d for
the generous sacrifice of their lives in their country's cause," was
regarded by those who enjoyed it as a new kind of obligatory service--an
obligation to supply judges and officers of rural police.

If we require any additional proof that the nobles amidst all these
changes were still as dependent as ever on the arbitrary will or caprice
of the Monarch, we have only to glance at their position in the time
of Paul I., the capricious, eccentric, violent son and successor of
Catherine. The autobiographical memoirs of the time depict in vivid
colours the humiliating position of even the leading men in the State,
in constant fear of exciting by act, word, or look the wrath of the
Sovereign. As we read these contemporary records we seem to have before
us a picture of ancient Rome under the most despotic and capricious
of her Emperors. Irritated and embittered before his accession to the
throne by the haughty demeanour of his mother's favourites, Paul lost no
opportunity of showing his contempt for aristocratic pretensions, and
of humiliating those who were supposed to harbour them. "Apprenez,
Monsieur," he said angrily on one occasion to Dumouriez, who had
accidentally referred to one of the "considerable" personages of the
Court, "Apprenez qu'il n'y a pas de considerable ici, que la personne a
laquelle je parle et pendant le temps que je lui parle!"*

* This saying is often falsely attributed to Nicholas. The
anecdote is related by Segur.

From the time of Catherine down to the accession of Alexander II. in
1855 no important change was made in the legal status of the Noblesse,
but a gradual change took place in its social character by the continual
influx of Western ideas and Western culture. The exclusively French
culture in vogue at the Court of Catherine assumed a more cosmopolitan
colouring, and permeated downwards till all who had any pretensions to
being civilises spoke French with tolerable fluency and possessed at
least a superficial acquaintance with the literature of Western Europe.
What chiefly distinguished them in the eye of the law from the other
classes was the privilege of possessing "inhabited estates"--that is to
say, estates with serfs. By the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 this
valuable privilege was abolished, and about one-half of their landed
property passed into the hands of the peasantry. By the administrative
reforms which have since taken place, any little significance which