at, and had a delightful aroma. Many of | be regretted rather than wondered at that to give promise of better things, should compete with professional swindlers in this inglorious race for ill-gotten wealth. Last spring a wealthy gentleman called upon a well-known and "respectable" dentist of Moscow, reputed to be a brilliant light in his profession, and ordered a complete set of teeth in gold. When it was ready his expectations were fulfilled to the utmost in all but the color of the metal. "Excuse me, doctor," he said, Turning to banks and counting-houses, we find that they have become a byword in Russia. It is only a few days since that a new law was launched against the sharp practices of some of the best-known and apparently respectable banks of St. Petersburg † - a law which will prove as efficacious as the feather of a young hum-"but is this pure gold?" The scientific ming-bird employed to tickle the side of a healthy rhinoceros. Within the eight years most of the "best" banks in Russia have stopped payment, and tens of thousands of peasant farmers, clergymen, widows and orphans who put their trust in these establishments approved by the government were turned adrift on the world to beg from door to door. The horrors of war have been many a time described with realistic vividness by artistic pens in prose and verse. It would require a masterly hand to depict the wailing and the weeping, the cries of anguish, the looks of despair, the suicides, the robberies, the hideous crimes, and heartrending sufferings that ensued upon the failure of the banks of Skopin, Kozloff, Orel, wherein were swallowed up millions of roubles laboriously scraped together by the thousands of units within whom, in spite of all their inborn recklessness, stirred a faint perception that providence and thrift might after all be worth a fair trial. The tale of wholesale, cold-blooded spoliation that was unfolded during the trials of the galaxy of swindling bankers who have reduced thousands to beggary during the past eight or ten years, might well cause any but the most sanguine patriot to despair of the future of Russia. Men can never wholly escape the influence of their age and country; and it is to The following is taken from an official report on Cf. Journal de St. Petersbourg, 26th September, light blazed out angrily: "How can you It would be no easy matter to point out a trade, a profession, a calling followed by genuine Russians, in the code of which elementary honesty has a place. It is not merely the unwritten law, the vague, shadowy borderland of sharp practice that lies between mere infamy and the more palpa. ble terrors of stone walls and iron bars, that is daily encroached upon, but the Rubicon of the Penal Code is continually passed with a calm tranquillity that guaranteed immunity from mere human penalties could scarcely justify. The bland simplicity with which wholesale robberies are carried on for years within the knowledge of the public, the priests, and the * Novoye Vremya, 13th April, 1889. police, amazes even travellers who have Another of these booksellers, we are lived long in China. That light weight, told, did a thriving little trade, in addition now as of yore, should be eked out by to the sale of books, in wax candles made heavy stones, that trademarks should by the monks, in accordance with the canbe forged; food adulterated; goods des- ons of the Church. He obtained the canpatched to distant purchasers which are dles in the same way that he came by the infinitely inferior to the samples that volumes: the little boys who were assisting elicited the orders, is no doubt highly the monks to sell them being paid to steal reprehensible, but might still, perhaps, be them. "He was often detected, and occaglossed over as venial errors by a moralist sionally threatened with the legal consewilling to make allowances for exceptional quences of his acts." It was on these human weakness under strong temptation. occasions, we are told, that the religious But notorious vulgar robbery, propped up principles to which he always tenaciously with perjury, forgery, and every conceiv- clung buoyed him up and bore him safely able form of chicanery, and raised to the out of danger. "I say, Masha!" he would dignity of one of the recognized methods cry out to his wife who was sitting in a of trade by representative men of good little parlor inside, "take a wax candle, a standing, who can yet be religious without good thick one, mind, and run off and blasphemy, and edifying without hypoc-light it before the icon."