Whitechapel High Street. One side of the
trapezoid I have left unmentioned, and that
is the long arcade facing the Sadovvaïa, or
Great Garden Street. This is almost
exclusively taken up by the great Boot Row.

Every human being is supposed to be a
little insane on some one subject. To the
way of watches some men's madness lies;
others are cracked about religion, government,
vegetarianism, perpetual motion,
economical chimney-sweeping, lead-mines,
squaring the circle, or the one primeval
language. Take your soberest, most business-
like friend, and run carefully over his gamut,
and you shall come on the note; sweep the
lyre and you shall find one cracked chord. I
knew a man—once the keenest at driving a
bargain to be met with out of Mark Lane—
who never went mad till two o'clock in the
morning, and on one topic; and then he was
as mad as a march hare. We think that we
have such an excellent coinage; but how
many a bright-looking shilling is only worth
elevenpence halfpenny! We boast of our
improved bee-hives; but how often the buzzing
honey-makers forsake the hive, and
house themselves in our bonnets! I have a
Boswell (every writer to the lowliest has his
Boswell) who professes to have read my
printed works; and according to him I am
mad on the subject of boots. He declares
that my pen is as faithful to the boot-tree as
the needle to the pole; and that, even as the
late Lord Byron could not write half-a-dozen
stanzas without alluding, in some shape or
other, to his own lordship's personal attractions
and hopeless misery, so I cannot get
over fifty lines of printed matter without
dragging in boots, directly or indirectly, as a
topic for description or disquisition. It may
be so. It is certain that I have a great affection
for boots, and can ride a boot-jack as I
would a hobby-horse. Often have I speculated
philosophically upon old boots; oftener
have I ardently desired the possession of new
ones; and of the little man wants here
below, nor wants long, I cannot call to mind
any thing I have an earnester ambition for than
a great many pair of new boots—good boots—
nicely blacked, all of a row, and all paid for. I
have mentioned, and admit this boot-weakness,
because I feel my soul expand, and my
ideas grow lucid as I approach the great
Sapagi-Linie, or Boot Row, of the Gostinnoï-
dvor.

The Russians are essentially a booted
people. The commonalty do not understand
shoes at all; and when they have no
boots, either go barefooted, or else thrust their
extremities into atrocious canoes of plaited
birch-bark. Next to a handsome kakoschnik
or tiara headdress, the article of costume most
coveted by a peasant-woman is a pair of full-
sized men's boots. One of the prettiest young
English ladies I ever knew used to wear
Wellington boots, and had a way of tapping
their polished sides with her parasol-handie
that well nigh drove me distracted; but let
that pass—a booted Russian female is quite
another sort of personage. In the streets of
Petersburg the "sign of the leg" or a huge
jack-boot with a tremendous spur, all painted
the brightest scarlet, is to be found on legions
of houses. The common soldiers wear mighty
boots, as our native brigade, after Alma,
knew full well; and if you make a morning
call on a Russian gentleman, you will very
probably find him giving audience to his
bootmaker.

But the Boot Row of the Gostinnoï-dvor!
Shops follow shops, whose loaded shelves
display seemingly interminable rows of works
addressed to the understanding, and bound
in the best Russia leather. The air is thick
and heavy—not exactly with the spicy
perfumes of Araby the Blest—but with the odour
of the birch-bark, used in the preparation
of the leather. Only here can you understand
how lamentably sterile we western
nations are in the invention of boots.
Wellingtons, top-boots, Bluchers, Oxonians,
highlows, and patent leather Albert slippers,—
name these, and our boot catalogue is very
nearly exhausted; for, though there are very
many other names for boots, and cunning
tradesmen have even done violence to the
Latin and Greek languages, joining them in
unholy alliance to produce monstrous
appellations for new boots; the articles
themselves have been but dreary repetitions of
the old forms. What is the Claviculodidastokolon,
but an attenuated Wellington?
what is even the well-known and established
Clarence but a genteel highlow?

But, in the Sapagi-Linie you shall find
boots of a strange fashion, and peculiar
to this strange people. There are the tall
jack-boots, worn till within a few months
since by the Czar's chevalier guards. They
are so long, so stern, so rigid, so
uncompromising that the big boots of our
lifeguardsmen would look mere stocking-hose to
them. They are rigid, creaseless, these boots:
the eyes, methinks, of James the Second
would have glistened with pleasure to see
them; they seem the very boots that
gracious tyrant would have put a criminal's
legs into, and driven wedges between. They
stand up bodily, boldly on the shelves,
kicking the walls behind them with their
long gilt spurs, trampling their wooden
resting-place beneath their tall heels, pointing
their toes menacingly at the curious
stranger. As to polish, they are varnished
rather than blacked, to such a degree of
brilliancy, that the Great Unknown immortalised
by Mr. Warren, might not only shave
himself in them, but flick the minutest speck of
dust out of the corner of his eye, by the aid
of their mirrored surface. These boots are
so tall, and strong, and hard, that I believe
them to be musket-proof, bomb-proof,
Jacobimachine proof, as they say the forts of
Cronstadt are. If it should ever happen that the