Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

314COMMENCEMENT OF HIS EEIGN.

He wished to retire; bnt the Russians, gathering round their master, besought him to continue to rule them according to his humour. Thus justified, thus assured, the tyrant recommenced his career of murder. With him, to reign was to kill; and this simple constitution was confirmed by the unanimous assent of Russia, and by the tears and laments of the nation at the death of the tyrant! Ivan, when he decided, like Nero, to throw off the yoke of glory and virtue in order to reign purely by terror, did not confine himself to refinements of cruelty unknown either before or after him, he overwhelmed also with inveetives the pitiable objects of his fury; he was ingenious and comic in his atrocity; the horrible and the burlesque refreshed at one and the same time his equally satirical and pitiless bosom. He pierced the inner heart with his sarcastic words, at the same time that, with his own hands, he tore in pieces the body ; and, in the infernal deeds which he perpetrated upon hia fellow beings, whom his restless pride took for so many enemies, the refined cruelty of words surpassed the barbarity of corporeal inflictions, even though he adopted and improved upon every species of invention by which the intensity of bodily suffering could be prolonged; for his government was the reign of torture.

Ivan IV., like the son of Agrippina, began hia reign virtuously, and, which perhaps yet more commands the love of a vain ambitious nation, with conquest. The pious counsellors and prudent advisers to whom he at this period submitted, have rendered the commencement of his government one of the most brilliant and prosperous epochs in the Muscovite annals.