ator of modern Russia was
regarded by a considerable portion of his subjects as an envoy or
representative of hell; and his empire has never ceased to hold the
unexampled position of a government cursed by a part of its own
people as the dominion of Antichrist.

This Satanic apotheosis derived no little support from some of the
reformer's idiosyncrasies. He was to his subjects what a rejected
claimant of the Messianic office may have been to the Jews--a stone
of stumbling and a rock of offence to the people whom he came to
bring to a new birth. His civil and ecclesiastical reforms, with the
seeming decapitation of the Church by the abrogation of the
patriarchate, were to the mass of the people an enigma only one
shade less disreputable than the demeanor of himself and his
courtiers. The repudiation of his legitimate wife, Eudoxia, and his
adulterous connection with a foreign concubine, the death
(perhaps by his own hand) of his son Alexis, even the morbid state
of his health and the nervous twitching of his face, and his
astonishing triumphs after equally incredible disasters, contributed
to invest the sombre and gigantic physiognomy of the reformer with a
kind of diabolic halo. The vices of Ivan the Terrible had been as
monstrous, but even in the thick of his crimes he was a true
Russian, as superstitious a devotee as the meanest of his subjects.
But the astonishment and bewilderment inspired by Peter the Great
were only deepened by the reverence felt by the old Russian for the
person of his sovereign. Men could not help doubting whether such a
man, who had cast aside his national and scriptural title for the
foreign and heathen style of emperor, could be the true, the "white"
czar. The story of the usurpers and the false Dmitri had not faded
from the popular memory; and thus there grew up amidst the
unlettered and bewildered Russian people a string of legends in
which were harmonized their belief in the reign of Antichrist and
the popular respect for the czar. In this way the Raskolniks have
created a fantastic history which has been handed down to our own
days, according to one version of which, as has been said, Peter the
Great is the impious bastard of the patriarch Nikon (and from such a
parentage only a devil's offspring could be looked for); while
another asserts that Peter Alexovitch was a pious prince, like his
forefathers, but that he had perished at sea, and in his stead had
been substituted a Jew of the r