It is only the inveterate habit of reading Isa.

'Shaftesbury, doubtless no friendly witness, speaks of him as .an inveterate liar, "proud, ambitious, revengeful, false, prodigal and covetous to the highest degree," 4 and Burnet supports his unfavourable judgment to a great extent.

In fact, nearly the whole of the region between the Caucasus and the Perso-Turkish frontier on the south, from the Caspian Sea on the one side to the Black Sea on the other, was embroiled in a civil war of the most sanguinary and ruthless character, the inveterate racial animosities of the combatants being in both cases inflamed by religious fanaticism.

Catherine de Medici, an inveterate match- and the maker, and also uneasy at Philip II.s increasing Nether- power, made advances to Jeanne, proposing to marry lands, her own daughter,Marguerite deValois,to Jeannes son, Henry of Navarre, now chief of the Huguenot party.

Penetrated by the conviction that ignorance was the worst of the inveterate evils of old Russia, a pitiless enemy of superstition of every sort, a reformer by nature, overflowing with energy and resource, and with a singularly lucid mind armed at all points by a farreaching erudition, Prokopovich was the soul of the reforming party after the death of Peter the Great.