his troops desired, he might have lived in peace, and raised his country to a high rank among the powers of Europe. Puffed up by a long series of easy victories, he believed all things possible to him; so he had resolved to do to the czar what he had done to the Polish king, — drive him from his throne. But all this time Peter had been creating an army. Deep in the wildernesses of Ukraine, the Swedish troops, weakened by hunger, fatigue and disease, encountered the trained soldiers of the czar. The Russians were more than victorious. The Swedish army was utterly destroyed, and the king, badly wounded, was compelled to fly, with a handful of followers, and seek refuge in Turkey. He lost in a day the fruits of seven years of victory, - troops, treasures, glory, all were gone, and he himself was a fugitive and a beggar.

No subsequent efforts could restore his fortunes. For two years he remained in Turkey, half prisoner, half guest. All his enemies rose upon him. The King of Poland regained his throne, Denmark invaded his dominions, and the czar prepared for new victories. Escaping, at length, Charles returned to Sweden, and was carrying on the war against his enemies, when a chance shot terminated his career. This occurred in December, 1718, when he was but thirty-six years of age. He was laying siege, at the time, to one of the Danish strongholds, and, going his rounds one evening at nine, he leaned over an angle of a battery, when a ball, weighing half a pound, entered his temple, and he fell dead upon the parapet. One of his officers said, as he threw a cloak over the body:

The play is over; let us go to supper."

The Swedes, happily delivered from this terrible scourge, hastened to make peace with all their enemies, and elected as their queen the sister of Charles XII., whom they compelled to renounce all right to bequeath the crown to her issue. The Swedes had had enough of arbitrary power; and they succeeded in controlling the power of their kings to such a degree that their monarchy was, for the next seventy years, the most lim. ited in Europe.

MAZEPPA.

In the year 1706, when Charles XII., King of Sweden, still in the full tide of successful warfare, had led his victorious troops into the heart of Russia, he received secret overtures from the Governor of Ukraine, a province in the south-eastern part of Europe. Ukraine belonged to Russia, though it still enjoyed the right of electing its prince, subject to the confirmation of the czar. Its inhabitants were warlike and semibarbarous, who were subject to the czar in little more than name; nor to their own elected prince did they render any more obedience than a Tartar tribe usually pays to its chief.

The Ukraine prince, who met the young King of Sweden in the forest on the banks of the Desna, engaged to furnish the king with thirty thousand troops, provisions for the Swedish army, and a large amount of treasure, the accumulation of thirty years, on condition that, at the end of the war against the czar, Ukraine should be an independent State. Charles accepted the condition, and the treaty was concluded.

The name of this powerful Ukraine chief was Ivan Stepanovitch Mazeppa. Civilized Europe first learned his name, and something of his strange history, through Voltaire, who heard .the particulars from one of Charles' officers, and gave them to the public in his celebrated Life of Charles XII. Lord Byron, struck with the romantic story, as related by Voltaire, made it the subject of a poem, and it has since been performed as a drama in all countries. But for the chance meeting in London, in 1726, of Voltaire and one of the mad King of Sweden's followers, the name of Mazeppa, in all probability, had never been known beyond the confines of Russia. Mazeppa was fiftytwo years of age when he first met Charles XII. The romantic

events which form the subject of Byron's poem took place when he was a youthful page at the court of the King of Poland, and it is quite likely (as Byron supposes) that he related them himself to the King of Sweden.

Mazeppa, though he ruled a barbarous people, was not himself a barbarian. He was born in 1644, in Poland; and was therefore not a born subject of the czar. He was descended, however, from a noble Russian family, which was transported to Poland by a chance of war fifty years before Mazeppa was born. His grandfather, a colonel in the Russian army, was carried away captive in 1597 by the Poles, with all his family, and was roasted alive in the belly of a copper bull, according to a pleasant custom of the country. His family remained in

Poland, and flourished; so that the grandson of the roasted colonel was well educated in a Jesuit college, and was transferred thence to the court of the king, where he served as page. Voltaire says he had only a "tincture of literature" (quelque teinture des belles-lettres), but more recent French authorities aver that he was as familiar with Latin as with Polish, and that he was a really accomplished man in literature. All agree, however, that he was one of the most handsome, well-formed, graceful, fascinating pages that ever adorned a court, skilled, too, in all martial arts and exercises, and inured to hardship and fatigue.

