Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/95

 Rh when that same earth was cast into the fire, he dried up with it. This did not involve any oblivion of the angels, who were invoked at the beginning of every piece of work, and St. Nikita had a special power of driving the demons out of a house where his help was sought. Paganism and Christianity, religion and superstition, were all mingled and confused together. At the midnight festivals held on certain feasts, on St. John's Eve, Christmas Eve, Twelfth Night, and St. Basil's Day, both God and the devil had their dues. On the Saturday before Pentecost, the people danced in the graveyards, howling dolorously. On Holy Thursday they burnt straw to call up the dead, and going to the churches, fetched, from behind the altar, a pinch of salt, an infallible cure for certain ailments.

In the sixteenth century remnants of superstition lingered in the best-managed Courts all over Europe, and even at the Vatican. Apart from the astrologers whom Paul II. consulted on every important occasion—but these were held to represent a science—was it not the settling of an owl that warned Alexander VI. of his approaching end? But in Russia the same century witnessed the fullest blossoming of such beliefs, the sole basis of an intellectual life which possessed no other substantial aliment. On it, till the very threshold of the modern epoch, literature largely subsisted, and what remained was not calculated to stay its readers' appetites.

The writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries confined themselves, as a rule, to mechanical works of compilation. Stillborn works, these! Not a living touch concerning manners and customs, even in the lives of the native saints; mere chronicles, with the style and contents of an official journal. The most remarkable of these collections—the Stiépiénnaïa-Kniga, or 'Book of Degrees,' written by the Metropolitan Macarius, only rises a little above the average, because its author has endeavoured to establish some agreement between the acts and genealogies of the various Sovereigns. It is a work with a political tendency, and, as such, less commonplace than its fellows. It inspired the Terrible with the idea of tracing his descent from Cæsar Augustus! A work of religious edification, too, which strove to show the Divine intervention in all things. Yet the Churchman who composed it, as we shall soon perceive, was nothing but a compiler in the broader sense.

Both in matter and in form, the literature of this period is inferior to that of Kiev. All poetry, all naturalness and