Peter was a child when his father died, and his half-brother Theodore became the Czar.  But Theodore reigned only a short time, and Peter succeeded him at the age of ten (1682), the government remaining in the hands of his half-sister, Sophia, a woman of great ability and intelligence, but intriguing and unscrupulous.  She was aided by Prince Galitzin, the ablest statesman of Russia, who held the great office of chancellor.  This prince, it would seem, with the aid of the general of the Streltzi (the ancient imperial guards) and the cabals of Sophia, conspired against the life of Peter, then seventeen years of age, inasmuch as he began to manifest extraordinary abilities and a will of his own.  But the young Hercules strangled the serpent,—­sent Galitzin to Siberia, confined his sister Sophia in a convent for the rest of her days, and assumed the reins of government himself, although a mere youth, in conjunction with his brother John.  That which characterized him was a remarkable precocity, greater than that of anybody of whom I have read.  At eighteen he was a man, with a fine physical development and great beauty of form, and entered upon absolute and undisputed power as Czar of Muscovy.

In the years of the regency, when the government was in the hands of his half-sister, he did not give promise of those remarkable abilities and that life of self-control which afterwards marked his career.

In his earlier youth he had been surrounded with seductive pleasures, as Louis XIV. had been, by the queen-regent, with a view to control him, not oppose him; and he yielded to these pleasures, and is said to have been a very dissipated young man, with his education neglected.  But he no sooner got rid of his sister and her adviser, Galitzin, than he seemed to comprehend at once for what he was raised up.  The vast responsibilities of his position pressed upon his mind.  To civilize his country, to make it politically powerful, to raise it in the scale of nations, to labor for its good rather than for his own private pleasure, seems to have animated his existence.  And this aim he pursued from first to last, like a giant of destiny, without any regard to losses, or humiliations, or defeats, or obstacles.

Chance, or destiny, or Providence, threw in his path the very person whom he needed as a teacher and a Mentor,—­a young gentleman from Geneva, whom historians love to call an adventurer, but who occupied the post of private secretary to the Danish minister.  Aristocratic pedants call everybody an adventurer who makes his fortune by his genius and his accomplishments.  They called Thomas Becket an adventurer in the time of Henry II., and Thomas Cromwell in the reign of Henry VIII.  The young secretary to the Danish minister seems to have been a man of remarkable ability, insight, and powers of fascination, based on his intelligence and on knowledge acquired in the first instance in a mercantile house,—­as was the success of Thomas Cromwell and Alexander Hamilton.