FEDOR ALEXEYEVICH. 



FEJfcR, QTOROY. 



church with rich donation!. Jeremy acknowledged the kindness of 

 Fedoc by consecrating a patriarch of Moicow, which dignity lasted till 

 the tima of Peter the Great, who abolished it, and declared himwlf th* 

 head of the Russian church. The conquest of Siberia, which had 

 been commenced under Ivan Vsailevich, wai completed under Fedor, 

 daring wboee reign Rueiia made the fint attempt to extend iu influ- 

 sns nTr ths Psnne*isn rsponn The khan of Crimea invaded Russia, 

 and penetrated to the capital, but he waa repulaed from the walls of 

 Moscow iu l.'.'.'l. Tlio reign of Fedor ia alto remarkable for many 

 diplomatical nlationa with foreign courts, and particularly with that 

 .-laud. The most important event of 1'Vdor'a reign was his 

 attempt to get himseif elected king of Poland, in 1587. Fedor, or 

 rather bin prime minuter Oodoonoff, promised to the states of Poland 

 and Lithuania, that if they elected him king, he would unite all the 

 furore of Moscow with those of Poland, and conquer the Crimea for 

 Moscow, and Wallachia, Moldavia, and Hungary for Poland. The pro- 

 posed union would hve easily created a power capable of accomplish- 

 ing not only the projected but oven much more extensive conquests. 

 Fedor's proposals were readily accepted by the majority of the Lithu- 

 anians, and they found many partisans even amongst the Poles. He 

 waa OB the point of being elected, when the overbearing conduct of the 

 Muscovite ambaasadura destroyed the bopea of Fedor, and Sigismund 

 Vwa, prince of Sweden, waa elected king of Poland. Fedor died in 

 1691, and with him ended the dynasty of Rurio on the throne of 

 Moscow, bis younger brother Demetrius having been murdered 

 through the instrumentality of Oodoonoff. 



FK1XJR ALKXEYKVICH, Czar of Russia, the eldest brother of 

 Peter the Great, ascended the throne after the death of his father, 

 Alexius Micbaylowicb, 1676, being only nineteen years of age. His 

 youth and delicate constitution did not prevent him from displaying 

 remarkable talents and energy, and the strong will which he constantly 

 evinced to improve the barbarous institutions of his country, may 

 almost justify us in supposing that but for his death he might have 

 accomplish*! the greater part, of what waa afterwards performed by 

 his brother Peter the Great. Fedor distinguished his reign particularly 

 by putting an end to a monstrous custom which had acquired the 

 force of law in Muscovy. According to this custom, called Mest- 

 nichestvo (literally 'placeehip,' from ilesto, place), no member of a 

 great family could be put under the command of or give precedence 

 to a person wboee birth was considered inferior to his. All the noble 

 *"' of the country were registered in a roll called ' Razriad,' or 

 'Arrangement,' and all the dispute* which frequently arose about 

 precedmt, not only at the court but even in active service, were 

 sjsUlsd by referring to this kind of herald's office. Such a system 

 necessarily frequently proved very detrimental to the public service ; 

 but it was eo deeply rooted, that even Ivan Vasilevich, who deluged 

 Muscovy with blood and decimated its nobility, was unable to destroy 

 the Mwtnichestvo. Fedor abolished the practice by very simple 

 means: be assembled his boyarda, or principal nobles, and having 

 expostulated with them on the bad consequences of the above- 

 mentioned custom, threw, in the presence of the assembly, all the 

 rolls of the ' Razriad ' into the fire. The genealogical records of the 

 Muscovite nobles, which did not relate to their claims of precedence, 

 woe spared by Fedor, and arranged in order by his command. Fedor 

 died in 1083, at the age of twenty-five. 



