give equitable laws to all her subjects, from Lapland to the Caspian, and from the Baltic to the wall of China, which excited the homage, how sincere I know not, of Frederic, and, what she valued more, of Voltaire, has never been acted upon. At this meeting, the following curious incident happened: Two Samoid deputies were directed by the empress to state those legislative provisions which they thought were best adapted to their own nation. One of them replied, "Our laws are few, and we want no more." "What!" exclaimed the imperial legislatrix, " do theft, murder, and adultery, "never appear amongst you ? " "We have such crimes, answered the deputy, "and they are punished: the man who deprives "another of his life wrongfully, is put to death."-" But what," said her majesty, interrupting him, " are the punishments of theft and "adultery?" "How!" said the Samoid, with great astonishment, "are they not sufficiently punished by detection?" Many events have conspired to prevent the accomplishment of the magnificent plan of Catherine; and heavily oppressive indeed would the present laws of Russia be, if an appeal to the emperor did not lie from the most abject of his subjects. The courts of the grand police-office opposite the admiralty are crowded every day, where the laws are expounded and administered, according to the discretion of the judicial officers appointed to preside over them. Whilst England might borrow some ideas from the police of Russia, she is enabled to present to the latter the sublimest spectacle of justice. Let us press for a moment through the crowd, into a British court of criminal justice; see that emaciated tattered wretch at the bar! he is without friends and without money; he can bring no witnesses; he can retain no counsel. What then? Is all the force of the law and the powers of eloquence against him? Listen the judge before whom he stands is his advocate! Hear that acute and favourable interrogation to the witness that presses against the culprit's life; mark that benign exposition; the miserable being is saved: tears gush from his eyes; he falls upon his knees, and in broken accents blesses Heaven that he was born in a country whose laws befriend the friendless and the persecuted. : I have hitherto omitted to mention the terrible annoyance of the bells of the Greek churches, the most deep-toned of any I ever heard those of one very near my chamber used every morning to curtail that little portion of sleep which legions of flies had allowed : me. To a stranger, the alternate clashing and jingling of these deepmouthed tenants of the steeple, for an hour without any interval, is very harassing; the bells, like saleable horses going to a fair, are tied in succession, and by pulling the rope which connects them, the agreeable harmony of clashing is effected, whilst the melody of chiming is produced by striking the particular bell with a wedge of iron. The Russian saints are said to be very fond of this matin music; and many was the time and oft that I wished it confined exclusively to their ears. Amongst the other early sounds of the busy morning, with which you are saluted, some are very foreign, and others very familiar, to an Englishman, and might, if the flies would permit, half induce him to think that he were in the capital of his own country: amongst the latter I was particularly delighted with the cry of the fruiterer, who, with a reverend beard, carried upon his head an oblong board, on which, in little baskets of birch bark, very neat and clean, the choicest summer fruits of Russia were disposed. Nothing could be more grateful than a block of ice, brought in every morning, to chill the water of the Neva with which we washed ourselves: I am at a loss to conjecture how the natives of tropical climates can survive their sultry summers without ice. Soon after our arrival we dined at the elegant and hospitable country House of Mons. B- -, upon the Peterhoff road, where we sat down, about thirty, to dinner, and after coffee retired to the gardens, formed of little romantic islands rising out of a small lake, the whole surrounded by a wood. When we were weary of rowing some pleasure boats, an amusement of which the Russians are very fond, we returned to the house, and the rest of the evening was spent in cards and waltzing. The day following we were introduced to the English club by a member, where the company is very select, consisting of Russian and Polish noblemen, foreigners of respectability, and that truly dignified character, an English merchant. The dinner is always excellent, and served up in the English fashion: adjoining are rooms for billiards and reading, where the principal foreign papers are taken in. The porter was ornamented with a very broad sash of velvet, richly embroidered with silver, thrown over the left shoulder, and held a staff tipped with silver, as do most of the porters of the principal nobility. The building on the outside is far from being handsome; but the apartments are good, and particularly the eating-room, which is very lofty, and has two enormous stoves made of brick, covered with blue Dutch tiles: upon the whole, its appearance is very inferior to the club-houses of Stockholm. About two o'clock, the dinner hour at this place, the court-yard is crowded with carriages and equipages. A fortunate removal of people from the hotel, enabled me to change my apartment for another more pleasantly situated; the price was the same, viz. seven rubles, or nineteen shillings English, per week. This room was divided, à la Russe, by a screen, behind which my bed, or crib, was placed. The windows looked upon the Moika canal, where of an evening I used to be serenaded by the common bargemen, and sometimes by the rowers of the pleasurebarges. Of the Russian song and music I will speak by and by : I shall only now, as some modest barristers say, humbly insist upon it, that barbarians have not a natural and ardent taste for music and singing. One evening, while amusing myself with a young bear in the court-yard of the house of a friend, my ears were gratified by some wild notes, which, upon turning round, I found issued from an instrument resembling a guitar, upon which a native of Archangel was playing very sweetly: the tenderness of the scene improved the music. The poor fellow