can buy Pivet's gloves; next door there is a cobbler's stall. Close to a printshop, where you see all the pictures one knows so well by sight in Regent Street or the Rue de Rivoli, is a shed where coloured prints of the lives of the saints, -prints in the very infancy of pictorial art-flutter in the wind. A milliner's establishment, where modes de Paris are advertised for sale, is flanked by a wodka store and a sausage shop. The

streets are intersected with ruts, dotted over with holes; and yet the small-built Russian horses drag the droshkis over them at a speed which would astonish a London cabman. Except in the great streets, there is no gas, and even here it is brought round in immense cans, and pumped into the lamps. Some day or other, soon, Moscow is to be supplied with gas-works; but Russia is a country where improvements without end are about to be introduced some day or other soon. In a queer, odd, shiftless way, the trade carried on here must be enormous. Every afternoon you see immense strings of one-horse carts, heavily laden with packages, going out into the country. The profit on retail transactions is enormous, and people who understand how to deal with the peasants make fortunes rapidly.

It would be absurd for a man who has only been a couple of weeks in Russia to undertake to express any opinion about the national character. Nobody, I think, can avoid feeling the charm of the manners of the educated Russians; nobody, on the other hand, can avoid the sensation that the common people belong to a lower grade of civilization than any we are accustomed to in the West. If you are to make an objection to the higher classes, it would be that they are too wellbred, and too cosmopolitan in manner. I have heard it said by a friend, given to paradox, that a mutual acquaintance talked too like a clever man to be really clever. And, in much the same way, I have sometimes felt a passing doubt whether the Russian gentlemen I have met with could possibly be so polished, so sensible,

their conversation. Proverbs about nations always lead you astray; but still, when you are conversing with educated. Russians, you cannot help feeling a desire, provided you are at a safe distance, to see what would be the result of . administering the proverbial scratching process. On the other hand, even the most ardent of philo-Russians cannot attempt, in describing the peasantry, to say anything higher than that they look dirty and degraded.

It is curious to any one who has heard much about the incapacity of the negroes for freedom in consequence of their facial development, and their unwillingness to work except under compulsion, and their inevitable relapse into barbarism if left to take care of themselves, to hear exactly the same. argument applied in conversation here to the Russian peasants, whose defects, whatever they may be, do not arise from their being descendants of Ham. I am told here constantly that the emancipated serfs will not work, that emancipation has proved a failure, and that the peasants would be glad to have the old system restored. On the other hand, the foreign resident merchants I have met, who have come here to make money, and are by no means disposed to sentimentalism of any kind, are one and all in favour of the emancipation, because it has already given such an impetus to trade. If we put the two accounts together, the real state of the case seems not difficult to explain. Both parties agree that the Moujiks will work very hard for a time; and both agree that they have fits of insuperable indolence and drunkenness. The truth is, their wants are exceedingly few, and easily gratified. They work hard enough to keep themselves in what they consider comfort, and then, like other workmen, in all parts of the world, they decline to work more. As they become educated and civilized, their wants increase, their notion of comfort is raised, and, in consequence, they work harder. The old proprietors, who can no longer get their work done below the market price

But, after all, if the Russians had no worse failing than a child's love for musical boxes, nobody-except perhaps Mr. Babbage-would hold this trait to be a proof of national depravity.

When you have seen the Kremlin, and the churches, and the bazaar, and the traktirs, and the hospitals-for which the city has a high, and I believe deserved, reputation-you have pretty well exhausted the actual sights of Moscow. But, to anybody fond of wandering about anywhere in general, or nowhere in particular-it comes to much the same in the long runMoscow is a town you do not easily get tired of. It is true that a thermometer long below freezing, and an icy cold wind which seems to drive all the blood out of your face, are not favourable circumstances for lounging about an unknown city. But the experienced lounger accommodates himself to necessity, and makes the best of it. The charm of Moscow to the flâneur consists in its never-failing contrasts. The churches are splendid; that of the Kremlin being only the most brilliant of a brilliant company. The theatre, so Muscovites say, is the handsomest in the world. Without allowing thus much, it may be fairly said to be one of the handsomest. Of colossal size, standing alone in the centre of a vast square, it seems to belong of right to a city of palaces. So also the Foundling Hospital, barrack-like as it necessarily is, is still worthy to rank high amidst European public edifices. Scattered about the streets there are a number of grand palaces, all built since the great fire, and all therefore placed in their position at a recent date; yet these very palaces are surrounded by the low squalid dwellings of which Moscow is mainly composed. There is not, somehow, any air of absolute misery about the shabby streets and the rows upon rows of dilapidated barn-like dwellings which run at every angle, and in every direction, right up to the Kremlin itself. Judging simply from an outside glance, I should say the

