from any man who had taken any pains to ascertain the progress actually made in the last five-and-twenty years. It has been vast -vast in a multitude of respects; and we venture to say the march is getting more and more rapid every day, and will continue to do so, barring civil wars and revolutions, for ages to come. With near 50,000,000 of serfs it would indeed be insane to talk of sudden enfranchisement. As rational admirers of liberty, we ought to rest satisfied, if knowledge be really advanced, and with this advancement the laws are improved.

We do not mean to lecture; but in addition to the great exertions which,' as Mr. Bremner truly says, the government is making in the cause of education' (vol. ii. p. 71), some most important measures of the present reign have been overlooked by all the writers of recent books on Russia. For example, not one of them alludes to the great blessing conferred on all classes by the issuing of the suod, or harmonised compendium of imperial ukases, so often till then contradictory and irreconcileable. This code, moreover, contains at least three new statutes which deserve every praise. 1st. Every crown peasant-(let us repeat 22,000,000 of souls)when he acquires sufficient wealth, may purchase the rights of citizenship and become the free merchant or burgher of a town. 2ndly. Every merchant of the first guild who has been thrice elected chief of the corporation of his district, at once establishes for his family the privilege of hereditary nobility. 3rdly. The rate of interest has been reduced from 6 to 4 per cent. The last of these laws propitiated the nobles, whilst the two enfranchising statutes were most unpalatable to them. But the Emperor held firm to his resolves-even at the risk of seriously annoying his nobility-convinced as he is that his dynasty will be best perpetuated by the gradual introduction of liberal institutions, which Russia cannot possess until after a solid middle class shall have been established.

In fact, we must be allowed to signify our utter distaste for the long political diatribes which occupy by far too much of Mr. Bremner's first volume. Essays upon all possible views of the foreign policy of the Russian Cabinet, indited by a gay young littérateur before he has been a fortnight in the country (we hope none of them were written before he got there), can have no weight with reflecting persons anywhere. We beg leave to pass, sub silentio, the solemn advice and instruction which this selfelected privy-councillor is pleased to offer to the Emperor Nicholas personally.

Admiring, as we generally do, Mr. Bremner's descriptions, and heartily backing his remarks, that the order and efficiency in everything with which the government is concerned strike the

stranger

stranger from the first to the last step he takes in Russia,'-we are occasionally vexed to see a generous sentiment marred by a false antithesis. Such, for example, is the finishing touch which he gives to a very soul-stirring picture of the universal custom in the Greek Church of lighting up their holy images. After alluding to the wide spread of the little lamp-from the Polar regions into Greece and Turkey-he exclaims, What a wide and what an endearing tie is religion! A similar faith unites the most distant regions and the most dissimilar tribes; makes as brothers the elegant Greek, who has a history of centuries, and the barbarous stranger whom we heard of but yesterday' (vol. i. p. 41). Such expressions are not only out of place and in bad taste, but nonsense. The elegant Greek' he is speaking of must be the modern Greek, the adherent of the Greek church. We should like to know what is elegant' about him except the cut of his nose and chin. Russia is neither barbarous nor of yesterday. Compared with Greece, her history is of course brief: but if that land be the term of comparison, what shall we say of ourselves? Why is the antiquity of the first great Russian sovereign, her Varangian, or Norman (as some antiquaries have it) conqueror, Ruric, or that of her earliest attacks upon the Greek emperors, not to be remembered? Were not the cities of Kieff, Wladimir, and Novogorod great and flourishing when England herself was but little beyond a benighted condition? Is the Hanseatic league, of which Novogorod formed a part, an affair of yesterday? Has the house of Romanow no lineage? Are not the deeds of the ancient heroes of the Muscovite branch of the Sclavonic family cherished by every true Russian? Are not Minin the plebeian and Pojarsky the noble (whose statues occupy the great place of Moscow) names which electrify him, when he celebrates, in their triumphs, the deliverance of his country from the Poles?

6

Again, why are the plains of Russia to be spoken of as storyless wilds,' and pretty German tales to be lugged in to fill a chapter? Had Mr. Bremner possessed the power of conversing with the natives, we venture to consider it as next to certain that his pages would have been amply and more appropriately enlivened with stories native to the soil. If it be said that Russia is a new land because her language is new, we again simply deny the statement. The language has but of late been brought into its now polished and consolidated shape; but it had plenty of ecclesiastical epistles and annalists centuries ago. How long before the days of Chancellor their ministers of state drew up written treaties with foreign powers, we barbarians of the evil eye' cannot tell; but certainly the public documents of John

Vasilivich

Vasilivich and his successor Theodore would have done no discredit even to our Walsinghams and our Burleighs. In fact, David Hume, when speaking of the modification of the first Russian and English treaties of commerce by the Emperor Theodore, candidly remarks that this barbarian entertained much juster notions of commerce than were practised by the renowned Elizabeth.'

No, let us first study the origin and progress of the language which the Russian people have spoken and written for centuries; let us trace it from its cradle to the grammars of Lomonossof and the odes of Puschkin, and then we may be entitled to estimate the value of the truly melodious sounds of a tongue which is used by so many millions of Europeans.*

6

But Mr. Bremner is not at all an antiquary. He has not even made himself acquainted with what men of his own nation have done in and for Russia. Thus, though announcing himself as of the north countrie,' he is surprised to find a learned professor of the University of Moscow occupying himself with the Scottish genealogy of the Gordon family. After blundering about two individuals of that noble name renowned in the service of Russia, he clearly betrays his ignorance of the existence of a work, known to most Scotchmen from their boyhood, the History of Peter the Great, by Alexander Gordon, of Achintoul, several years a Major-General in the Czar's Service.'t This sturdy and sagacious gentleman was one of Peter's best and most valued servants; and we are free to confess that we do not respect his memory a whit the less, because, after he had won many a battle for the Czar, and had retired to his own fire-side, he turned out in 1715, and, under the Earl of Mar, directed (if he did not really command) the Highland clans with such skill, that any advantage they had over the king's troops was generally attributed to his conduct.' If Mr. Bremner had read this old Sheriffmuir hero's honest book, he would have spared us certain theories and sarcastic phrases, which we hope to see expunged from his next edition.

