London.  An English factory was built at Archangel.  That factory was indeed, even in the latter part of the seventeenth century, a rude and mean building.  The walls consisted of trees laid one upon another; and the roof was of birch bark.  This shelter, however, was sufficient in the long summer day of the Arctic regions.  Regularly at that season several English ships cast anchor in the bay.  A fair was held on the beach.  Traders came from a distance of many hundreds of miles to the only mart where they could exchange hemp and tar, hides and tallow, wax and honey, the fur of the sable and the wolverine, and the roe of the sturgeon of the Volga, for Manchester stuffs, Sheffield knives, Birmingham buttons, sugar from Jamaica and pepper from Malabar.  The commerce in these articles was open.  But there was a secret traffic which was not less active or less lucrative, though the Russian laws had made it punishable, and though the Russian divines pronounced it damnable.  In general the mandates of princes and the lessons of priests were received by the Muscovite with profound reverence.  But the authority of his princes and of his priests united could not keep him from tobacco.  Pipes he could not obtain; but a cow’s horn perforated served his turn.  From every Archangel fair rolls of the best Virginia speedily found their way to Novgorod and Tobolsk.

The commercial intercourse between England and Russia made some diplomatic intercourse necessary.  The diplomatic intercourse however was only occasional.  The Czar had no permanent minister here.  We had no permanent minister at Moscow; and even at Archangel we had no consul.  Three or four times in a century extraordinary embassies were sent from Whitehall to the Kremlin and from the Kremlin to Whitehall.

The English embassies had historians whose narratives may still be read with interest.  Those historians described vividly, and sometimes bitterly, the savage ignorance and the squalid poverty of the barbarous country in which they had sojourned.  In that country, they said, there was neither literature nor science, neither school nor college.  It was not till more than a hundred years after the invention of printing that a single printing press had been introduced into the Russian empire; and that printing press had speedily perished in a fire which was supposed to have been kindled by the priests.  Even in the seventeenth century the library of a prelate of the first dignity consisted of a few manuscripts.  Those manuscripts too were in long rolls; for the art of bookbinding was unknown.  The best educated men could barely read and write.  It was much if the secretary to whom was entrusted the direction of negotiations with foreign powers had a sufficient smattering of Dog Latin to make himself understood.  The arithmetic was the arithmetic of the dark ages.  The denary notation was unknown.  Even in the Imperial Treasury the computations were made by the help of balls strung on wires.  Round the person of the Sovereign there was a blaze of gold and jewels; but even in his most splendid palaces were to be found the filth and misery of an Irish cabin.  So late as the year 1663 the gentlemen of the retinue of the Earl of Carlisle were, in the city of Moscow, thrust into a single bedroom, and were told that, if they did not remain together, they would be in danger of being devoured by rats.