FEITH. 1UIY N VIS, a Dutch poet of high reputation, was bora on 

 the 7th of February 1753 at /wolle, the chief town of the province 

 of Overyssel, in which the family had been a noted one since the 

 time of Everard Feith, a distinguished classical scholar, who flourished 

 in the sixteenth century. Rhynvis, who was the only child of his 

 parents, received an excellent education under a private tutor, and 

 afterwards studied at Leyden, where he took his degree of Doctor of 

 Laws in 1770, at the unusually early age of seventeen. At the age of 

 nineteen he waa married to Okje Groenoveld, with whom be spent the 

 next forty yean of his life in an uninterrupted current of domestic 

 happinea*, sweetened by literary fame. His first poem, ' The Transitori- 

 nesaof the Universe,' which appeared in 1779, was followed by sufficient 

 proae and verse to fill about thirty octavo volumes. The most 

 successful poem of all, 'Fanny,' which waa published in 1737, was 

 devoted to celebrating the cnunubi.il felicity of an imaginary Fanny 

 and Edward, concluding with a scene of Fanny at Edward's grave. 

 It was so popular for some yean in Holland that it was customary 

 for young persons to learn it by heart, and tho whole was set to 

 music. Its reputation has now entirely faded ; and two prose novels 

 by the author, ' Ferdinand and Constantia ' and ' Julio,' written at the 

 time of the \Verter mania, were from the first condemned as too 

 rntimcnUl. The other works of Feith have been more fortunate. 

 They an almost all either of a religion* or a patriotic cant, and the 

 latter are eminently spirited. A scries of his odes, which commence! 

 with the outbreak of tho American war and lasts to about the com- 

 UMDctment of the French revolution, is interesting in an historical as 

 well a* a portiral point of view, from the light it throws on the 

 sentiment* of the Dutch patriotic or anti-Oranger's party of tho 

 period, Hb ' Song of Triumph on the Anniversary of the Victory of 

 the DofgetfMok/ Washington and Necker,' To the Foe* of Nether- 

 land,' are all animated with the same feelings shame at the degeneracy 

 of bin countrymen compared with their glorious ancestors of the time! 

 of Tromp and I* Ruiter, a most exaggerated estimate of these bygone 



heroes, and a bitter hostility to England, which, at the time of the 

 American war, is spoken of as the relentless tyrant of the seas, and 

 viewed in no other light. The same spirit pervade* a vary fine eulogy 

 on De Ruiter, and an ode on the aame hero, both of which were sent 

 anonymously by Feith in 1735 to a society which offered a reward 

 for pooms on the subject, and to the first of which the society awarded 

 its first prize, a gold medal, and to the other its second, a silver one, 

 unaware of course at the time that they were from tho aame hand. 

 Feith closed the first series of his patriotic odes at the time of the 

 Dutch revolution of 1787, too indignant at the turn affairs bad taken 

 to continue them, and little foreseeing at that time what more serious 

 calamities were in store for Holland. He resumed them in 1809, 

 when the country was at the lowest ebb of its fortunes, and he had 

 the satisfaction of concluding the whole with an ode on tha fall of 

 Napoleon. Of his didactic poems, "The Grave' and 'Old Age* are 

 regarded as masterpieces. He wrote four tragedies, one of which is 

 on tha subject of Lady Jane Grey, but the best i that entitled 

 ' Thirsa, or the Triumph of Religion,' the heroine of which in the 

 Hebrew mother recorded in the book of Maccabees, who exhorted her 

 seven sons to martyrdom. He wrote, in conjunction with Bildcrdyk 

 [liii.uKitDTK], a new version of Van Haren's poem of ' ! 

