a navy.  He had now an army modelled after the European fashion, according to the suggestions of Lefort, whose regiment became the model of other regiments.  Five thousand men were trained and commanded by General Gordon.  Lefort raised another corps of twelve thousand, from the Streltzi chiefly.  These were the forces, in conjunction with the navy, with which he reduced Azof.  He now returns to Moscow, and receives the congratulations of the boyars, or nobles,—­that class who owned the landed property of Russia and cultivated it by serfs.  He made heavy contributions on these nobles, and also on the clergy,—­for it takes money to carry on a war, and money he must have somehow.

These forced contributions and the changes which were made in the army were not beheld with complacency.  The old guard, the Streltzi, were particularly disgusted.  The various innovations were very unpopular, especially those made in reference to the dress of the new soldiers.  The result of all these innovations and discontents was a conspiracy to take his life; which, however, was seasonably detected and severely punished.

An extraordinary purpose now seized the mind of the Czar, which was to travel in the various countries of Europe, and learn something more especially about ship-building, on which his heart was set.  He also wished to study laws, institutions, sciences, and arts; and in order to study them effectually, he resolved to travel incognito.  Hitherto he had not been represented in the European courts; so he appointed an embassy of extraordinary magnificence to proceed in the first instance to Holland, then the foremost mercantile state of Europe.  The retinue consisted of four secretaries, at the head of whom was Lefort, twelve nobles, fifty guards, and other persons,—­altogether to the number of two hundred.  As they travelled through Prussia they were received with great distinction, and the whole journey seems to have been a Bacchanalian progress.  There were nothing lout, fetes and banquets to his honor, and the Russians proved to have great capacity for drinking.  At Koenigsberg he left his semi-barbaric embassy to their revels, and proceeded rapidly and privately to Holland, hired a small room—­kitchen and garret—­for lodgings, and established himself as journeyman carpenter, with a resolute determination to learn the trade of a ship-carpenter.  He dressed like a common carpenter, and lived like one, with great simplicity.  When he was not at work in the dock-yard with his broad axe, he amused himself by sailing a yacht, dressed like a Dutch skipper, with a red jacket and white trousers.  He was a marked personage, even had it not been known that he was the Czar,—­a tall, robust, active man of twenty-five, with a fierce look and curling brown locks, free from all restraint, seeing but little of the ambassadors who had followed him, and passing his time with ship-builders and merchants, and adhering rigidly to all the regulations