Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/324

300 whole days on horseback, and, whenever he had a moment's leisure, proved himself the boldest of sportsmen.

Mentally he was a curious mixture of stiffness and pliability, of masterfulness and liberalism, of violence and gentleness. When one of the deputies to the Diet raised his voice, he clapped his hand upon his sword, and shouted Tace nebulo! When the King of Sweden put forward claims that displeased him, he repeated the same gesture, and grumbled the words, Docebo istum regulum! Contrary to all precedent, he had a turbulent nobleman belonging to one of the most powerful families in the country condemned and executed. Supplications and threats were all equally vain. Canis mortuus non mordet! was his imperturbable reply. Plectatur!

He treated the rebellious Cossacks after the Tsar's own fashion, had them put to death by dozens, and, so some people asserted, caused their bodies to be cut into pieces. And when, in the course of an audience he was giving a foreigner, a dog ran in and disturbed him, he sent the beast flying to the other end of the room with a blow from his spurred boot. But he knew how to employ more gentle methods with the turbaned suzerain of his former days. In Transylvania he had been half a Protestant, but he was a zealous Catholic once he was in Poland. At the Diet of Election he had been represented by an Arian, Blandrata; his election once ensured, his counsellors were Jesuits.

He intended to be master in his own kingdom, but in the sixteenth century he refused to make a difference between a starost and a Jew. He thought of reducing forced service, and substituting fines for flogging. More than once, on the battlefield, he turned peasants into noblemen; and, hard as he was to others and to himself, this same man was tender-hearted—nay, sentimental—to such a point that his grief for the loss of a friend brought on a serious illness.

At a Court which the last Jagellons had Italianized, and in a country into which the intellectual currents of the day had penetrated freely, he was at first looked on as a peasant. But hardly had be been brought into contact with his new surroundings, before—though he repudiated refinements unsuitable to his character and temperament—he placed himself in the forefront of the most enlightened Princes of his time. He founded the Academy of Wilna; he was the partisan and initiator of the reform of the calendar, the organizer of the postal and financial administrations, the creator of a new judicial system. …

And, above all, he governed. He brought the machine, which was beginning to go astray, back into order, and thus, though a foreigner by birth, habits, and language, he was a fine