was weeping as he played, to mitigate the sufferings of his wife, upon whom death had fixed his seal, and who, with her head reclining upon her hand, sat at an open window in the basement floor to enjoy a little air. The rude and sorrowful musician, and his pale and interesting wife, formed a subject for the painter. This sensibility, which would have charmed a traveller, had he beheld it in the love-inspiring groves of Italy, was the produce of the frozen regions of the White Sea! The natives of Archangel are looked upon as more civilized than their more southern brethren, and servants from this part of Russia are preferred for their integrity, intelligence, and activity. Although I have expressed my attachment to the Russian, and like the good-humoured fellow prodigiously, yet I must admit that he has no objection to improve his notions of earthly felicity by a little occasional inebriation. At a house where I passed the evening, previous to supper we had been drinking some ale, which in this country is prized on account of its being both excellent and forbidden, having left a couple of bottles, about half full, upon the table when supper was announced, a most demure looking menial, with a long beard, who stood behind my chair, was ordered to bring them in : after some little hesitation, he informed his master "that he was 66 very sorry for it; but that, as he passed through the room, by "mere accident he had emptied the bottles. " Nature, by some of her odd freaks, very soon confirmed the truth of one part of this statement. This propensity is much encouraged by the extraordinary number of festivals which occur in this country, particularly at the end of Lent; almost as many as the feasts of the civic corporation of London, which, it is said, would present, if they were duly observed, one for every day in the year, and some over. One day whilst I was at Petersburg, as the emperor was returning from Cronstadt, when the weather was most oppressively hot, he halted at a little village about twenty versts from the residence, in consequence of the relay of horses not being immediately ready. An English merchant who had a country house adjoining, with that warmth of heart which forgets and surpasses all etiquette, ran out, and presented to the emperor, who appeared to be in great heat and covered with dust, a glass of excellent Burton ale, for which his majesty, with his usual affability, thanked his attentive host, and drank. Both the emperor and the merchant forgot that the beverage was prohibited, or secretly relished it the more on that account. A German, who was present, and was struck with the frank and cordial avidity with which the emperor emptied the glass, observed, "that ❝ had a Frenchman offered it, his majesty would have made one of "his horses taste it first. " Upon another occasion the emperor exhibited the native goodness of his heart: some British bottled porter, which is also prohibited, was shipped for an Englishman whose lady was very much indisposed, and to whom it was recommended by her physicians. Scarcely had it reached Petersburg from Cronstadt, before it was seized by the custom-house officer: upon the emperor hearing of it, he sent to the customs, declaring it to be his own (for such, in truth, the law of confiscation had made it) and immediately forwarded it, with some very kind expressions, to the fair invalid. The princely magnificence in which some of the Russian nobility live is prodigious. Having occasion one day to find out a person who occupied a suite of rooms in one of the great town hotels of count Sherametoff, the Russian duke of Bedford, we had an opportunity of seeing this enormous pile, in which a great number of respectable families reside; and the rent, amounting to twenty thou Сс sand rubles, is applied by its munificent lord to the relief of the poor. Exclusive of another superb mansion in the city, which he inhabits, the count has a town on the road to Moscow, called Paulova, containing about two thousand five hundred houses, and five churches: this place is the Birmingham of Russia, all the inhabitants of which are his slaves, who carry on an extensive trade on the Caspian Sea. In the neighbourhood of this place, he has a palace rivalling Versailles in extent and splendour. Many of his slaves, all of whom adore him, have realized vast fortunes, and display at their tables sumptuous services of plate, every costly luxury, and have foreign masters to teach their children. Though rolling in unwieldy revenues, the count is frequently embarrassed, from his princely munificence; yet he never replenishes his exhausted treasury, by exercising the sovereign right which he has to raise the capitation-tax of his peasantry. What additional blessings might not such a nobleman bestow upon his country, by converting his vassals into tenants: how great and immediate would be the influence and example of a spirit so liberal:—with what power has fortune invested him to accelerate the civilization of his country! One of the count's slaves advertised, during my stay in Petersburg, for a family preceptor, with an offer of two thousand rubles per annum, and six rubles per day for his table, and a cook! The count was under severe domestic affliction at this time, having just lost his amiable lady who had formerly been one of his slaves: she left behind her a little son to console him, whom the emperor elevated to the rank of nobility; a measure rendered necessary in consequence of his mixed birth, to enable him to enjoy his father's wealth and honours. Prince Sherametoff, who is the lord of one hundred and forty thousand slaves, lost eighty thousand rubles one night at the gaming-table: not having so much money at immediate command, he offered to transfer to the winner an estate of slaves of that value. As soon as the unfortunate vassals heard of the intended assignment, dreading to have another master, they immediately raised the money amongst them, and sent it to their lord. Many of the nobles have three hundred servants; and one of that order, it is reported, had thirteen thousand in constant attendance. The manners of the Russian nobility very much partake of the manners of the old school of France, and, in complimentary profession, perhaps a little exceed it. They are acute observers of human |