mushroom monarch; not only did he demand from the Pope and the King