line, was quite charmed with the capabilities of the country for railway construction, in a political as well as in a scientific sense. "No tunnels, no viaducts, no cuttings, no embankments-and above all, no Act of Parliament!" he exclaimed. Many of the new lines present similar advantages. There is no land to buy, no import duties to pay, and engineers say that the £16,500 a mile, at which the contracts have been taken, will leave a very fine margin for profit.

Among the numerous railways projected in Russia, it is scarcely known in England that one is already being planned from Nijni-Novgorod (which in a few years will be connected by rail with Moscow) to the river Amoor. An American company has offered to construct it at its own expense in return for certain privileges, one of these being the cession of a certain amount of land on each side of the line, on which it is proposed to erect trade stations. The line would be upwards of seven thousand miles long, and the journey would be performed in about a fortnight. At present the caravans are thirteen weeks going from Moscow to Kiakhta, on the Chinese frontier.* The construction of this railway to the Amoor presents serious difficulties, of which the most important would be the brittleness of the iron in the Siberian cold, and the probability that at the commencement of winter the first frost would, in marshy places, cause the rails to spring from their sleepers. This inconvenience has been already felt on the Moscow line, where some of the land was so boggy that in certain spots small forests of logs had to be sunk before the rails could be laid down with any chance of their remaining level. After the wet season, when the water in these bogs expands into ice, the rails are sometimes forced up; and though I believe no accident has yet occurred from that cause on the Moscow line, it is not

It will be remembered, however, that news sent by a Government courier from Pekin on the 9th of last November was received in St, Petersburg on the 15th December,

certain that passengers would be equally fortunate in travelling through the deserts of Siberia, where the number of signal-men engaged would, comparatively speaking, be of course very small. On the St. Petersburg and Moscow Railway there is a signal-man at every verst (two-thirds of a mile).

CHAPTER XXIV.

FROM ST. PETERSBURG TO THE PRUSSIAN FRONTIER.

As I approached Moscow from St. Petersburg in the summer, I found a sensible and progressive increase of temperature, and when at the end of winter, in March, I travelled to St. Petersburg from Moscow, I left a hard frost and clear sunlit atmosphere for a half-thaw, a mist, and a perpetual drizzle of sleet and snow. It has often been said that Moscow is more thoroughly Russian than St. Petersburg, and, independently of atmospheric differences, there are many points in which the old and the new capital are unlike one another. In several respects St. Petersburg resembles Berlin far more than Moscow; only it is Berlin on a larger scale, and with a magnificent river flowing through it. There are also a good many more palaces, and grander ones, in the Russian city, to say nothing of its unrivalled quays. But one of the first things that strikes the traveller in the capital of the north is the rigid, military aspect of the streets, with all the houses drawn up in line, or in columns of companies, or-seen from an eminence in squares of battalions; and this is just what every one notices in Berlin. In addition, moreover, to the architectural resemblance between Berlin and St. Petersburg, the latter derives a certain Teutonic look from the large number of Germans included in its official and mercantile population, which is increased by the presence of an inevitable proportion of Germans in distress; whereas in Moscow, when you "take your walks abroad," the only poor you see are pilgrim-like beggars in caftan and girdle,

with the traditional staff, with shoes of bark and with beards a foot long. In St. Petersburg the ordinary winter costume (except among the moujiks) is very much like that of Berlin, and nearly all the men wear hats; in Moscow, a general wearing of hats is a phenomenon which only manifests itself simultaneously with a display of full-dress uniforms, and may be accepted as a sign of a féte-day requiring visits to be paid.

