the very greatest difficulty that the guards and police could prevent the mob from rushing into the burning ruins, not. for the purpose of plunder, but with the view of saving the goods and chattels of their "Little Father." The soldiers were imbued with the same feeling; and it is said that the Emperor Nicholas, who was watching the progress of the flames with the greatest composure, was only enabled to put a stop to the self-sacrificing efforts of a party of grenadiers who were trying to wrench a magnificent mirror from the wall to which it was nailed, by hurling his double-barrelled lorgnette at it. Nicholas had the strength of a giant; and the well-aimed missile shattered the mighty sheet of plate-glass to fragments. His Majesty turned, laughing, to an aide-de-camp, as the grenadiers held up their hands in horror. "The fools," he said, "will begin to risk their lives in trying to pick up my opera-glass. Tell them that they shall be fired on if they do not desist." The story of the sentry who refused to leave his post and perished in the flames because he had not been properly relieved is, I fear, apocryphal—at least, I have heard it told of half a dozen sentinels, at half a dozen fires. The Winter Palace was rebuilt in a year. The Emperor sent for an architect and told him that the new house must be finished within twelve months, or he would know the reason why. And Nicholas was not a Czar to be trifled with. At the end of the stipulated term the New Winter Palace was finished. A grand ball was given at Court, and nobody was sent to Siberia. To be sure the enterprise had not been completed without a considerable expenditure of roubles, and even of human life. In the depth of winter more than six thousand workmen used to be shut up in rooms heated to thirty degrees Réaumur, in order that the walls might dry the more quickly; and when they left the palace they experienced a difference of fifty or sixty degrees in the temperature. These little atmospheric variations were occasionally fatal to Ivan Ivanovich the moujik; but what cared he? To die for the Czar (there is a popular Russian drama on that theme) is a sweet boon to the loyal Muscovite. We English can be as loyal, upon occasion. "As for my life, it's the King's," says the tar in Dibdin's ballad. And it is certain that Jack very often did give his life for the King. The actual palace is an enormous parallelogram, of which the principal façade is four hundred and fifty feet long. It has often been compared architecturally with the (ex) Royal Palace at Madrid; but the Czar's residence is on the bank of the broad and beautiful Neva; whereas the abode of defunct Spanish royalty only overlooks the miserable little streamlet called the Mançanares. I should be talking guide-book were I to tell you of all the lions of the Winter Palace-of the grand staircase of marble encrusted with gold; of the prodigious banqueting saloon called the Salle Blanche (there is an analogous apartment in the old Schloss at Berlin), where covers are sometimes laid for eight hundred guests; or of St. George's Hall, which is one mass of gorgeous ornamentation in Carrara marble. That I am not talking guide-book may be apparent from the admission on my part that I really forget whether it was in this St. George's Hall or in a saloon of the adjacent Hermitage that I saw a vast collection of portraits in oil of distinguished Russian generals. These pictures, all let into the walls, without frames, produced a very curious effect. I specially recollect among them the ferocious face of Suvorov, and the almost more brutish and savage countenance of Barclay de Tolly, who could have been but a parcelRussian, I apprehend, but who, in his portrait, looks every inch a Calmuck whose chief diet was horseflesh and vodka, whose pursuit was slaughter and whose relaxation plunder. "Booty is a Holy thing!" quoth our grandmammas' Field-Marshal Suwarrow. General Barclay de Tolly looks as though he fully appreciated the cogency of his great predecessor's maxim. In addition to the English sound of Barclay's name there is another element of interest in these portraits owing to their being nearly if not all due to the pencil of the English Royal Academician George Dawe : an artist best known in his own country by his remarkably powerful picture of a mother rescuing her child from an eagle's nest. Foreign artists, pictorial, plastic, lyric, and dramatic, have always been munificently patronised at the Russian Court. At least a score of French sculptors, and at