Hebrew poet to write the most charming
pastoral in the world, and inspired an
Irish copyist to compose the libretto of the
opera of "Rosina." There are no fireplaces
with Dutch tiles now. I have been in Holland;
and, in their rooms, they have register
stoves, and Simeon Stylites' columns. I can
forgive almost that Dutch-built King of
England who threw our Art back half a
century—I mean William the Third—who
spoilt the Tower of London, introduced
the cat-o'-nine-tails into the English navy,
would never go to the theatre, and wouldn't
let his gentle wife have any green peas,
for the one and simple fact that it was in his
reign that fire-places with Dutch tile-linings
became common in England. From these
fire-places, with their white and blue Scripture
stories, little Philip Doddridge and
little Sam Wesley learnt, at their mothers'
knees, lessons of truth and love and mercy.
There are no Doddridges and Wesleys to
expound to us now. Doddridge is a dean with
two thousand a year, busily occupied in
editing Confucius and defending bad smells;
and Wesley is a clown who sings a sacred
Tippetywitchet in a music-hall where people
are killed. Least of all I am entitled to
accuse the Russians of uncivilisation in
their stone building, seeing that their method
of keeping the burning game alive is nearly
identical with the process adopted by the
shepherds on the melancholy downs of
Hampshire and Sussex. The Corydon with the
crook, and with the ragged smock-frock and
the eight shillings a week, takes Monsieur
Hedgehog, covers him up with clay—how
Russian!—sticks him in a hole in the ground,
which he fills up with fire, and then covers
that up with clay and turf again; and capital
eating—hot, succulent, and gravy-yielding, is
this same Signor Hedgehog, when you dig
him out of the clay again. Such a hedgehog
dinner with a shepherd on a lonely down, a
wise dog sitting about two yards off, now sniffing
the hot regale, and sententiously anticipatory
of bones and fragments, now wriggling
that sapient nozzle of his in the ambient air
as if his scent were seven-league reaching,
and he could smell out mutton misbehaving
itself miles off, now casting a watchful back-
handed eye—I mean by the misnomer, when
the optic is cast back by a half-upwards, half-
sideways jerk of the head—upon the silly
sheep—silly enough to eat their perpetual
salad without asking for Doctor Kitchener's
mixture; silly enough to be made into
continual chops without remembering that
there is many a ram who is more than a
match for a man. Such a noontide meal—a
grey sky above, and a neutral tint in the
perspective, discreet silence during the repast,
monosyllabic conversation and a short pipe
afterwards—is a most philosophical and
instructive entertainment. The edge is rather
taken off the Aristotelian aspect of the
encounter when the shepherd, like the
needy knife-grinder, asks you for sixpence
for a pot of beer, to drink your honour's
health in.

On the long body of the stove, the
Russian peasant dozes in summer, and sleeps
without disguise in winter. When his miserable
life is over they lay him out—that is,
they pull his legs, and try to uncrisp his
fingers, and tie his jaw up with a stocking,
and put a copeck on each eyelid, and press a
painted image to his senseless lip, and place
an iron trencher, with bread and salt in it, on
his breast, and don't wash him—on the stove;
if there happen to be a scarcity of tables in
the mansion. On the top of the stove the
mother makes her elder children hold down
her younger children to be beaten—it is almost
as convenient for that purpose as the bench
in the yard of a police-gaol; on the top of the
stove, Ivan Ivanovitch and Dmitri Djorjevitch
lean on their elbows with beakers of
quass, and saucers full of salted cucumbers
between them, disputing over knavish
bargains, making abstruse calculations upon
their inky-nailed fingers with much quickness,
taking the name of their Lord in vain to
prove the verity of assertions to which Barabbas
is one party and Judas the other; and
ultimately interchanging dirty rags of rouble
notes, with grins and shrugs, and spittings,
and crossings. I have previously had occasion
to remark that the only test exercised
by the uneducated Russians, as regards the
value of a bank-note, is in its colour. The
fifty-rouble note is grey; the twenty-five
rouble note, violet; the ten ditto, red; the
five ditto, blue; the three ditto, green;
lastly, the one-rouble note is a yellowish
brown. You frequently hear a moujik say, "I
earned a blue yesterday;" "he has stolen a
red;" "he lost a brown," &c. A monetary
dispute between two Russians frequently
concludes by the disputants embracing, and
mutually treating each other to liquor; in
such a case, you may be perfectly certain that
both parties—A and B—have made a good
thing of it; but that some third party, not
present,—say C—has been most awfully
robbed, swindled, and cozened in the transaction.
On the flat roof of the stove, finally,
the Russian peasant is supposed to pass the
only happy period of his life: that of his
dozing slumbers. And it is positively—I
have heard it from all sorts of differently
actuated informants, hundreds of times—a
standard and deeply rooted impression or
superstition with the moujik, call it which
you will, that while he is in dreamland, he
really walks and talks, and eats and drinks,
and loves, and is free, and enjoys himself;
and that his waking life—the life in which
he is kicked, and pinched, and flogged,
and not paid—is only an ugly nightmare,
which God in his mercy will dispel some
day.

Rashly have I said that the top of the stove is
the only place (saving the vodki shop; that