I have already spoken more than once of the architecture of Moscow. St. Petersburg is built on a plain which was once a marsh; Moscow stands on hills. There is nothing characteristically Russian in the fact of a city being erected on uneven ground; but in all the old Russian towns of importance there is a stronghold, or "kremlin," built on a commanding point, and this cannot be said to be replaced in St. Petersburg by the fortress. Then, in St. Petersburg, numbers of the principal churches and cathedrals are not constructed on the old Russo-Byzantine model, but exhibit a compromise between the native or naturalized style and that of Italy since the Renaissance. Of the small square churches with gilt, painted, or spangled domes-one principal dome in the centre, with a satellite at each of the four corners-there are but few specimens in the new capital. In Moscow, again, every family in good circumstances has a separate house, which is almost always detached, and surrounded by a garden; whereas, in St. Petersburg, those who do not live in palaces generally content themselves with a "flat," in the French style. In both cities the old Russian custom still prevails of calling houses after the names of their proprietors (so that on your letters you are addressed in the Oriental style, as "So-and-so, at the house of So-and-so "), but the numbering system is being gradually introduced into St. Petersburg. Finally, the two capitals present a striking contrast in the matter of colour. St. Petersburg is composed of long regular lines of grey; the fantastic Moscow is white or pale yellow, with roofs of dark-red or light-green, varied

with cupolas of gold or of bright ultramarine with golden.

stars.

Magnificent as St. Petersburg had appeared to me when I first saw it, it certainly disappointed me the second time, when I arrived there from Moscow. However, there was the Italian Opera to see, which was not open when I passed through St. Petersburg in the summer of the previous year, and which is a magnificent house, second only in my recollection to the unrivalled Moscow Opera (constructed by the same architect, M. Cavos), and, perhaps, also (putting size and commodiousness out of the comparison) to the artistically-decorated Opera of Berlin. I of course made a series of visits to the Gallery of the Hermitage, which possesses Brouloff's admirable "Destruction of Pompeii," and a few other works of merit by Russian artists, together with a marvellous collection of Italian, Flemish, and Dutch paintings of which the Titians and Rembrandts are especially remarkable, both for their number and for their rare excellence. Here, too, is the wonderful comic series of pictures by Paul Potter (in a style with which, of late years, the name of Granville has been especially associated), the "Animals sitting in Judgment on Man." Without attempting to give an account of the treasures of the Hermitage Gallery, I may call attention to two seemingly unimportant restorations that have been made during the present reign, but which have their significance as testifying to the liberalmindedness of Alexander II. Houdon's fine marble bust of Voltaire, of which the bust at the Théâtre Français is a repetition, had been consigned by Nicholas, the great anti"idéologue" (who must have had peculiar horror of the all-examining author of the " Philosophical Dictionary"), to some lumber-room in the palace; and, from the same motives of propriety which induce the Ministers of Fine Art to discountenance the utter nudity of Academy models, Rembrandt's "Danaë," remarkable for the forcible drawing of the principal figure, and for the voluptuousness expressed in her attitude and in her rather common order of face, had

been removed from the public gaze, and could not be seen unless the visitor went through the tedious form of procuring a special permission to view it. I am sure that no person of education-except, perhaps, the ex-editor of the Univers, who regards some of the greatest pictures ever painted as diabolical devices, because, by his own account, he is unable to look at the Correggio in the square room of the Louvre without "feeling like a satyr, "-would object to Rembrandt's "Danaë" occupying its present position on the walls of the Hermitage. But it was consistent, on the part of the sovereign who persecuted the Moscow University, and increased the rigour of the censorship, to imagine that the youth of his empire could be corrupted by the sight of a fine picture.

The Imperial library, with its admirably-arranged catalogue (on the plan of Adelung), is another of the things that must be seen at St. Petersburg. In one of the rooms, enclosed in glass-cases, are a variety of manuscript curiosities, the most remarkable of which is the astonishing apophthegm given to Louis XIV. as a boy to write "copies" from-"Les rois font ce qui leur plait ;" a notion which he certainly carried out to the best of his ability in after-life. “J'attends le moman de revoire mes chairs soldats” is another specimen of royal orthography. Besides many volumes of manuscript by Voltaire, which have never been published, the Hermitage contains the whole of his private library. It was after a careful examination of it that M. Le Maistre wrote his remarks concerning Voltaire's characteristic indifference to truth as shown in the numerous incorrect editions of important works studied by him, and annotated in his own hand.

Some of the Imperial manufactories, the School of Mines -in fact, any or all of the Government institutions in or near St. Petersburg-ought also to be visited, if only to see the magnificence of the buildings, and the neatness and order of all the internal arrangements. The State, in Russia, is so far ahead of the mass of the people that these