keep them from severe suffering by cold, and bread enough to fill their stomachs, and wodka enough to get drunk upon at all appropriate periods. The strange feature about Moscow is the utter absence of the bourgeois houses you see in other towns. If you are a prince you can doubtless get lodged luxuriously enough; if you are a peasant you can pig beneath a roof not more wretchedly than your class does in other countries-better perhaps than you could do in Dorsetshire; but, if you were neither a prince nor a peasant, and required an eight-roomed house or a small flat for yourself, you would hunt about Moscow a long time before you found your want satisfied. In Russia generally, and in Moscow especially, a middle-class hardly exists, and therefore no preparations are made to supply its wants. The only persons with moderate incomes in the whole country are the officials, and they are miserably underpaid and poor. An officer of high rank, whom I met travelling the other day, informed me that his pay of 150l. was utterly insufficient to support him, and that he should literally be in want, if he did not carry on a private business as a sort of nondescript broker. Rightly or wrongly, every official in the country is regarded as prima facie corrupt; and, considering the price of living, and the scale of government pay, it is impossible they should be regarded as otherwise. It may give you some notion of Moscow prices to say that, at a second-rate hotel, my bill, not including extras or attendance, was 17. a day; and yet the hotel was frequented by English travellers because it was considered to be moderate in its charges.

But I am wandering from the streets. One is the very image of every other. The houses are whitewashed, lined with great strips of red and blue paint, decorated with giltsignboards, showing the nature of the articles sold within. Shops and trades are jumbled together in the oddest juxtaposition. Here there is a French coiffeur, where you have

going to rack and ruin. The foreign employers, who pay wages, and have no longer to compete with unpaid labour, are well satisfied with the new state of things. Meanwhile, I heard two facts from reliable sources, which seem to me to show, as far as they go, that the emancipation is not working badly. Since the abolition of serfdom, the population of Moscow has increased by fifty thousand souls. This influx is solely due to the crowds of serfs who, as soon as they are set free to go where they will, have come into the great cities, where they can get higher wages for their labour. Again, a manufacturer who employs some twenty odd thousand workmen assured me that, since the abolition of serfdom, he finds it difficult to get labour during harvest-time, because all the peasants have taken to cultivate small plots of ground of their

own.

But considerations like these lie rather out of the province of an article containing a few random reflections of some three days spent in Moscow. If you want to keep up your illusions about

Russia, you should not, I fancy, look much below the surface. If you want to retain your impression of Moscow in all its splendour, you should look down upon the city from above, not descend into its streets. St. Petersburg is strange at its first aspect, and unlike the cities which we know in the West; but, when you come back to St. Petersburg from Moscow, you seem to have come back to a commonplace European city. A foretaste of the. East hangs about Moscow; you feel that you are standing on the extreme threshold of European civilization. In St. Petersburg, Europe has conquered Asia; but in Moscow, the struggle is still undecided. The water-carriers still ply their trade about the streets; Turks, and Armenians, and Persians may be seen amongst the crowd at the market-places, look ingmore at home than the German traders in hats and trousers. And, when you leave Moscow, behind you, you feel that you have caught a glimpse of a new and unknown world, of a civilization that is other than our own.

Ir is long since there left the world any one who deserved so well of it as Richard Cobden. To say this is indeed, in one sense, to say but little. For the acts of those who have had it in their power to influence the destinies of mankind, mankind has in general small reason to be grateful. In account with humanity, the public characters have been few indeed who could point with satisfaction to the credit side. But of Cobden's career there are results which none can gainsay. Vast, signal, and comprehensive, they disarm alike both competition and criticism. The two great triumphs of his life were the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Commercial Treaty with France. Of these, the first gave food to starving millions, redressed a gigantic and intolerable abuse of political power, saved an empire from revolutionary convulsion, and imparted new and irresistible impulse to material progress throughout the world; the second carried still further the work which the first had begun, ensured, sooner or later, its full consummation, and fixed, amidst the waves of conflicting passions and jarring interests, deep in the tenacious ground of commercial sympathy, a rock for the foot of Peace.

But, though Cobden's public life is admired by most Englishmen, its real scope and nature are understood by very

few. The prophet was not without honour, but he was almost entirely without comprehension, in his own country. Being asked on one occasion to take part in some project of interest or pleasure he declined, on the ground that he had a "mission." What, then, was the "mission" of which he spoke? What was his distinctive character as a public man? The prevalent notion entertained respecting him among welleducated Englishmen is that he was the apostle of Free Trade, with a strong and rather dangerous tendency towards democracy and cheap government, and a disposition to peace at any price on account of the costliness of war. It was reserved for foreigners to appreciate the greatest Englishman of his time, and for a foreigner to describe him justly. He repealed the Corn Laws; he fought and triumphed for Free Trade; he advocated peace; he deprecated national extravagance; and broke a lance, when occasion occurred, for political liberty. But these acts of his were but means to an end; illustrative of and subservient to the great object and idea in the service of which his energies were employed and his life sacrificed;-for the true political definition of Cobden is that which the foreigner supplied-an international man.

It is strange, but it is true, that there