adoring homage as well as the unquestioning obedience of his subjects, essentially modified the nobler, freer idea of government, as held by the Variag princes; but the change was wrought gradually, and was hardly perceptible during the epoch of the ascendency of the Russia of the steppes, the supremacy of Kief. It came into prominence, as we shall see, in the Russia of the forests, when Suzdal, and later Moscow, became the nuclei, the centers of the realm in a subsequent epoch. Iaroslaf compiled a code of laws, the Russkaia Pravda, the Russian right, or verity, a code that, though subsequently modified by Byzantine influence, remained for centuries the basis of the national jurisprudence. The laws of the Pravda are in effect those of ancient Scandinavia. Private revenge and avenging are recognized, as are also the judicial duel and the ordeals; fines are fixed for various crimes. The primitive form of trial by jury is established, but none of the harsher penalties are prescribed that were introduced later by the corrupted Greeks. Prisons, torture to wring confession, corporal cruelties, flogging and capital punishment were unknown in the Russia of the eleventh century. Its laws were milder, more humane than those of Charlemagne. The Slav had not become debased by the vices of the Roman empire of the east, nor by the ferocity of the Tatars. “A white Arab,” a child of nature, uncorrupted by the iniquities of an ancient civilization, with his ardent Oriental temperament, he retained as yet much of the simplicity, the freedom from duplicity, that won the recognition of Homer, Choerilius and Strabo.

The introduction of Greek Christianity was a fact of immeasurable significance to the Russian realm. It proscribed the Papal Church from Russian territory, and thereby isolated it from the nations of the west. This isolation precluded the Russian people from the religious sympathy, the material support of the Pope, and of the other European nations, in crises of peril, or periods of emergency, such as that of the appalling Tatar invasion. They could look for no help beyond their own resources, their own strength. The difference of religion served also as a perpetual barrier, a continually irritating antagonism between the Russian and the Polish Slavs. On the other hand, as the new faith was introduced by means of the Slavonic, the mother tongue, Russian society was spared the sharp division between the clerical, the learned, the high, Latin-speaking class, and the lower classes that compose the bulk of every nation; a division that contributed immensely to the founding of caste and to the arrogations of a hierarchy throughout Latin Christendom. In Russia was reared a national church, subject to no foreign, no alien sway, entangled with no foreign alliances or foreign politics. Thus was secured an absolute national and ecclesiastical independence. “No dragonnades, no frightful inquisition, no Saint Bartholomews, no myriads of martyrs, no hideous tortures, such as those invented and practiced by Jesuits and Romish priests, have ever defiled the venerable ministry that traces its origin to Ephesus and Saint John.”

Christianity gradually but essentially modified the social life, the customs and manners of the people. It abolished polygamy; the structure of the family was no longer Asiatic, but European. It heightened the Slav virtues of hospitality and benevolence, by inculcating the humanitarian precepts of the New Testament. It conferred a dignity previously unknown, upon weakness, infirmity, poverty and labor. It modified the public sentiment in regard to crime, by teaching the inherent heinousness of sin. The oft-uttered words of Vladimir, “I fear to sin,” indicate the change that was gradually effected in the popular mind. Assassination, theft, and other crimes ceased to be regarded as private injuries, to be commuted by fines or atoned for by reprisals. They were punished as offences against humanity, in the name of the Legislator, the Father of the race. What is more precious than a Christian soul? asks one of the earlier descendants and successors of Vladimir. The new religion brought music in its train to a people who had a capacity for this art, but who were ignorant of its first principles. It brought architecture into a realm whose buildings were simply wooden tents, and whose ramparts were made of mud. In the rude city were laid the decorated aisles, the sumptuous columns, the golden cupolas and domes of the Russian church. It brought literature, first of all by the sacred books translated into the vernacular; the works of the Church fathers, among them Basil and Chrysostom; the lives of the saints, Byzantine chronicles, eagerly read by the scholastic monk; works on speculative and natural philosophy, and some few romances. Contemporary Byzantine literature was not of the highest order; but exported among a people whose thought and knowledge were limited to the recital of their national legends, their primitive poems, it aroused their germinant powers, and gave direction to their intellectual, their social, and their moral development. We have to concede, however, that the introduction of the Greek form of Christian belief was not entirely salutary in its effects upon the people at large. The Byzantine Church was smitten with the decay whereof the Byzantine civilization was perishing. It retained, indeed, the elevated truths of the Christian system, but had deplorably lost the spirit that alone “giveth life.” It had failed, generally speaking, to eradicate the distinctive vices of the Greek peoples—falsehood, treachery, perfidy, instability. In place of a regenerated nature, it required of its adherents participation in its elaborate ceremonial, the practice of its intricate rites, homage to its imposing forms. It did little for intellectual enlightenment or advancement, save in the perverted form of Oriental monachism,—a painfully unnatural mode of life, calculated to foster mental disease and general self-stultification. With no arrogations of secular or of civil power, it has associated itself throughout Russian history with the baleful conservatism, the hoary tyranny, the enslaving autocracy of her sovereigns. Oriental in its origin, it has fastened upon the Russian State the stationary ignorance, the servitude, the mental inertia of the effete Oriental nations. Among its adherents we shall find scarcely an example of the moral and spiritual liberty wherewith the Head of the Church maketh his children free. So far removed are they from this freedom, that their spiritual debasement, their intellectual bondage and moral perversion lie like an incubus, against which thus far the inherent strength of the nation has struggled in vain. An Oriental autocracy and a church devoid of spiritual vitality have hitherto proved immovable checks upon the advancement of the Russian people. Not without reason does the Nihilist reject the wretched ecclesiasticism that has misguided and miseducated his race throughout a thousand years.

The portraits of Rurik and his Variag-Slav successors, preserved in the imperial galleries of St. Petersburgh, are doubtless much idealized; yet they may be supposed to bear some resemblance to their originals, for Byzantine artists were in Kief as early as the reign of Vladimir (972). The face of Rurik is strong, and possessed of a primitive majesty; beneath heavy brows his eyes are steadfast, penetrating, containing a force that under stress might break into the Berserker rage, the fury that was a characteristic of the ancient Norse warrior. The contours of the face are vigorous, and marked by a certain rude symmetry, so to speak. The heavy mustaches part above the lips; below them falls a dense beard that clings to the sides of the cheeks and climbs to the hair. The head is shielded beneath a plain helmet terminating above in a talon. From the under side of the helmet falls a cape of mail, protecting the throat and shoulders; a sack or loose coat of mail covers the body. A man to put one’s trust in, a man to be