olous and
handsome young men. They knew how to laugh and be cheerful, and she was
thus sure that no other lady would be there to dispute with her the palm
of beauty.

Elizabeth was not proud. She cared not whether noble blood flowed in the
veins of those who were invited to her festivals. The youth, beauty, and
agreeable qualities which the empress found in any person, alone decided
the question of their admittance to the court.

Peasants, grooms, soldiers, servants, abandoned reprobates, who by their
beauty had won the favor of the empress, were seen to attain to the
highest stations.

On them were lavished the treasures of the state; they were adorned with
orders and titles, and the magnates bowed to the ground before these
potent favorites of the all-powerful empress, and the people shouted
with transport when their beloved czarina, with her magnificent train
of newly-created noblemen, made her appearance in the streets, and with
gracious smiles returned the humble salutations of her kneeling slaves.
That was the ruler in perfect accordance with Russian ideas; they
sympathized with her inclinations and pleasures--she was blood of their
blood and flesh of their flesh! The strangers were at length banished,
and a real Russian sat upon the throne of the czars!

And yet Elizabeth trembled upon her imperial throne, surrounded by the
band of magnates and nobles of whom she could truly say, "I am their
creator--they are my work!" She trembled before those secret daggers,
those lingering poisons, which always surround the imperial Russian
throne as its truest satellites, and lay low many a high-born head; she
trembled before Anna Leopoldowna, who was sighing away her days in the
closed citadel of Riga, and before Anna's son, the infant Ivan, whom the
Empress Anna in her testament had named as Emperor of all the Russias!
She, indeed, would not work and trouble herself for her country and
her people, this good empress by the grace of God, but yet she would
be empress, that she might be enabled to enjoy life, and no cloud must
obscure the heaven of her earthly glory!

She therefore tore herself for some short hours from the pleasures in
which she was usually immersed, from the arms of her lover, the
object of her deepest interest; her own safety and her own peace were
concerned. That was well worth the effort to take the pen once more in
hand, and affix the troublesomely long name of Elizabeth to some few
official documen