he had represented himself to be; and finally, when the sailing-season was at an end, and the sharpener of cutlasses had captured an immense number of fishing-boats, the Russians ventured upon a caricature in which the English admiral was exhibited with an enormous fish under his arm, about to present the spoils of the Baltic Sea to the British Parliament.

From the very commencement of the alliance between France and England for the protection of Turkey, Russia asserted-the wish being, of course, father to the assertion -that such a union could never lead to any practical result. In illustration of this idea, a swan, a crab, and a pike, each in its own way a water-animal, were represented in the act of drawing a load-or rather of attempting to do so, for the load remains stationary. Beneath the engraving was printed the fable (by Kriloff) from which the notion was taken, and which I here endeavour to reproduce in English:

"When comrades cannot agree,

They may toil as much as they like,
The work won't proceed;

And such folks should take heed
By the fate of the wonderful three-
The Swan, the Crab, and the Pike.

"The Pike, the Crab, and the Swan
A union suddenly formed.
A load they saw

And wished to draw;

So to friendship rapidly warmed,

Into harness they went,

And their energies spent,

But the wagon-load didn't move on.

And yet the load was no great weight;
But Pike into the water full,
And Swan into the heavens straight,

And backwards Crab the cart would pull.
Which was right and which was wrong,

I really can't pretend to say;

But this I know-they laboured long,

And the load stands still to the present day."

Towards the close of the war there was an end to jo king; and the popular engravings seem to have consisted principally of representations of atrocities alleged to have been perpetrated by English sailors in the Gulf of Finland, and of the havoc that was certainly committed at Kertch. The French émeutiers of 1848, in the Palace of the Tuileries, set an example which armies, priding themselves on their discipline, are sometimes unable to follow. That the destruction of the Kertch Museum should have taken place, in spite of the officers' exertions to restrain the men, seems to show, that in every war some deeds may be done of which all reasonable and honest persons will afterwards be ashamed. But the English people are no more answerable for the conduct of certain regiments at Kertch, than the Russians, as a nation, are for the Hango massacre.

On the other hand, there were actions performed during the late war, on each side, of which both Russia and the allies may well preserve the memory. Several of the English officers who were prisoners in Russia have made a point of relating to the world what treatment they received during their residence in the enemy's country; and a number of the Russian prisoners detained on parole at Lewes expressed, after their return to their native land, in a letter which found its way to the newspapers, their gratitude for the kindness and hospitality they had met with in that town. The French, as we all know, vied with one another in their attention to their prisoner-guests.

War is indeed a terrible scourge when, to the bloodshed and the tears, there are no counterbalancing results, and when the signing of peace leaves nations where the declaration of hostilities had found them,-full of hatred and the spirit of misrepresentation and calumny. In the case of England and Russia, whether or not it be desirable that there should be an intimate political connection, there can be no reason why there should not be a much better understanding between the two countries. Of all the nations on the Continent, there is none which merits our sympathy so much as our late enemy, in the attitude he has recently assumed. There is not another country in Europe, except England, which criticizes so freely and so vigorously its own internal affairs, and none which at the present moment takes so much interest in ours.

CHAPTER IV.

SECRET LITERATURE.

MR. IVAN GOLOVIN, in his sometimes amusing and gene rally untrustworthy book entitled La Russie sous Nicolas I., tells an anecdote which is, at least, ben trovato, on the subject of Sir Robert Peel's anxiety to obtain an advantageous treaty of commerce with Russia.

When the late Emperor visited London, he met with no very cordial reception from the populace, and on one occasionally, while riding out with the great apostle of Free Trade (according to Mr. Golovin), was actually hissed by the mob. Turning to Sir Robert Peel, he said,

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I have to thank your newspapers and their calumnies for this."

"No," replied the minister, "our people are very intelligent, and what they are now hissing is the Russian tariff."

D

The answer was both clever and courteous; and altogether it is a pity that in all probability it was never uttered. But at the same time it would have required a very favour. able tariff to have effaced from the memory of the English the names of Pestal and Poland. Some vague notions and misconceptions in connection with the conspiracy of 1825, the Polish insurrection of 1830, the nuns of Minsk, Siberia, the spy system, and secret tribunals-these were certainly the causes of the hisses, if hisses there were. To many persons, it is true, the name of Pestal is known only from a vapid, commonplace waltz, of which some unscrupulous music-publisher has declared him to be the composer-just as the misfortunes of Poland were for a long time intimately associated with an annual ball at the Mansion House. But, on the whole, the Emperor Nicholas may have been right in attributing his alleged unfavourable reception when he appeared in the streets to what (according to Mr. Golovin) he was pleased to call the "calumnies" of the journals; only it was not in England that the calumnies were invented. No travellers are more truthful than the English. None take so much trouble to ascertain facts; and in describing their personal experiences none, as a rule, care so little for self-display. But the great majority of our supposed facts concerning Russia have not been obtained either directly or indirectly from English sources. Most of our Russian news, nearly all that which finds its way into our journals, comes to us either from Germany, or from Poland through Germanythat is to say, from a country which hates Russia, though one which fears it. Add to this that the Austrian newspapers, and those, like the Augsburg Gazette under Austrian influence, represent the Latin Church which, among Jesuits, means misrepresenting the Greek-and it will not be difficult to understand how so many false and exaggerated stories of Russian tyranny and persecution have reached England. It is only now and then that

such tales, by their very monstrosity, provoke examination. in the country where the infamies they record are alleged to have taken place, and in those cases the correction or contradiction never finds its way so far as the original calumny has done. Thus, of the thousands who have heard the story of the "Nuns of Minsk," few are aware that M. de Gerebtzoff, governor of the province of Minsk, having been instructed by the Emperor to inquire into the affair, could only report that the nuns named by the Augsburg paper had never existed, that there had been no persecution, and that the whole history was without foundation-a conclusion at which the Rev. Mr. Blackmore, English minister at Cronstadt, who took great trouble to inquire into the facts of the case, also arrived. Another "calumny" from Poland, of almost equal importance, was imported into the columns of the English journals about a year and a half since, and was shown to be false, a fortnight afterwards, by the contents of a letter from the St. Petersburg correspondent of the Times. Since the accession of the present Emperor great efforts have been made to improve not only the material, but also the moral and mental condition of the Russian peasants. Associations for printing cheap books, reading clubs, and additional schools have been established; and temperance societies have been formed in various parts of the empire. These temperance societies, some of which included whole communes," that is to say, entire villages, had the natural effect of diminishing the profits of the "brandy farmers," who purchase from the Crown the exclusive right of selling spirits. The "farmers" were indignant, and petitioned the Government to suppress the associations; a request with which, according to one of the Polish journals, the Government, for the sake of its spirit revenue, actually complied. This assertion agreed with the well-known and absurd tale about drunkenness being encouraged in Russia for the pecuniary advantage of the State, and more than

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