in yet older times Ivan Vasilievitch, something fantastical, violent, and ironical combined.  Wit was with them rather an arm than an enjoyment, and it was by the imagination that they were led.  Generosity, barbarity, unbridled passions, and religious superstition, all met in the same character.  Even now civilization in Russia has not penetrated beyond the surface, even among the great nobility; externally they imitate other nations, but all are Russians at heart, and in that consists their strength and originality, the love of country being next to that of God, the noblest sentiment which men can feel.  That country must certainly be exceedingly different from those which surround it to inspire a decided attachment; nations which are confounded with one another by slight shades of difference, or which are divided into several separate states, never devote themselves with real passion to the conventional association to which they have attached the name of country.

CHAPTER 18.

Manners of the Great Russian Nobility.

I went to spend a day at the country seat of prince Narischkin, great chamberlain of the court, an amiable, easy and polished man, but who cannot exist without a fete; it is at his house that you obtain a correct notion of that vivacity in their tastes, which explains the defects and qualities of the Russians.  The house of M. de Narischkin is always open, and if there happen to be only twenty persons at his country seat, he begins to be weary of this philosophical retreat.  Polite to strangers, always in movement, and yet perfectly capable of the reflection required to stand well at court:  greedy of the enjoyments of imagination, but placing these only in things and not in books; impatient every where but at court, witty when it is to his advantage to be so, magnificent rather than ambitious, and seeking in everything for a certain Asiatic grandeur, in which fortune and rank are more conspicuous than personal advantages.  His country seat is as agreeable as it is possible for a place of the kind to be, created by the hand of man:  all the surrounding country is marshy and barren; so as to make this residence a perfect Oasis.  On ascending the terrace, you see the gulph of Finland, and perceive in the distance, the palace which Peter I. built upon its borders; but the space which separates it from the sea and the palace is almost a waste, and the park of M. Narischkin alone charms the eye of the observer.  We dined in the house of the Moldavians, that is to say, in a saloon built according to the taste of these people; it was arranged so as to protect from the heat of the sun, a precaution rather needless in Russia.  However the imagination is impressed to that degree with the idea that you are living among a people who have only come into the North by accident, that it appears natural to find there the customs of the South, as if the Russians were some day or other to bring to Petersburg the climate of their old country.  The table was covered with the fruits of all countries, according to the custom taken from the East, of only letting the fruits appear, while a crowd of servants carried round to each guest the dishes of meat and vegetables they required.