Lastly, we must qualify Mr. Bremner's statements about the manufactures of Russia. Agreeing with him in the belief, that for many a day she must supply herself with articles of luxury from foreign nations, we cannot admit that the highest of their cloth-manufactories produce only coarse stuffs, worn only by the

* See Karamsin, Hist. de l'Emp. de Russie. French Ed. 1819-26.
Aberdeen, 1755.

Author's life, p. 16. Alexander Gordon is not to be confounded with his kinsman and father-in-law, General Patrick Gordon, the hero of Azoff, and the chief assistant Peter had in the decisive business of the Strelitzes.

poorer

poorer classes; for we happen to have now in wear a good long cloak of imperial grey, of genuine Muscovite manufacture, which is the admiration of brother reviewers. As to linen, we venture

to state that their damask table-cloths, sheeting, and duck (the latter so long known to our soldiers), cannot be surpassed in any country. In jewellery and fillagree, we can exhibit samples from Vologda and the remote Oustiug (tracts which, it appears, few Englishmen have traversed since the days of our first adventurers), that rival even Genoese or Venetian work. The whole of the well-dressed population of the northern tracts of the ancient Permia are clad in the work of their own hands; and in all handicraft of wood, from the carved front of the peasant's cottage, to the imitation of a French commode or fauteuil, every common artizan is supreme. In porcelain, prodigious improvements have already taken place, as the 'gastinoi-dwor' of Moscow will testify; and as to cutlery, though Russia is still far behind Sheffield, we are now mending our pen (for we are old-fashioned enough to stick to the grey goose-quill) with a small knife made in the cottage of a peasant in the government of Vladimir, which would have done no discredit to any shop in the Strand.

If truth, therefore, must be told, Russia is advancing in manufactures as in every other sign of civilisation; and we believe that this advance would be much more rapid if the government did not strive to force its subjects, by heavy import duties, to become manufacturers of everything which they have formerly bought from the stranger. If the mass of the people were first permitted to purchase cheaply, and thus acquire a taste for foreign goods, England and the rest of Europe would be benefited, whilst Russia would be laying the foundation of her future grandeur and independence.

How soon, and to what extent, she can ever become independent of all other states, is no easy problem to solve-though we may in part anticipate its solution. Steam is the acknowledged new element of advancement, by which this age is distinguished from all which have preceded it. By its magic power distance is set at nought; and the productions of the antipodes are brought rapidly together. Coal, therefore, must henceforth be the motor and the meter of all commercial nations. Without it no modern people can become great, either in manufactures or in the naval art of war. In Western Europe, with the limited exceptions of parts of Belgium, Westphalia, and Silesia, where coal-fields (comparatively small, however) exist, Great Britain holds an almost exclusive monopoly of this mighty agent, since the carbonaceous tracts of France are well known to be valueless for all great purposes. Far to the west must we, indeed, roam

ere

ere we again meet with the same sinews of strength, and then we find them in the hands of our own North American colonies, and in those of our kinsmen of the United States. And even in that great western continent, quit but the region over which the English language is spoken, and you leave behind you the country of coal, there being little carboniferous matter to the south of the isthmus of Darien. There is something so remarkable in this correlation between the spread of Englishmen and the presence of that mineral which is destined to be their great palladium (for Australia and New Zealand may be added), that we cannot but admire the truth of the sailor's creed, and believe with him, that There's a sweet little Providence sits up aloft,' which, in keeping watch for the life of poor Jack,' has brought us to this sure anchoring-ground of a great commercial people.

But to return to Russia. If, in the progress of cultivation, her forests are destined to disappear, has she no natural deposits of coal to supply their place? This is the question which must go home to her statesmen. Our own last summer's explorations already enable us to answer it to some extent. It is no longer doubtful that all the rock formations of northern Russia are more ancient than that peculiar zone in the crust of the earth, which, in other favoured tracts, is carboniferous, and hence that any search for coal in such deposits would be hopeless. Has, then, Russia no coal-field? One, indeed, she has, upon the Donetz, but it is distant from either metropolis, and, moreover, it is yet to be proved if its contents be of sufficient value to be transported to the Black Sea. And in like manner, it is still to be determined whether certain wide tracts on the western flanks of the Ural chain, which are known to be slightly carbonaceous, are of national import.*

In the mean time, whatever may be the extent to which coal may be worked in a given district of the south of Russia, or subsequently discovered in her governments of the east-(and we hope she may realise these objects)—the bare fact that the great provinces which surround her metropolitan cities do not contain it, is sufficient for us. With a knowledge of this fact, wise and prudent men, such as the Emperor and his ministers are generally allowed to be, can never wish to be on bad terms with that state which supplies Russia with the fuel by which her steam-vessels and her

* We doubt not that the Emperor, fully alive as he is to the vast interest attached to this inquiry, will, through his very efficient school of mines, and the able director, General Tcheffkine, employ competent persons to determine these national questions. M. Demidoff, to whom a large portion of the Donetz coal-field belongs, has indeed already obtained a survey of this from a skilful French engineer, M. Le Play.

rail-carriages