manager, but too fond of heavy melodramas of
the startling order), is said to be rather
afraid of his stage-manager. A. N. is a mild
and beneficent middle-aged young man,
whose dramatic predilections are supposed
to lean towards light vaudevilles and
burlettas, making all the characters happy at
the fall of the curtain. He is not indisposed
either, they say, to many free translations
from the French and English; but the stage-
manager of the Marionnettes won't hear of
such a thing, and continues to keep the
tightest of hands over his puppets. The
most curious feature in all this is, that
the stage-manager has himself a master
whom he is compelled, no one knows why,
to obey.

This master—a slow, cruel, treacherous,
dishonest tyrant—is never seen, but dwells
remote from mortal eyes, though not from their
miserable ken, like the grand Llama. His—
her—its name is System. Liberal, nay,
democratic stage-managers, have been known
to assume the government of the sixty-five
million dolls, and forthwith, in their blind
obedience to system, to become intolerable
oppressors, spies, and thieves. Things have
gone wrong before now in the Theatre
Royal; and several lessees have died of sore
throat, of stomach-ache, of head-ache, and of
compression of the œsophagus. But this
abominable System has lived through all
vicissitudes, and though immensely old, is as
strong and wicked as ever.* The old
hypocrite gives out occasionally that he is about
to reform; but the only way to reform that
hoary miscreant, is to strangle him at once,
and outright. Your fingers are not
unaccustomed to this work, most noble Boyards.

* A magnificent diamond tabatière full of snuff has
recently been thrown in the eyes of Western Europe from
the coronation throne at Moscow. The only real abolition
of a grievance, in this much belauded manifesto, is the
removal of part of the tax on passports to native
Russians, who, if they had families, were formerly obliged
to pay something like four hundred pounds a-year to the
government while travelling. The political amnesty is a
cruel farce: not but that I believe the Emperor
Alexander to be (though deficient in strength of mind) a
sovereign of thorough liberal tendencies, and of extreme
kindness of heart; but he dares not accomplish a tithe of
the reforms he meditates. I was speaking one day to an
intelligent Russian on this subject (he was a republican
and a socialist, but an accomplished gentleman), who, so
far from blaming the Czar for his meagre concessions to
the spirit of the age, made a purely Russian excuse for
him: "Que voulez-vous?" he said; "le Tsar lui-même a
peur d'être rossé par la Police Secrète." The idea of the
Autocrat of all the Russias being deterred from increased
liberalism by bodily fear of the STICK is sufficiently
extravagant; but there is, nevertheless, a great deal of
truth in the locution.

The only timber yet unshivered of the
Douma is the great watchtower, one
hundred and fifty feet in height, which is
entirely of sham marble, but real wood.
There is a curious telegraphic apparatus of
iron at the summit, and in this work the
different fire-signals. They are in constant
employment.

I can imagine no better way of conveying
a palpable notion of things I have seen in this
strange land than to institute comparisons
between things Russian, which my reader
will never know, I hope, save through the
medium of faithful travellers, and things
familiar to us all in London and Paris. So.
If you take one avenue of the glorious
Palais Royal, say that where the goldsmith
and jewellers' shops are, and with this
combine the old colonnade of the Regent's
Quadrant; if to this you add a dwarfed semblance of
the Piazza in Covent Garden—especially
as regards the coffee-stalls at early morning;
if you throw in a dash of the Cloisters of
Westminster Abbey taking care to
Byzantinise all the Gothic, but keeping all
the chequered effects of chiaro-oscuro; if,
still elaborating your work, you piece on
a fragment of that musty little colonnade
out of Lower Regent Street, which ought
to belong to the Italian Opera House, but
doesn't, and at whose corner Mr. Seguin's
library used to be; if, as a final
architectural effort, you finish off with a few
yards of the dark entry in Canterbury Cathedral
yard, and with as much as you like
(there is not much) of that particularly grim,
ghostly, and mildewed arcade at the Fields
corner of Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn:
if you make an architectural salmagundy of
all these; spice with a flavour of the delightful
up-and-down, under-the-basement and
over-the-tiles, streets of Chester; garnish
with that portion of the peristyle of the
Palace of the Institute in Paris, where the
print-stalls are; and serve up hot with
reminiscences of what old Exeter 'Change must
have been like; you will have something of
a skeleton notion of the outward appearance
of the Gostinnoï-dvor. Further to educate
the eye, I must relate, that round all the
pillars there is a long Lowther Arcade
broke loose, of toys and small ware; that
the Palais-Royal-like shops are curiously
dovetailed with bits of the Bezesteen at
Constantinople; that amongst the diamonds
and gold lace there is a strong tinge of
Holywell Street: to plant the photograph well
in the stereoscope, I must beg my reader to
endeavour to imagine this London and Paris
medley transplanted to Russia. There is a
roaring street outside, along which the fierce-
horsed and fierce-driven droschkies fly;
through the interstices of the arches, you
see, first droschkies, then dust, then
palaces, palaces, palaces, then a blue blue sky;
within a crowd of helmets, grey great-coats,
beards, boots, red shirts, sheepskins, sabres,
long grey cloaks, pink bonnets, and black
velvet mantles, little children in fancy
bonnets; nurses in crimson satin, and pearl
tiaras; and all this circulating in an
atmosphere where the Burlington Arcade-like
odour of pomatum and bouquet à la reine
(for perfumes abound in the Gostinnoï-dvor)
struggles with that of Russia leather, wax-
candles, and that one powerful searching,
oleaginous smell, which is compounded of