credit of wits, to bring into the country. Men
eminent in any way were lavishly remunerated
by the court of St. Petersburgh, and
actively supported by the servants of the
court. The Russians had very nearly everything
to learn, and in the opinion of Monsieur
Robertson, were destitute of any great power
of intellect. They seemed to him light-
minded and superficial, anxious to maintain
the greatest possible show of knowledge,
interrupting with an eternal  "I know,"  any
information that was being given them; but
more capable of maintaining a sham of
knowledge than of supporting the weight of the
real thing itself. Their princes too had a great
faith in the abilities of foreigners. When a foul
ditch about the Admiralty was being arched
over, somebody suggested to M. Robertson
that there was a good site furnished by
the new ground for a coffee-house. The
emperor Alexander, who stood near, asked,
"Who proposes to establish that?"   "A
Frenchman, sire." "A Frenchman!  I agree
to that. Anything but a Russ. The Russians
can do nothing properly."  Frenchmen,
therefore, Italians, Germans, and Englishmen,
were encouraged to settle in St. Petersburgh.
If they had anything to teach the town; and,
above all, if they had anything with which
to amuse it, they went to Russia to make
tolerably certain fortunes—and returned to their
own countries to spend them.  M. Robertson,
at the instance of the Russian ambassador in
France, M. de Marcoff, resolved to go with the
stream of fortune-hunters into the dominions of
the Czar. No balloon ascent had ever been
witnessed at St. Petersburgh, and there was
nothing in those days like a well-managed
balloon for travelling upon the road to fortune
M. Robertson's receipts by one ascent
in a strange town several times exceeded a
thousand pounds.

M. Robertson landed at St. Petersburgh
in the year eighteen hundred and three,
while people were still talking mysteriously
of the assassination of the emperor Paul
two years before, and when the young and
popular Alexander was new to the throne.
Paul had expected his fate, and had
endeavoured to avert it by erecting for himself
the palace of St. Michael near the summer
garden: an imperial gaol, surrounded by moats
and drawbridges, with loophole windows
through which sunlight dribbled, never
shone, and maintained always as if in a
state of siege. Nevertheless, it was within
this palace of St. Michael that Paul was
assassinated. In M. Robertson's time it
was the part of a good Parisian to believe
as he believed, that the English government
had part in the crime. Nobody holds that
opinion now. The czar was a victim to
the wrath of his nobles, whose will was
accomplished by the hand of the most
physically powerful among their number,
probably at that time the strongest man in
Russia, the count Orloff. Of him it was
said that he could bend the thickest nail into
a ring about one finger. The count strangled
his master, not—as Robertson reports the
story—with a piece of British linen, but with
an imperial scarf; and when the work was
half done, it is said, took it off because the
spangles on the scarf were an impediment,
and cut them away with his sword while the
czar fled, to crouch vainly in abject horror
underneath a table. Alexander his successor,
as all the world knows, waited—hoping that
extremities might, perhaps, not be proceeded
to—in a room below; he was the first who
received the report of the conspirators; he
assisted in declaring that his father had
been killed by an apoplectic stroke; and he
afterwards kept the murderers as friends and
advisers near his throne.

A friend of Robertson in St. Petersburgh,
the painter Orlosky, was rival to count
Orloff in the character of Hercules. Orlosky
was a Pole, hating the Russians, and allowed
to express his contempt for them freely to
the czar, his patron. He was considered the
best painter in St. Petersburgh—his style
something resembling that of Horace Vernet
—and was a colossal man, generally to be found
in a morose state under the influence of ardent
spirits. It is said that Orlosky once called on
the Duke Constantine when he was out; and,
instead of writing his name in the visitors'
book, took up a baker's shovel that lay
near, twisted it into a knot, and told the
porter to give that to the grand duke. He
did so, and Constantine immediately asked,
"How long is it since Orlosky called?"

M. Saucesotte, the czar's dentist, was a
hospitable entertainer of all his countrymen: to
him and others, as well as to his own shrewdness,
Robertson was indebted for the discovery,
that he must, if he would prosper, do at St.
Petersburgh as the St.Petersburghers do, that
is to say, make all the display possible. Hotels
in any decent sense, there were at that time
none. He lost no time, therefore, in becoming
tenant of the largest house he could find, at a
rental of some five hundred pounds a year, and
set up a carriage wherein he and his family
might enter their appearance properly among
the loungers in the Newsky Perspective.

The aspect of the St. Petersburgh streets
did not please M. Robertson. All who can
afford to ride, he says, and many who cannot,
would consider it a degradation to be seen on
foot. There is a roll of carriages along the
road and no life on the pavement. Such a
thing as a street-boy singing his young Russian
version of Susannah don't you cry for
me, or whistling anything corresponding to the
chorus out of Vilikins, was never to be seen:
there were no organs (blessed exemption); no
bands, tumblers, or street amusements of any
kind whatever. A boutisnik (a policeman) at the
corner of most streets was bound to see the
peace kept, in other words, to extinguish
outdoor life entirely. In the theatre there was the
same uncomfortable chill. All expression of