Thus endowed, he was naturally a favorite with the ladies of the court, and he passed much of his time in what were then styled." gallant intrigues," but which we call by a much more correct and descriptive name. Among those to whom he was attached was a Polish nobleman's young and lovely wife, whose "Asiatic eye" Byron describes in a passage that has been a thousand times quoted :

"All love, half languor and half fire,
Like saints that at the stake expire,
And lift their raptured looks on high,
As though it were a joy to die."

The injured husband, having surprised these lawless lovers, wreaked upon Mazeppa a vengeance at once terrible and unique

Having caused him to be stripped naked, he had him smeared with tar from head to foot, and then rolled in down; or, as we should say, he had him tarred and feathered. This part of the penalty both Voltaire and Byron omit. As far as I know, Mazeppa was the first man recorded in history who suffered this ignominious punishment, which many people suppose to be an American invention. The enraged Pole next ordered a wild horse to be brought, "a Tartar of the Ukraine breed," upon which Mazeppa was bound, and the horse was let go:

"Away! away - my breath was gone ·

I saw not where he hurried on.
'Twas scarcely yet the break of day,
And on he foamed- away! away!"

To speak in plain prose, this horse, having been bred in Ukraine, fled toward that province, and galloped about two hundred miles with Mazeppa before he dropped dead under his burthen. Mazeppa, too, became insensible, just as a troop of wolves seemed about to close in and devour both horse and rider. When he returned to consciousness, he found himself stretched upon a coarse bed in a woodman's cottage, waited upon by the woodman's daughter, whom Byron, of course, represents to have been one of the loveliest of her sex:

"A slender girl, long-haired and tall."

Attended by this beautiful Cossack girl and her respectable parents Mazeppa soon regained his health, and won every heart by his gayety, courage, and dexterity. Joining the Cossack army, he advanced rapidly, until he became the most popular and powerful of the Cossack chiefs. Tradition reports that he made his way to chieftainship by acts of treachery and cruelty, destroying the men by whose aid he had begun to climb. This, however, is mere tradition, and it comes to us through his enemies, the Russians. Elected, at length, Governor of Ukraine, his election was confirmed by the czar, Peter the Great, and he repaired, some time after, to the court of that fiery potentate. Peter, whom Mazeppa, with his troops, had ably served in the conquest of the Crimea, received him with great consideration,

decorated him with orders, and admitted him at length to per fect intimacy. One day (so the story goes) when Mazeppa was dining with the czar at Moscow, and the irascible Peter had drunk too much wine, as he did every day, the conversation turned upon the affairs of Ukraine, in the course of which the czar said he meant to send an army there, and formally annex the province to Russia. Supposing Mazeppa to be in heart and soul a Russian, he was surprised to observe that this announcement of a cherished purpose was unpleasing to him. Mazeppa, it is said, proceeded from gentle remonstrance to emphatic and even menacing objection. He reminded the czar that the essential independence of Ukraine was secured by treaties, and he declared that if an attempt should ever be made to deprive the Cossacks of their ancient liberties, he, their governor, would know how to defend them.

At this the czar flew into one of his tearing passions. Starting up from his seat, he rushed upon Mazeppa, seized him by the beard, and tore out a handful of his mustache. Mazeppa, indignant as he was, was still sufficiently master of himself not to offer resistance to the infuriate monarch. Peter thought no more of the affair, but Mazeppa cherished in his heart a deep and active resentment, which he bore back with him to his province. Before many years had elapsed, Charles XII. came thundering through that part of Europe, his darling object being the dethronement of the czar, and Mazeppa thought he saw in that young conqueror, who had never yet been defeated, the means of securing the independence of his country and the gratification of his vengeance. His offers were promptly accepted. He soon after met the King of Sweden, and they became fast friends.

The Russian historians, in their endeavors to blacken the character of Mazeppa, relate this anecdote, which Voltaire borrows from them. Having concluded his treaty with Charles XII., he invited a number of chiefs to his house to bring them over to consent to the alliance. When they were all drunk, Mazeppa easily got them to swear upon the gospels that they would furnish men and food to the King of Sweden. At the end of the debauch, the chiefs carried away all the silver vessels and