When his muddled brain occasionally awoke to the knowledge that he was a King, he would bully and hector his boon-comrades like any drunken trooper.  On one occasion, when a young Jewess refused to drain a goblet of neat brandy which he thrust into her hand, he promptly administered two resounding boxes on her ears, shouting, “Vile Hebrew spawn!  I’ll teach thee to obey.”

There was in him, too, a vein of savage cruelty which took remarkable forms.  A favourite pastime was to visit the torture-chamber and gloat over the sufferings of the victims of the knout and the strappado; or to attend (and frequently to officiate at) public executions.  Once, we are told, at a banquet, he “amused himself by decapitating twenty Streltsy, emptying as many glasses of brandy between successive strokes, and challenging the Prussian envoy to repeat the feat.”

Mad?  There can be little doubt that Peter had madness in his veins.  He was a degenerate and an epileptic, subject to brain storms which terrified all who witnessed them.  “A sort of convulsion seized him, which often for hours threw him into a most distressing condition.  His body was violently contorted; his face distorted into horrible grimaces; and he was further subject to paroxysms of rage, during which it was almost certain death to approach him.”  Even in his saner moods, as Waliszewski tells us, he “joined to the roughness of a Russian barin all the coarseness of a Dutch sailor.”  Such in brief suggestion was Peter I. of Russia, half-savage, half-sovereign, the strangest jumble of contradictions who has ever worn the Imperial purple—­“a huge mastodon, whose moral perceptions were all colossal and monstrous.”

It was, perhaps, inevitable that a man so primitive, so little removed from the animal, should find his chief pleasures in low pursuits and companionships.  During his historic visit to London, after a hard day’s work with adze and saw in the shipbuilding yard, the Tsar would adjourn with his fellow-workmen to a public-house in Great Tower Street, and “smoke and drink ale and brandy, almost enough to float the vessel he had been helping to construct.”

And in his own kingdom the favourite companions of his debauches were common soldiers and servants.

“He chose his friends among the common herd; looked after his household like any shopkeeper; thrashed his wife like a peasant; and sought his pleasure where the lower populace generally finds it.”  His female companions were chosen rather for their coarseness than their charms, and pleased him most when they were drunk.  It was thus fitting that he should make an Empress of a scullery-maid, who, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, had no vestige of beauty to commend her to his favour, and whose chief attractions in his eyes were that she had a coarse tongue and was a “first-rate toper.”