THE story of the Romanoffs has three phases. The first is the preparation, when the primitive democracy of the Slavs is slowly destroyed and the people are enslaved to an autocracy. The second, and longest, phase is the enjoyment of power by the Romanoffs: the succession of brutal or genial, strong or weak, merry or pious sovereigns whom the accident of birth or the red hand of revolution raises to the throne. A certain nervous instability runs through nearly the whole series, but it is almost invariably expressed in a determination to enjoy--to kill, to drink, to love, to spend, to seize territory, to use power for self-gratification. In Peter the Great we find a glimmer, amidst the old disorder, of a new day. In Catherine the Great it revives and grows. Now the middle phase is over. We enter upon a period of grave and sober-living monarchs, at first bent upon the reform of their people, according to their ideals, then struggling in fear against the people they have awakened from a long slumber. The reign of Paul I is merely a dark episode between the second and the third phase. He was now forty-two years old: a short, ugly, bald, sour-tempered man, of diseased nerves. He hardly concealed his joy as he hastened to the throne and strove to obliterate the memory of his great mother. If she must have an imperial funeral, his martyred father shall have one also. He digs up the corpse, or what is left of it after thirty-four years, puts it in a magnificent coffin, and makes the survivors of the conspiracy of 1762 walk humbly behind it, before they are exiled. St. Petersburg is still a land of rumours, and we do not know precisely what form his mad idea took. Some say that there was body enough left to seat in the throne; some say that the skull was put upon the altar and crowned with a superb diadem; some say that only the boots and a few fragments of Peter III were found. Whatever there was received an imperial funeral; and the bones of Potiamkin were dug up and cast into a ditch. The usual golden shower descended upon the new brood of favourites.