text:  in the midst of the most revolting atrocities and debaucheries broke down the power of the aristocracy prostrated the energies of the nation and paved the way for successive usurpations--the skilful and crafty policy and the unscrupulous means by which Boris raised himself to the throne after he had destroyed the last representatives of the direct line of Rurik which in all the vicissitudes of Russian fortune had hitherto held the chief place in the nation--the taint of guilt which poisoned and polluted a mind otherwise powerful and not without some virtues and made him at length a suspicious and cruel tyrant who having alienated the good-will of the nation was unable to oppose the pretensions of an impostor and swallowed poison to escape the tortures of an upbraiding conscience--the successful imposture of the monk who personated the Prince Dimitri one of the victims of Boris' ambition and who was slaughtered on the day of his nuptials at the foot of the throne he had so strangely usurped by an infuriated mob; not because he was known to be an impostor but because he was accused of a leaning to the Latin church--the season of anarchy that succeeded and led to fresh impostures and to the Polish domination--the servile submission of the Russian nobility to Sigismund king of Poland to whom they sold their country; the revival of patriotic feelings almost as soon as the sacrifice had been made--the bold and determined opposition of the Russian church to the usurpation of a Latin prince the persecutions the hardships the martyrdom it endured; the ultimate rising of the Muscovite people at its call--the sanguinary conflict in Moscow; the expulsion of the Poles; the election of Michael Romanoff the first sovereign of his family and of the reigning dynasty--the whole history of the days of Peter of Catharine and of Alexander and even the less prominent reigns of intermediate sovereigns--are full of the interest and the incidents which are usually considered most available to the writers of historical romance