dozen times in the course of these papers. I
never saw it, or the knout-masters, or the
miserable wretch who had had it. I wish to
say here, however, that this knout is really
another Great Russian Boguey— not to the
Russians, who know all about it, but to us
Western Europeans. There is scarcely a book
of travels you can open— English, French, or
German, without a chapter bearing this
special heading, The Knout, and in nine cases
out of ten the description of the punishment
is taken from the old wonderful magazine
account of Madame Lapoukhin, who suffered
in the reign of the Empress Ann Elizabeth;
or from some of the Faubourg St. Denis
travels of the vivacious author of the
Mystères de la Russie. The Russians use the stick,
the whip, and the rod, freely enough, Heaven
knows; but the extreme agony of the knout,
they are exceedingly chary in having recourse
to. There was not one criminal knouted
during my stay—at least, in the capitals (for
the imminence of the ultimo ratio is always
made public a week beforehand, in all the
newspapers), though I daresay some dozens,
males and females, were daily beaten, cruelly
but not dangerously, in the police-yards. The
infliction of the knout in cases of murder
(brigands and female criminals, who, the latter,
only receive from five to twenty strokes, are
allowed to survive) amounting to one
hundred and fifty lashes of that terrible instrument,
is almost always fatal; indeed I have
often heard Russians, whose humane dispositions
I have had no reason to doubt, say that
the police-surgeons had, generally, instructions
not to attempt to cure the criminals
after their torture. It is not the actual knout
that kills, but the gangrene that supervenes
in the neglected wounds. The old traveller's
assertion that a skilful executioner can kill
his patient with three strokes of the knout,
is, if surgical authority be of any value, a
pure fable. In any case, I am enabled to state
my conviction that the Russians knout fewer
criminals for capital offences in two years
than we hang in one.

Crowds at such executions are, therefore,
rare. Even the gathering together of two
or three in no name save that of tyranny,
is an infrequent occurrence: though the
Czar, in the summer, can have his
crowd, and does have it, to the amount
of some hundred and fifteen thousand men
to be reviewed on the Czarinski Loug, or
Champ de Mars—a square, compact crowd
of men, good enough to fill a pit, who shout
from their one hundred and fifteen thousand
throstles, "We thank you, Father," as one
man, or rather one machine, when the Czar
graciously says: " Good morning, my children;"
and shout again: " We hope to do
better next time! " when, if the evolutions
have been satisfactory, his majesty says,
"Well done, my children! " who, in cavalry
charge in one pulk, to use Cossack parlance—
in one plump of spears, to use chivalric
phraseology, to the number of fifty thousand,
and sweep, pricking fast as a Simoom from
the Sommer-Garten to the grim marble palace
where the "frank, open-hearted sailor " the
Grand Duke Constantine lives. So notable
a thing is a mob, that the few there have
been, have become historical, and are
remembered like battles, or pestilences, or
famines, or comets. Old men whisper low,
now, of the great silent crowd of Black People
that gathered round the old winter palace
one morning at the commencement of the
present century; when it began to be not
noised—not bruited, but sinuously trailed
about in movements of fingers, by glanceless
eyes, by voiceless opening and shutting of
telegraphic lips— that a dreadful deed had
been done during the night by the great
Boyards; that the mad Czar was dead, and
that Alexander Pavlovitch reigned in his
stead.

Most reverend seigneurs—potent and grave
likewise— you have entertained at your
boards, you have sat at council with, you, most
beauteous ladies, you have waltzed and
flirted with, and have had your slender
waists encircled by the kid-gloved hands of,
and have accepted bouquets and ices from—
not the sons or the grandsons of, but the very
men who were guests among those bloody
sixty who supped at a house in the
Pourschlatskaïa Oulitza on the twenty-third of
March, eighteen hundred and one, who
formed part of the band of murderers who,
under the guidance of Platon Zouboff
and Pahlen and Benningsen, maddened
with hatred and drunk with champagne,
rushed after the orgie was over to the Winter
Palace on the canal, and took the Czar, naked
and a-bed, and slew him. They say that
Alexander the First never recovered from
the first fit of (I hope not guilty) horror into
which he was thrown by the deed he profited
so largely by; that the triumphs of the
Borodino and the Bérésina, the splendours
of Erfurt and Tilsit, the witticisms of Madame
de Staël, the patronage of the first gentleman
(and we hope the last gentleman of that
pattern) in Europe, including as that patronage
did a Guildhall banquet, the pencil of Sir
Thomas Lawrence, the Temple of Concord on
the Serpentine, and Sir William Congreve's
fireworks—nay, not these nor the invocations
of Madame Krudener could ever efface from
his mind the memory of that night of
abominations. They say that on his doubtful bed
of death at Taganrog he writhed with more
than pain, and continually moaned: "Oh!
c'est épouvantable! c'est épouvantable! " and
then, after a lapse, " l'Empereur!" The
gentlewoman was not by as in the tragedy,
but the physician was; and he knew his
patient was suffering from ills that physic
could not cure. The lord of sixty million
souls was haunted by the remembrance of
that night. He saw in imagination the
bedroom; the conspirators reeling in; the Czar