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It no less deeply offended the Young Turks, who were resolved to revivify the Turkish people and assert their authority over all parts of the Ottoman dominions. It came at the same time as the assumption by Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria of the title of Tsar of the Bulgarians.
At three minutes past ten that evening the Tsar looked into the eye-piece of the Greenwich Equatorial, and saw a double-winged yellow shape floating in the centre of the field of vision. He watched it for long minutes, listening to the soft clicking of the clockwork, which was the only sound that broke the silence.
In common with the uneducated peasantry, the nobles had a boundless respect one might almost say a superstitious reverence not only for the person, but also for the will of the Tsar, and were ready to show unquestioning obedience to his commands, so long as these did not interfere with their accustomed mode of life.
There was but one Russia; and the head of the consolidated empire called himself not "Grand Prince of all the Russias," but Tsar. When it is remembered that Tsar is only the Slavonic form for Caesar, it will be seen that the dream of the Varangian Princes had been in an unexpected way realized. The Tsar of Russia was the successor of the Caesars in the East.
But proud as he was of his birth and his riches, Colonel Nathaniel was still prouder of his two lovely daughters, each of whom had inherited in liberal measure the beauty of their mother, a daughter of the princely house of Stourza; and of the two the more beautiful, by common consent, was Natalie, whose charms won this spontaneous tribute from Tsar Nicholas, when first he saw her, "I would I were a beggar that I might every day ask your alms, and have the happiness of kissing your hand."
Though it was never printed, it obtained a wide circulation: "'God has placed me over Russia, said the Tsar to us, 'and you must bow down before me, for my throne is His altar. Trouble not yourselves with public affairs, for I think for you and watch over you every hour.
The Judge is preparing everything needful for the journey, and, so far as I am able, I will aid you with money.” The gentry felt that the Chamberlain counselled wisely. It is well known that whoever has once quarrelled with the Russian Tsar, can never conclude a lasting peace with him on this earth, and must either fight or rot in Siberia.
But meanwhile the northern powers, without exception, had been making partition of all the cis-Baltic territories of the Swedish crown. Tsar Peter, master of the Baltic, held that ascendancy which had once belonged to Charles. But the hopes of Sweden revived with the knowledge that the king had reappeared at Stralsund. Even Charles could not make head against the hosts of his foes.
The tsar desired to erect the duchy of Warsaw, Prussia's share in the two partitions of Poland in 1793 and 1795, into a constitutional monarchy attached to the Russian crown, while Prussia, though not unwilling to resign her claims to Polish dominion, wished to increase her territory by the incorporation of Saxony in her monarchy.
The Tsar still bears the title of King of Poland, but the constitutional kingdom created at the great settlement of political accounts in 1815 has been officially styled "The Cis-Vistula Provinces," ever since the absolute incorporation with the Russian empire in 1868.
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