by Catherine the Second (who certainly
adhered to the whole-hog principle in a most
imperial manner), there have been many
convents in the interior which have been self-
supporting, and have even raised ample
revenues, by the skill of the nuns and the poor
girls whom they receive as inmates, in embroidery.
Du reste, all the Russians are adepts
in elaborate handiwork—imitative only, be it
well understood. You must set them to
work by pattern, for of invention they are
absolutely barren; but whether the thing to
be imitated be a miniature by Isabey, or an
Aubusson carpet, a Limerick glove, or a
Napier's steam-engine, a Sevres vase or a
Grecian column, they will turn you out a
copy, so close, so faithfully followed in its
minutest details, that you will have considerable
difficulty in distinguishing the original
from the duplicate. There is an immense
leaven of the Chinese Tartar in the Tartar-
Russian. The small eyes, the high cheekbone,
sallow complexions, and nervous
gesticulation, I will not insist upon; the similarities
are so ethnologically obvious. But
there are many more points of resemblance
between the Russians and the Chinese. Both
people are habitually false and thievish, both
are faithless in diplomacy, bragging in success,
mendacious in defeat, cruel and despotic
always. Both nations are jealous of, and
loathe, yet imitate, the manners and customs
of strangers; both have an exaggerated and
idolatrous emperor-worship, and Joss-worship;
both are passionately addicted to tea, fireworks
graven images, and the use of the stick as a
penal remedy. Both have enormous armies
on paper, and tremendous fleets in harbour,
and forts impregnable (till they are taken,
after which misadventure they turn up to
have been nothing but mere blockhouses);
both nations are slaves to a fatiguing and
silly etiquette; both are outwardly polite and
inwardly barbarous; both are irreclaimably
wedded to a fidgetty, elaborately clumsy
system of centralisation—boards of punishments,
boards of rewards, boards of dignities.
Both, in organisation, are intensely literary
and academical, and in actuality, grossly
ignorant. The Chinese have the mandarin
class system; the Russians have the Tchinn
with its fourteen grades—both bureaucratic
pyramids, stupendous and rotten. The Chinese
bamboo their wives; the Russians bamboo
their wives ("And so do the English," I
hear a critic say: but neither Russian nor
Chinese incurs the risk of six months at the
treadmill for maltreating his spouse). In
both empires there is the same homogeneous
nullity on the part of the common people
—I mean forty millions or so feeding and
fighting and being oppressed and beaten like
ONE, without turning a hair in the scale of
political power; and—here I bring my
parallel triumphantly to a close—both nations
possess a language which, though utterly
and radically dissimilar, are both copious,
both written in incomprehensible characters,
both as arbitrary in orthography
and pronunciation as their emperors are
arbitrary in power, and both difficult, if
not impossible, of perfect acquisition by
western Europeans. I declare, as an honest
traveller, holding up my hand in the court of
criticism, and desirous of being tried by
Lord Chief Justice Aristarchus and my
country, that I never passed a week in
Russia without thinking vividly of what I
had read about the Celestial Empire; that
it was impossible to read the list of nominations,
promotions, preferments, and decorations
in the Pekin—I beg pardon—I mean the
St. Petersburg—Gazette, without thinking of
the mandarins, and the peacocks' feathers,
and the blue buttons, and the yellow girdles;
that the frequent application of the stick
was wonderfully like the rice-paper
representations of the administration of the
bamboo; that the "let it be so" at the end
of an oukase of the Russian Czar, struck me
as being own rhetorical brother to the
"respect this" which terminates the yellow-
poster proclamations of the Chinese
emperor. I must do the Russians the justice
to admit that they do not attempt to tell the
time of day by the cat's eyes; and that, though
arrant boasters, they are not the miserable
cowards the Chinese are. As a people, and
collectively, the Russians are brave in the
highest degree; but it is in their imitative
skill that the Russians, while they excel, so
strongly resemble their Mantchou Tartar
cousins. They have, it is true, a sufficient
consciousness of the fitness of things to
avoid falling into the absurd errors to
which the Chinese, from their slavish
adherence to a given pattern, are liable.
They do not, if a cracked but mended tea-cup
be sent them as a model, send home an entire
tea-service duly cracked and mended with
little brass clamps; they do not make half-
a-dozen pair of nankeen pantaloons, each
with a black patch in the seat, because the
originals had been so repaired; neither do
they carefully scrape the nap off a new dress-
coat at the seams, in faithful imitation of the
threadbare model; but, whatever you choose
to set before a Russian, from millinery to
murder, from architecture to arsenic, that
will he produce in duplicate with the most
wonderful skill and fidelity. There is, to be
sure, always something wanting in these
wondrous Russian copies. In their pictures,
their Corinthian columns, their Versailles
fountains, their operas, their lace bonnets,
there is an indefinable soupçon of candle-
grease and bears' hides, and the North Pole,
and the man with the bushy beard who had
to work at these fine things for nothing—
because he was a slave. Can you imagine a
wedding trousseau, all daintily displayed—
all satin, gauze, orange flowers, Brussels lace,
and pink rosettes—which had been clumsily
handled by some Boy Jones? Imagine the