least fifty Italian architects, have amassed large fortunes at St. Petersburg. Jean Baptiste Le Prince, the favourite pupil of Boucher, was a great protégé of Catherine; and the Semiramis of the North would have been only too delighted to have welcomed Sir Joshua Reynolds to Petropolis, had that gifted but prudent painter chosen to risk the perils of a Russian winter. As it was, her Czarinian Majesty commissioned a picture from the illustrious British artist, at the then almost unprecedented price of two thousand guineas. This painting, "The Birth of Hercules," is in the palace of the Hermitage, and when I saw it seventeen years since, it was in a lamentable condition. The varnish had "bloomed" to the last degree of blurred fogginess; the whole surface of the work was covered with cracks; and in some places the very pigments themselves had "run," forming deep channels. The furnace-heat to which Russian rooms are heated in winter time may have had something to do with the liquefaction of the colours; but much of the damage undergone by "The Birth of Hercules "—one of Sir Joshua's noblest works-must be ascribed to the extraordinary tricks which the painter was in the habit of playing with his oils and varnishes-mixing wax, gelatine, asphaltum, and all kinds of strange messes with them. Reynolds was haunted by the idea that the great Venetian painters possessed some secret by means of which they obtained the wondrous brilliancy of colour which prevails in their pictures; and to discover this secret he was perpetually trying vain experiments. Truly Titian, Paolo Veronese, and the rest did possess the key to such a mystery; but it was in the Sun and the Atmosphere of the Adriatic. During eight months out of the twelve the Winter Palace is inhabited by the Imperial Family; and it is thus, I hope, not without warranty that I have devoted so much space to an edifice which may be emphatically spoken of as "the Home of the Czarevna." There is one apartment in it, however, which I have omitted to mention, but which should not be passed by in utter silence. It is a little plain room, most modestly furnished, and containing a simple camp bed without curtains. It was here in the beginning of 1855 that "General Février turned traitor," and that the Emperor Nicholas died from a terribly brief illness which, at the outset, had been deemed to be merely a slight attack of influenza. The room, as is customary in Russia (and in some parts of Germany likewise), has been left in precisely the same state in which it was when the spirit of its mighty master passed away. The Emperor's gloves and handkerchief lie on a chair; his military cloak hangs behind the door; a half-finished letter is on the blotting-pad on the bureau. There is the pen with which he wrote; there are the envelopes and sealing wax he used. The shadow of the hand of Death seems to pervade the whole place. You creep away hushed and awe-stricken from the potency of that presence, and the magnificent lines of Malesherbes strike like a tolling bell on your memory— Le pauvre en sa cabane, où le chaume le couvre, Est sujet à ses lois ; Et la garde qui veille aux barrières du Louvre The adjoining palace of the Hermitage escaped the fire of '37. This "Hermitage," which was built by order of Catherine II. from designs by Lamotte, Velten, and Guarenghi, was styled by Semiramis her petite maison. It was her Trianon, her Monbijou, her House at Loo; and it is big enough to lodge all the battalions and squadrons, horse and foot, of our Household Brigade, with the Royal Regiment of Artillery thrown into the bargain. The Hermitage is not now inhabited, but has been converted into an Imperial Museum of pictures and curiosities. The library is rich in manuscript letters of Voltaire, d'Alembert, and Diderot, and is said to contain (although ordinary visitors are not permitted to inspect the very odd "curio ") the copybook written by Louis XV. of France when a child, and which comprises the following admirable "exercise" in caligraphy — Les rois font ce qu'ils veulent: il faut leur obéir. Kings do what they please. They must be obeyed. After all (I should like to know the name of the courtly writing master) this is but a paraphrase of the reminder of the Court grandee who pointed out to his royal master from the terrace of the palace the Sunday holiday folks enjoying themselves in the gardens of Versailles. "Regardez, mon maître tout ce peuple, c'est à vous." A very apt commentary on the maxim "Les rois font ce qu'ils veulent," reduced