ountry they conquered, were all men of
the same race, the same habits, and the same character. The daring spirit
of maritime adventure, the love of war, and the thirst of plunder, which
brought their barks to the coasts of Britain and of France, was displayed
with even greater boldness in Russia. After the death of Rurik, these
pirates of the Baltic, under the regent Oleg, launching their galleys on
the Borysthenes, forced the descent of the river against hostile tribes,
defeated the armies of Byzantium, exercised their ancient craft on the
Black sea and on the Bosphorus, and, entering Constantinople in triumph,
extorted tribute and a treaty from the Keisar in his palace.

Then, after a time, came the introduction of the Christian religion and of
letters; and the contests which terminated in the triumph of Christianity
over the ancient mythology, in which the milder deities of the Pantheon,
with their attendant spirits of the woods, the streams, and the household
hearth, would seem to have mingled with the fiercer gods of the Valhalla.
Then the frequent contests and varying fortunes of the principalities into
which the country was divided--the invasions of the Tartar hordes, under
the successors of Chenjez Khan, destroying every living thing, and
deliberately making a desert of every populous place, that grass might
more abound for their horses and their flocks--the long and weary
domination of these desolating masters; the gradual relaxation of the iron
gripe with which they crushed the country; the pomp and power of the
Russian church, even in the worst times of Tartar oppression; the first
gathering together of the nation's strength as its spirit revived; the
first great effort to cast off the load under which its loins had been
breaking for more than two centuries, and the desperate valour with which
the Russians fought their first great battle for freedom and their faith,
and shook the Tartar supremacy, under the brave and skilful Dimitri, on
the banks of the Don--the cautious wisdom and foresight with which he
created an aristocracy to support the sovereignty he had made
hereditary--the pertinacity with which, in every change of fortune, his
successors worked out slowly, and more by superior intelligence than by
prowess, the deliverance of their country--the final triumph of this wary
policy, under the warlike, but consummately able and dexterous management
of Ivan the Great--the rapidity and force with which the Mu