to possess pictorial talent sensibly
diminishes—so little rosiness, so little beauty, so
few smiles have claims upon my palette
among the youngest women and girls.

It is to be understood that I have long
since given up, and no more insist on, that
long and fondly preserved Annual tradition
of the beauty of peasant girls, the merry
ways of peasant children, the prettiness of
villages, the picturesqueness of peasant
costume. I have buried the fallacious tradition
along with other illusions. I give up
pifferari, the Saltarella, purple vines, the
rayed petticoats and miniature table-cloth
head-dresses of Italian Contadine, the
harvesters of Leopold Robert, the brigands of
Pinelli, the high-laced caps and shining sabots
of little Normande paysannes, the pretty
"Welch girl with a man's hat, the skirt of her
gown drawn through the pocket-holes, and
a goat following at her heels; the lustrous
eyes and henna-tipped fingers of Turkish
women, the pretty bare feet and long dark
hair of the maids of Connaught, the buy-a-
broom quaintness of the yellow-haired
Alsaciennes, the ribboned boddices, straw hats,
and chintz shirts of our own comely peasant
girls in merry England. I know how melancholy
are the habitations and ways of poverty.
I know that Blankanese flower-girls, Contadine,
Normande paysannes, Turkish houris,
Connaught maidens, barefooted and beauteous,
are conventional artificialities, made to order,
exhibited, ticketed, and appraised, for the
benefit of artists' studios, aristocratic families
who like Norman wet-nurses, writers of
oriental poems, the frequenters of the Alster
Bassin promenade at Hamburg, and the
artists who illustrate the wild Irish novels.

So, prepared for the prosaic, I am not
disappointed at as great a paucity of the
beautiful as of the picturesque among Russian
peasant women. But, as in the homeliest
plainest villages in the west I have seen and
delighted in some rough gaiety, and an
unpretending neatness and a ruddy comeliness
that to me compensated for any absent
amount of Annualism in feature, form, or
attire, I cannot avoid feeling as though
I had swallowed the contents of a belt of
Number Four shot—so heavy am I—when
I consider the women and children here.
The negro slave will laugh, and jest, and
show all his white teeth, before half the
wounds from his last cutting up are healed;
but the Russian peasant, male or female,
is—when sober—always mournful, dejected,
doleful. All the songs he sings are
monotonous complaints, drawling, pining, and
despairing. You have heard how the Swiss
soldiers used to weep and die sometimes
for home sickness at the notes of the
Ranz des Vaches. The Muscovite moujik
has a perpetual home sickness upon him;
but it is a sickness, not for, but of his home.
He is sick of his life and of himself. When
drunk, only, the Russian peasant lights up
into a feeble corpse-candle sort of gaiety;
but it is temporary and transient, and he
sobers himself in sackcloth and ashes.

Home is not as a home held by in any class
in Russia. It very rarely happens that
moujiks who from serfs have become merchants
of the second guild, and amassed large
fortunes, ever think in their declining days of
retiring to the village which has given them
birth, or even of making bequests beneficial
to their native place at their death. Soldiers
too, when discharged after their time of
service has expired, scarcely ever return to
their village. They prefer becoming servants
and Dvorniks in the large towns. " Eh!
and what would you have them do?" a
vivacious Russian gentleman, with whom I
had been conversing on the subject, asked
me. They are no longer serfs, and are of no
use to their seigneur. They are no longer
young, and are no longer wanted for the
conscription. What would you have them
do in this village of yours ? What indeed?
Governmentally inclined philosophers say
that the Russians are so patriotic that home
is home to them, "be it ever so homely,"
throughout the whole extent of the empire,
and that they are as much at home in the
steppes of the Ukraine as in the morasses of
Lake Lodoga. I am of opinion myself that
the homely feeling does not exist at all
among the Russian people. Russian military
officers have told me that an epidemic
melancholia sometimes breaks out among young
recruits which is broadly qualified as a Mal
du Pays; but I think it might be far better
described as a Mal de Position. The position
of a recruit for the first six months of his
apprenticeship is perhaps the most intolerable
and infernal noviciate which a human being
can well suffer—a combination of the situation
of the young bear with all his troubles
to come, the monkey upon that well-known
allowance of many kicks and few halfpence,
the hedgehog with his prickles inwards
instead of outwards, and the anti-slavery
preacher whose suit of tar and feathers is just
beginning to peel off. When, however, the
recruit has swallowed sufficient stick, he very
soon gets over his Mal du Pays. Rationally
envisaging the question of home-loving in
nationalities, the Great Britons (English,
Irish, and Scotch), though the greatest
travellers and longest residents abroad, are the
people most remarkable for a steadfast love
for their home, and a steadfast determination
to return to it at some time or another.
After them must be ranked the French, who
always preserve an affectionate reverence for
their pays; but for all the sentimental Vaterland
and Suce Heimweg songs of the Germans,
the hundreds of German tailors, bootmakers,
and watchmakers, one finds in every
European capital, seem to get on very well—
at least up to threescore and ten, or
thereabouts—without looking forward to a return
home. Your Dane or Swede, so long as he