Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/410

 386 appear authentic. Two voiévodes, Joseph Chtcherbatyi and George Bariatinski by name, who had been taken prisoners by Batory, were ransomed by the Tsar. He plied them with eager questions. The first spoke honestly as to the King of Poland's power; the second, thinking to please his master, contradicted his comrade's assertions, declaring Batory had neither men nor forts, and that the Tsar's very name made him tremble. 'Poor King!' quoth Ivan, 'how I pity him!' And then, grasping his spear, he dealt the impudent courtier a sudden blow. 'Here are your wages, impostor!'

After his own fashion, Ivan was more cultivated than the majority of his Russian contemporaries, and quite as much so as the most enlightened European Princes of his period—if not as to what he knew, as to his desire of knowledge, at all events. In this he differs essentially from Louis XI., 'who had a mortal hatred of literature,' and said 'learning made him melancholy.' He was more like Francis I. But to what did his knowledge really amount?

He knew many things, drawn from his wide reading, but he was incapable of understanding them thoroughly, or setting them in clear order in his mind. During the first years of his reign, when, the government being in the hands of the boïars, he had long hours of leisure, and was driven to commune with himself in savage loneliness, he read everything that fell into his hands and roused his curiosity—sacred history, Roman history, Russian and Byzantine chronicles, the works of the holy Fathers, and menologies. His memory retained many passages, and by preference he chose those that seemed to him applicable to his own person, his position in the world, and the part he desired to play in it. His correspondence with Kourbski gives us a sort of inventory of the knowledge he thus acquired, and also some idea of the use to which he knew how to put it. It constitutes a pamphlet in two parts against the boïars, combined with a treatise on the absolute power, both of them elaborated by means of quotations which are certainly from memory. In most cases, indeed, the words are not exactly quoted, though there is nothing to indicate any intentional alteration. Gregory of Nazianzus and St. John Chrysostom, Moses and Isaiah, the Bible and the Greek mythology, the 'Iliad' and the legends of the Siege of Troy, which have been incorporated into the ancient literature of Russia, have all been laid under contribution, and present us with an extraordinary mixture, in which we come on names which must be astounded to find themselves in such close proximity—Zeus and Dionysius