Once, we are
told, at a banquet, he "amused himself by decapitating twenty Streltsy,
emptying as many glasses of brandy between successive strokes, and
challenging the Prussian envoy to repeat the feat."

Mad? There can be little doubt that Peter had madness in his veins. He
was a degenerate and an epileptic, subject to brain storms which
terrified all who witnessed them. "A sort of convulsion seized him,
which often for hours threw him into a most distressing condition. His
body was violently contorted; his face distorted into horrible grimaces;
and he was further subject to paroxysms of rage, during which it was
almost certain death to approach him." Even in his saner moods, as
Waliszewski tells us, he "joined to the roughness of a Russian _barin_
all the coarseness of a Dutch sailor." Such in brief suggestion was
Peter I. of Russia, half-savage, half-sovereign, the strangest jumble of
contradictions who has ever worn the Imperial purple--"a huge mastodon,
whose moral perceptions were all colossal and monstrous."

It was, perhaps, inevitable that a man so primitive, so little removed
from the animal, should find his chief pleasures in low pursuits and
companionships. During his historic visit to London, after a hard day's
work with adze and saw in the shipbuilding yard, the Tsar would adjourn
with his fellow-workmen to a public-house in Great Tower Street, and
"smoke and drink ale and brandy, almost enough to float the vessel he
had been helping to construct."

And in his own kingdom the favourite companions of his debauches were
common soldiers and servants.

"He chose his friends among the common herd; looked after his household
like any shopkeeper; thrashed his wife like a peasant; and sought his
pleasure where the lower populace generally finds it." His female
companions were chosen rather for their coarseness than their charms,
and pleased him most when they were drunk. It was thus fitting that he
should make an Empress of a scullery-maid, who, as we have seen in an
earlier chapter, had no vestige of beauty to commend her to his favour,
and whose chief attractions in his eyes were that she had a coarse
tongue and was a "first-rate toper."

It was thus a strange and unhappy caprice of fate that united Peter,
while still a youth, to his first Empress, the refined and sensitive
Eudoxia, a woman as remote from her husband as the stars. Never was
there a more incongruous bride than this delicately nurtured girl