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

for all, a few of the refinements of cruelty invented by himself, and exercised upon the pretended criminals whom he would punish. He caused parts of their body to be boiled while the other parts were being bathed in ice-water. He had them flayed alive in his presence, and their quivering naked flesh lacerated with knives, all the while feasting his eyes with their blood and convulsions, and his ears with their screams. Sometimes he finished their torments by stabbing them with his own hand, but more often, reproaching himself with this act of clemency as a weakness, he contrived to leave uninjured the vitals as long as possible ; he operated on the members, but carefully, and without attacking the trunk, casting the living morsels one by one to starved wild beasts, who devoured them in the presence of the mutilated victims. The palpitating trunks were sustained with the utmost care and science, in order to prolong to the utmost these scenes, in which the Czar and the tigers vied with each other in ferocity.

The Great Novgorod may be selected as an example of the wholesale wrath of the monster. The entire city was accused of treason in favour of the Poles ; its real crime was, having long been independent and glorious. The air was tainted by the multitude of executions that took place within its blood-stained walls ; the waters of the Volkoff were corrupted by the bodies which lay unburied round the ramparts of the condemned city ; and, as if deaths by execution were not prompt enough for the will of the tyrant, a pestilential epidemic was created in order to aid the scaffold in destroying the population more speedily, and in glutting .the rage of the father— a title of affec-P 4