* And his faith risy, would seem in sober truth to imply a was strengthened by the knowledge that standard of ethics specifically different from that of civilized nations. There is a curious class of discount booksellers in Russia who thrive and prosper while the fate that continually threatens and often overtakes the publishing firms whose works they trade in is insolvency and ruin. Vast palatial buildings that yield a handsome yearly income, prove that they drive a brisk trade in books, and give the lie to the saw, that honesty is the best policy. Their method is simple: they usually fee young apprentices of the principal publishing houses to steal whatever books are in demand, and to deliver to their own boy apprentices, who are also members of the conspiracy, as many copies of them as may be required by their customers. That the consciences of these tradesmen give them no uneasiness needs no more convincing proof than the fact that some of them are bringing up their own children to the business. Nor could it well be otherwise. Trade is held in high esteem by men of all countries, classes, and confessions, and to their thinking trade is merely the art of robbing your neighbor without exposing yourself to his vengeance. The first part of this definition is tersely expressed by the proverb, "Wherein one deals, therein one steals," while the moral blamelessness of robbery could scarcely be proclaimed with greater force than in this other proverb: Why not steal, so long as there's no one to hinder it." 66 Take as a typical instance the firm of Messrs. Weingurt, of Odessa, who received from the factory with which they deal and sold to their own customers without having previously verified it, sugar in which to nine hundredweight of sugar there was one hundredweight of stones. (Odessa News, 7th December, 1887.) his fervent prayers for a way out of the difficulty were always heard and granted. A less pious colleague was proportionably less fortunate, and once had to stand his trial. He made up in sharpness, however, for what he lacked in piety, and "wriggled out of the accusation in a truly masterly manner." Chatting after his acquittal with his neighbor, the man who had prosecuted him for the theft, "What a greenhorn you are, to be sure!" he exclaimed. "If, when you caused the raid to be made on my shop, you had only looked under the counter, you would have found all the stolen books there. But it's evident that, to punish you for your litigiousness, God turned your eyes away."† E. B. LANIN. * Novoye Vremya, 21st October, 1888. From The Nineteenth Century IN PRAISE OF LONDON FOG. IT has been said that no city in the world is so beautiful as London on a fine day. Whether this is true or not seems very doubtful. But the converse of this proposition, viz. that nothing is like the beauty of London at night, or during a foggy day - though apparently paradoxical, is most certainly true. Such beauty does not indeed come under the received classical forms and types, and, should we turn to the old Latin adage, Pulchra sunt, quæ visa placent, we might find much difficulty in bringing it within the scope of that definition. There is nothing at all agreeable in being out in the fog; neither the man of business nor the man of pleasure can possibly help dis- In many respects, London has no advantage over other cities; in several points, it is even inferior to some. The good taste shown in the architecture of its palaces and public buildings is not unfre quently questionable, to say the least. The West End itself contains few mansions that would not find their equals in Paris, Vienna, or Berlin. The old monuments scattered here and there about the town, are hardly more curious than those of most other nations, and sink into complete insignificance when we remember those of Rome. The public gardens and parks, trim and well kept as they are, exhibit nothing that, to a greater or less extent, is not to be found in every wealthy capital in Europe. But that which can be seen nowhere but in London that which And yet this ought surely not to be so. Dead nature, landscape nature, attracts us by far too much. Real as its charms indubitably are, they belong to the superficial rather than to the internal order of things. And hence it comes that their study is so frequently carried to excess, and that their descriptions are so hackneyed as to become ridiculously trite; so Stand upon Westminster Bridge, and much so, that a writer who seeks to be gaze at the innumerable glories reflected original and graphic in his delineations of back by the Thames; the avenues of gas scenery is almost forced to be unintel- lights and rows of illuminated windows, ligible at times. repeated in the heaving waters, and tremWhile, therefore, these inferior mani-bling and undulating as the waters heave; festations of loveliness in color and in form are so much sought after, living human nature, which is always new, which never can become the stale and hackneyed object of the artist's toil, both on account of its infinite variety and of its being so close at hand, so near to us -man, with his works and thoughts, as typified in this vast city of the world is comparatively given over to oblivion; I mean, of course, from one particular point of view sufficiently pointed out in the foregoing lines. Yet it is but the merest truism to say that there is more of real beauty in a human face, in a stone carved by a human hand, in a toy invented for a child by a human mind, than in the cataract of