 and edited a complete edition of tha works of Jacob Cats, tha 

 preface to which, a panegyric on the Holland of tho seventeenth 

 century, is a fine specimen of vigorous prose. His prose works are 

 chiefly of a religious character, written for prizes offered by a society 

 at the Hague and by the trustee! of the Teylerian legacy, a fund 

 analogous to the Bridgewater fund, founded by a miser of Haarlem, 

 which has given birth to a long series of quarto volume*. Another of 

 his works which gained a prize is an ' Essay on Epic Poetry,' in which 

 he gives an account of his intercourse with Klopstock during an 

 excursion to Hamburgh, which seems to have been his only taste of 

 foreign travel. The usual course of his life was to spend the winter 

 months at Zwolle, where he filled come municipal office*, and tho 

 summer one* at Boschwyh, a rural retreat near that town, to which 

 he was much attached and where he gratified his taate for landscape 

 gardening. His domestic tranquillity wag first broken by the death 

 of his wife in 1813, a loss which he never entirely recovered. In the 

 next year he was invited to form one of the " notables " assembled at 

 Amsterdam to consult on a constitution, but he declined on account 

 of old age and failing health. He survived however till 1821, whm 

 he died, after a tedious illness, on the 8th of February, one day after 

 bis seventy-first birthday. He left nine children, one of whom wrote 

 a poem of some merit descriptive of hi* father's funeral, which i< 

 given in the volume entitled, ' Gedeukzuil voor Mr. Rhvuvis l-Vith,' 

 published at Leeuwarden in 1825. A collected edition of his works, 

 compressed into thirteen volumes, was printed in tho rarne year at 

 the Hague, with a life by Van Kampen. 



KKJKR, GYORGY, a very industrious Hungarian author, was born 

 at Keszthely in the year 170(5, studied at the university of Pesth and 

 Buda, was for fifteen years a priest at Stuhlweissenburg, and after 

 occupying the post of professor of dogmatic theology and some others 

 of an analogous character, became in 1824 librarian of the university 

 of Pesth and Buda, During all this period his pen had been in 

 incessant activity, and in a list of his own printed works which he 

 published in 1830 be gives tho titles of 102, beginning with the year 

 1784 when he was eighteen. They are of various kinds from poetry 

 to dogmatic theology, and of various sizes from mere pamphlets to 

 works in five or more volumes, all in the Latin language or iu the 

 Hungarian. Ho specifies some articles of considerable extent which 

 had appeared in periodical publications, but very many of Ifss con- 

 sequence in the ' Halle Litteratur-Zeituug,' and the ' Tudoinitnyos 

 Gyujtemeny,' are paused over. Of the ' Tudomiinyoa GyujteuxSny,' 

 a very valuable publication, which was for a quarter of a century, 

 from 1817tol841, the best magazine and review that Hungary pos- 

 sessed, he was the original editor as well as a frequent contributor to 

 it* pages. His great contribution to the literature of his country in 

 however the ' Codex diplomatics Hungarian ecclesiasticu* ac civilis,' 

 published between 1829 and 1844 in twelve so-called volumes, which 

 are generally bound in eight-and-twenty, some of the volumes being 

 divided into* several sections, each of the size of an ordinary volume. 

 In this ' Codex,' which is a general collection of charters and other 

 documents relating to Hungarian history from the earliest time* to 

 the year 1440, it is said that many errors and inaccuracies are to be 

 found, but the work is a stupendous monument of industry and 

 perseverance, especially when the circumstances under which it was 

 produced are considered. "I have sought for the documents it 

 contain*," says Fejdr, in tho preface to one of the volumes of tho 

 Index published in IbS/i, "and applied for them in season and out of 

 season ; I have transcribed them with my own fist (' proprio transcripsi 

 pugno'), and let me be allowed to add, I have been led by no hope 

 of recompense ; I have had no patronage and no assistance ; this work 

 I dedicate to the public use at an expense from my own purse of 

 12,000 florins" (about 12001.) Several Latin dinHertations on <li.-<]>ut, <l 

 point* in Hungarian hUtory are interspersed, and the whole forms an 

 appropriate companion to Kutona's great ' Historia critioa rogum 

 liungaiia?.' The last works of rVjrr that we have seen mentioned 

 arc, 'A' Kunok ercdetoriil' ('On the Origin of the Huns'), and ' .V 

 politikai Forradalmok okoi' ('The Cause* of Political Revolutions'), 



