In her later years Anne, perhaps taught by the pungent criticisms of foreign guests, developed a sober taste. She was a very tall woman, of large and not ungraceful build, with grave dark blue eyes and black hair. In her later years she exchanged her bright blues and greens for gold brocade or brown silk, her diamonds for pearls; and her officers had black and yellow liveries, embroidered with silver braid. She did much to raise the taste of Russia. Although champagne was now introduced into Russia, she frowned upon the ancient daily habit of intoxication. Only on one day of the year--the anniversary of her coronation--did she tolerate heavy drinking. She introduced also a certain lightness and elegance into open-air feasts, which had in Peter’s day been orgies of drink and roughness, and she insisted on better manners at table. It was not long since, at a Russian dinner, one plate had had to serve a guest through the long and varied series of courses--the punctilious man wiped his plate with his finger or napkin, or poured the gravy on to the floor--and a servant had torn scraps of linen or calico off a roll for the use of those who desired napkins. Into the state of such rooms when the doors were locked for many hours, as they often were, the polite modern must not inquire too closely. A good deal of this grossness lingered in Russia, and Anne set her face against it. She--the earlier lover of Besthuzeff and Biren--was not less warmly opposed to laxity of morals. Moderate gambling she herself introduced and encouraged, but the young folk whom she liked to have about her had to be careful. When Elizabeth did not reform her free ways, after a few lovers had been sent to Siberia, she was threatened with a convent. Anne’s favourite was a niece. Princess Anne of Mecklenburg, an insipid, good-natured girl whom she was preparing for the throne. The Saxon envoy, Count Lynar, was discovered in too close a relation to this young lady, and was sent back to Saxony; whence we shall find him return as soon as the Tsarina is dead and his lover is on the throne. In other respects the character of Anne was at the lowest Romanoff level. She not only delighted in the dwarfs and buffoons, and the rough knock-about comedies, which had always been popular at the court, but she found pleasure in refinements of cruelty which Peter would have thought unchivalrous. She would rock with laughter when her dwarfs got to bloody noses in their cock-fights, and she sank to the depth of compelling noble men and women who incurred her anger to enter these vulgar troops and provide the most puerile amusement. A noble of merit was condemned to this disgraceful service because Anne hated his wife; another because he joined the Roman Church. But the most curious and brutal of all her whims was her treatment of a noble of the great Golitzuin family.