Niagara or the most dazzling snow-clad summits of the Alps. And if so, what of London? Life is in movement, and here, what movement, what life! Beauty is in life; and here, therefore, what beauty! Artistic natures, that love whatever is colossal, magnificent, and sublime, could not fail to love London if they would only open their eyes and look around them on every side. Samuel Johnson would have willingly given up the country, with all its verdur out of the darkness, into the darkness ous and smiling landscapes, for the scen thousands of living fellow-creatures, all ery that his dear Fleet Street offered to of them thinking and willing, many of them bis view. And the present writer, with- loving and hating, some of them like unto out, however, thus restricting his prefer- holy angels, and some like fiends from ence to any one part of the great metrop- hell! Oh, the dread intensity, the wonderolis, ventures to hold a similar opinion. ful meaning, the turbulent grandeur of the the solitary electric lamp that shines out from the immense station of Charing Cross; the red, blue, and emerald green lanterns on the railway bridge far away, and the long cloud of white smoke that, iris-like, takes the color of each lantern over which it rolls, while it marks the passage of a fiery messenger along the rails; the lights of the swift, graceful steamboats below, plying upwards against the tide, or downwards with it, and making the brown waters foam and sparkle; the factories on the south side of the river, all ablaze with a thousand radiances; the long, straight line of lamps, that stretches as far as the eye can see, above Westminster Bridge, where Lambeth Hospital faces, not unworthily, the great Houses of Parliament; and with all these splendors surrounding you, and in the midst of this whirlpool movement ever more and more rapid, ever louder and louder, as the great city swells to vaster dimensions year by year - go and talk nonsense about the stars and the light of the moon! Prate about cornfields and green grass, sheep and oxen, when you see, streaming past you over the bridge 2 scene! Starlight and moonlight may in- | among the Choctaws and the Kickapoos, deed embellish it; the towers of Westminster, silvered with celestial radiance, may indeed look more splendid than when they loom, black and solemn, out of the lamplight and the starless obscurity; still, to my mind, these occasional interferences add but little to the scenery, and their absence does not matter much. But what would the fairest of capitals - Venice, for instance-be at night, without those lamps of Heaven? Only London gives out enough light to be, like the Medusa, beautiful by its own phosphorescence. 66 And yet who would care to step out of his way and view the performance? No one; or at most, very few. Why so? because "it is so low a part of the town." Now, this is just what I should like to deny. That these poor people are below the aristocracy and the highly bred portion of the middle class is, of course, undeniable; but, in my opinion, the underbred middle class is, in reality, much lower than they. Vulgarity, the very essence and perfection of vulgarity, lies in the affectation of social tastes and manners which are not natural, But still, this beauty is of a sort that the and this surely is the infallible criterion common mind, accustomed to judge of all of a nature that is low. Supreme vulgarity things by precedent, is able to understand is attained when persons imperfectly civilwithout any very great difficulty. Let us ized attempt to appear more civilized than now turn to another part of the town, and they are. Every station, when kept, has walk through Drury Lane on the evening its own peculiar picturesqueness; if it is of a bank holiday, or on Saturday night. much departed from, the departure beWe find ourselves transported at once to comes ridiculous; if less so, merely vulgar. an unutterably strange region, dismal to The African monarch who spoiled the dwell in, squalid beyond description, and picturesque bronze of his nudity with a inhabited by a population of tame savages. dress coat, a white collar, and a pair of An Orpheus, in the shape of an organ- slippers, was absurd. The grocer's daughgrinder, makes his appearance and meta- ter in Dickens, who was horrified to see phorically "strikes the lyre," and behold, her father wring off half-a-dozen shrimps' ragged and tawdry beings of all sizes, from heads and eat what remained at one mouththe three-year-old child to the girl of six-ful, was vulgar. I know people who do teen and more, come trooping out of their not eat periwinkles because it is so unsavory wigwams, and hop about in the vulgar to do so;" not because they do murky open air, under the flaring gas. not like them. Just as if the abstention "Music hath charms," it would appear; itself was not a token of vulgarity. and whether this can or cannot be called music, it has indescribable charms for them. The rain begins to fall; a thin drizzle at first, it quickly becomes a heavy shower; but