The last scene is pregnant with the "horror that awaits on princes." The climax is built up step by step. After the lurking insanity of Boris, barely curbed by the presence of the Council; after his interview with Pimen, who destroys his last furtive hope that the young Tsarevich may not have been murdered after all; after his access of mental and physical agony, and his parting with his beloved son--it is with a feeling of relief that we see death put an end to his unbearable sufferings. Although _Khovanstchina_ may in some ways approach more nearly to the conventional ideal of opera, yet foreigners, I think, will find it more difficult to understand than _Boris Godounov_. To begin with it lacks the tragic dominant figure, swayed by such universal passions as ambition, remorse, and paternal tenderness, which gives a psychological unity to the earlier work. Here the dramatic interest is more widely dispersed; it is as though Moussorgsky sought to crowd into this series of historical pictures as many different types of seventeenth-century Russia as possible; and these types are peculiarly national. Except that it breaks through the rigid traditions of Byzantine art, the figures being full of vitality, _Khovanstchina_ reminds us of those early _ikons_ belonging to the period when the transport of pictures through the forests, bogs, and wildernesses of Russia so restricted their distribution, that the religious painter resorted to the expedient of representing on one canvas as many saints as could be packed into it.