to practice, may be found in one of the saloons of the Hermitage, and in a beautiful and eminently scandalous statue of the Dubarry as Venus, by Houdon. In the days of the great Czarina the Hermitage was famous for the (sometimes not very decorous) humours of its Imperial mistress -for private theatricals, dancing teas, joyous card parties, convivial suppers, and witty conversaziones, to which everybody was welcome, bores only excepted. The rules and regulations (Réglement de l'Ermitage), drawn up by Catherine herself, are worth repeating, and may best be read side by side with the Leges Conviviales of Ben Jonson. These rules may be briefly summed up as follows: : 1. Leave your rank and titles at the door, together with your hat, sword, and cane. 2. Leave your pride of birth and your prerogatives of position, if you have any, behind you at the same time. 3. Be gay and sprightly; but do not break the crockeryware nor tread on the paws of the lapdogs. 4. Sit down, stand up, or walk about as you like; but do not get in the ladies' way. 5. If you mean to hold your tongue, you needn't come; if you intend to outtalk everybody else, stay at home and talk to yourself. 6. Argue without losing your temper; but argue. Society should not be composed of a set of simpering idiots, all agreeing with one another. 7. Don't sigh, don't yawn, and don't bother people. 8. If the company wish to play forfeits, don't be afraid of making a fool of yourself. 9. Eat with a good appetite, and without making a noise. Drink in moderation (afin que chacun retrouve ses jambes en sortant), in order that you may be able to stand on your legs when you retire. [This must have been a regulation addressed exclusively to gentlemen; yet I have somewhere read of the "Rules of VOL. XII., N.S. 1874. H a Russian Club" recited by one of our elder humourists, in which the law is laid down that "no lady is to get drunk before nine of the clock."] 10. If any one is convicted, on the testimony of two trustworthy witnesses, of having infringed any one of these rules, he or she shall be constrained to swallow a glassful of cold water for every such act of infringement, and in addition, to read aloud a whole page of the "Telemachiad" (the mercilessly laughed-at epic of a Bavio-Mævian Russian poet called Frederikovski). Whosoever shall, in the course of one evening, break three of these rules, shall be compelled to learn by heart not less than six lines of the said "Telemachiad ;" and whosoever refuses to submit to the penalties imposed by this tenth and last article, shall be turned out of the Hermitage, and will not be allowed to come to tea any more. Might not the "Réglement de l'Ermitage" be adopted, with some degree of benefit to a chronically bored society, at a good many Belgravian and Tyburnian soirées? They may have been slightly "shaky" as to their morals, these habitués and habituées, but at all events they "laughed consumedly"; and when people are laughing heartily they cannot for the moment do much harm. It was at one of the Hermitage tea parties that the famous epitaph was composed on Catherine's lap-dog: Ci-gît la Duchesse Anderson Que mordit Monsieur Rogerson. This unhappy animal actually experienced the fate poetically imagined by Goldsmith in a poem which everybody has read. The "Duchesse Anderson" had the misfortune to bite a Scotch physician attached to the Court. The Doctor got well; but "the dog it was that died." Here, too, an unhappy French mathematical savant, forced under threats of the cold-water torture to compose two lines of verse, indited the immortal couplet :- Il fait le plus beau temps du monde Pour aller à cheval, sur la terre ou sur l'onde. Foyers éteints! The Imperial Court of Russia has at present a very different appearance to that which it assumed in the days of the politic, profligate woman who had wit enough to govern fifty millions of people as securely as any village schoolmistress who ever boasted "unruly brats with birch to tame" governed her rustic scholars. Catherine gave her subjects plenty of sweetstuff; but she certainly did not spare the rod upon occasion. I should occupy a great many more pages than the editor of this magazine would be able or willing to place at my disposal were I to discourse at length of all the palaces at St. Petersburg. It is as much as I shall be able to do, even barely to enumerate them. There is the Taurida Palace, for instance, built by Catherine II. to commemorate the conquest of the Tauric Chersonese, and presented by her to her |