the dancers will not be baulked of their enjoyment. So that they get all the benefit of the ball, what do these children of nature care for a drop of rain or a splash of mud more or less? And indeed the ball-room is most brilliantly lighted, and there is no want of partners; no glacial coldness, or polite ceremonial, or questions of etiquette, come in here to make the party a failure. They enjoy themselves as thoroughly and as wildly as it is possible to do. On the begrimed (but not painted) faces; on the scowling, laughing, saucy, devil-may-care (but never languid) countenances that move to and fro in time with the music, the fitful flickering of the gas-flames tells with admirable effect. Rembrandt might perhaps do justice to the scene. For my part, I have often stopped in my way to look at it, and would quite as willingly see that as any war-dance or bear-dance, with torches, and screams, and whoops, such as travellers tell us are to be witnessed Lie Now, the denizens of Drury Lane and the neighboring slums and alleys are assuredly nearer to nature than these. In their lives there is no artificiality, no makebelieve, no stiffness, no inherent falsehood of any sort. If they love you they will say so; if they hate you they will curse. as they may, their falsity is but upon the surface, and is less false than the truthspeaking of many other social grades. So also of their amusements; and hence it comes that, throwing their whole soul into them, they give us the picturesque, where we had least expected to find it. To see them in the excitement of the dance, when the music-man has come round to bestow a little melody and happiness upon them, is well worth many a spectacle more elegant, more sought after, and seemingly more æsthetic, and surely worth a thousand of those balls in which the daughters of the very small bourgeoisie purchase a few hours of fictitious amusement at the cheap rate of half-a-crown. Oh, it is a lively sight! In the background, a fruiterer's shop, adorned with plenty of gas, festoons of bright red carrots, set off with bright green leaves and bundles of snow white turnips, not without crowns of philanthropist and the police reporter; art But the ugliness that is everywhere to be met with! the blear-eyed wretches that crouch, intoxicated, in dark corners; the loathsome habits of vice, graven on so many faces; the smell of the breweries and of the spirit-vaults; the rank odor of dried fish, overpowering you from the open doors of innumerable eating-houses; are these no drawbacks? can we call the scene picturesque taken in its entirety? Unreasonable objector that you are, I by no means deny that these are drawbacks that interfere with our enjoyment of the scene; but does it follow that it is any the less picturesque? Perhaps you do not like the smell of varnish; but would that render Raphael's Madonnas, when freshly painted, any the less beautiful? We exist in a world of real facts, which it is the business of the artist to idealize while he represents them. He must, in order to perform his task, either totally abscind from the hideous, or only bring the latter into his picture in order to set off the beautiful by contrast. Look at that comely girl, with brilliant, coal-black eyes and mantling ruddy color in her cheeks, holding in her arms a puny, weazen, leadenfaced baby; here the contrast may perhaps increase the artistic effect. But the drunken hags that stagger to and fro before the pot-house door belong to the The fact is that most people are under a strange delusion as regards the country and the town. Plenty of green grass and shady nooks, luxuriant foliage, waving corn, hills and valleys - all this takes us at first by surprise, and we foolishly imagine it to be the highest ideal of beauty. But after a time all these things pall upon the senses, like the decorations of a theatre when the actors have left the scene, and a feeling of insupportable lassitude takes hold of us. In the town, on the contrary, we first see nothing but the unpicturesque side-the long, straight streets, the parallel rows of houses, the want of space, and the dull sky; but if, throwing aside all foregone conclusions as to what is and what is not beautiful, we venture to call in question this sweeping condemnation, and look for beauty around us in the town - a beauty which should not be an imitation of the country, but something apart, something sui generis, something that belongs to the essence of the town, as town, and which grows necessarily greater and greater, more and more sublime, with the growth of the town itself-our search will soon be rewarded, and ever more abundantly as it is more careful. Life in town, commenced in weariness, will little by little turn to delight; while country life, beginning in delight, gradually changes into weariness. London by night, from Westminster Bridge, is darkly picturesque; in Drury Lane, wildly picturesque. It now remains for us to see London weirdly picturesque. I was crossing the narrow bridge for So here her Stor ake |