Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/259

 Rh as shutting up Jews in dungeons full of water … and leeches. At war with everybody, beginning with the King, who was certainly anything but a tyrant; in perpetual rebellion against every authority, even in such matters as the taxes payable on his new properties, or the recruits he was bound to furnish from them, he made himself generally hated.

What he would seem to have especially represented and personified is that class of men with whom Ivan found himself forced to struggle—men whose intelligence was open to certain elements of civilization and certain ideas of freedom, but who interpreted them all in a narrow sense, to suit their own caste or clan interests. Some people have gone so far as to deny that he was one of the group of boïars who clung obstinately to their superannuated privileges; but did he not put forward his claims to the Duchy of Jaroslavl? The fact of his poverty has been alleged. If that is so, he was nothing, when he passed over into Poland, but a vulgar fortune-hunter, for in addition to the Starosty of Krev, to ten villages and 4,000 diéssiatines of land in Lithuania, the town and castle of Kovel, and twenty-eight villages in Volhynia, a very liberal sum of money was bestowed upon him. And this would have involved an abominable deceit practised on Sigismund-Augustus, who, as his letters granting the concession prove, believed himself to be giving an equivalent for the wealth left behind in Muscovy.

All these advantages Kourbski gained in his newly-chosen fatherland, after having dreamed at Moscow, if not of recovering the appanage of his ancestors—and yet one of his peers, Chouïski, when he ascended the throne soon afterwards, was to claim exactly similar rights—at all events of protecting what remained of his inheritance against the encroachments of the State, and increasing it at the State's expense; of defending his right to sit on his master's councils, too, and make himself heard there, as well as his claim to yield him just so much obedience as might suit his own convenience. Thus, partisan of progress though he may have been, he remained a laggard, dallying behind his time, amidst the formal traditions of bygone centuries. He had an ideal, no doubt—the political ideal, though he did not dream it, perhaps, of the hospitable country he despised and detested, even though he had come to break bread at her board. But this ideal, anarchical enough in its own birthplace, dangerous and even fatal, was not susceptible of transportation to Muscovite soil. Once across the frontier, it collided with different conceptions and habits, it was transformed into a mere negation—refusal of service, desertion, treachery. And thus it comes about that in the popular legend, and in spite of all the exile's pains to endue him with