Slavonic Europe Author:Robert Nisbet Bain Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XIV. PETER THE GREAT, 1689-1725. i Earlier' Years. Peter Aleksyeevich was born on May 30, 1672. In all respects he was a singularly backward ch... more »ild. He was two and a half before he was weaned, and in his 11th year we find him still playing with wooden horses, and struggling with the difficulties of Russian etymology. After 1680 the lad had no regular tutor. From his third to his tenth year, he shared the miseries and the perils of the rest of his family. The stories of innocent children remorselessly persecuted by wicked relatives which other children learn from their nurses with comfortable tremours, were, in Peter's case, terrible experiences. At his second election, scenes of bloodshed were enacted daily before his eyes. He saw one of his uncles dragged from the palace, and butchered by a savage mob. He saw his mother's beloved mentor, and his own best friend, Artamon Matvyeev, torn bleeding from his detaining grasp, and hacked to pieces. The convulsions from which he suffered so much in later years must be partly attributed to the nervous shock and the haunting memories of these horrible days. Dunce though he might be from the pedagogues' point of view, the child was, nevertheless, of an amazingly alert and inquisitive intelligence. It is plain that he soon felt cramped and stifled in the dim and close, semi-religious, atmosphere ofold Moscovite family life. He escaped from the boredom and melancholy of Natalia's terem by rushing out into the streets; and the streets of Moscow in the seventeenth century were very dirty streets. Already we notice what was to become a leading trait of his character, that rollicking joyousness—an exaggeration, no doubt, of his gentle father's sociability—which clutched at life with both hands, and squeezed out of it recklessly...« less