Page:Notes upon Russia (volume 1, 1851).djvu/106

lxxviii not indeed to be found; but we have the proposals of the ambassador, and what he received in answer, carefully protocoled, after he had been three times admitted to audience with the grand-prince. From these we learn that Poppel, at his own request, was allowed to hold his third audience with this prince in private, and without an interpreter. From this latter fact, we may conclude that he was of Sclavonic descent.

Poppel, at his first audience, sought above all to gain the favour of the grand-prince and his Boyars; informing them, that upon his return from his first journey, he had been asked by the emperor (whom he had met at Nurnberg) and by all the princes to give them information concerning the kingdom of Russia, of which but little was then known in Germany. He also informed them, that he had had an opportunity, and had availed himself of it, to make them acquainted with the general state of Russia, from his own observation, and had described the almost boundless extent of the countries and nations subject to its sovereign, on whose power, riches, and wisdom, he had been able to speak as an eye-witness.

His second object was to justify himself against the suspicions which the Boyars entertained, that he was not really an ambassador from the emperor, but that he assumed that name and title as an emissary from the king of Poland. “People,” he says, “have believed, that I have prepared the imperial letter myself, and have desired that I should write something, that it may be compared with that letter;