"It is sometimes said that the Romanoff family is more German than Russian, in consequence of the marriages of the emperors with German princesses. Peter the Great was pure Russian; his son Alexis, father of Peter II., married a German princess, and their daughter Anne married a German duke. Anne and the German duke were the parents of Peter III., the husband of Catherine II.; Peter III. and Catherine were the parents of Paul, who married a German princess, and the example has been followed by all the emperors. The Russian poet Pushkin used to represent in an amusing way the Germanizing of the Imperial family, which was as follows:
"He placed in a goblet a spoonful of wine for the Czarevitch Alexis and a spoonful of water for his German wife. Then he added a spoonful of water for Anne's German husband, a third for Catherine II., and a fourth, fifth, and sixth for the German wives of Paul, Nicholas, and Alexander II. Were the poet alive to-day, he would add a seventh for the Danish wife of Alexander III., and an eighth for the wife of the young Nicholas, whoever she may be.
"However little Russian blood may be running at present in the veins of the Romanoff family, there is no question about the thoroughly Russian character of the persons most concerned. Born and bred in Russia, it would be strange if the men were otherwise than national in their feelings; and as for the women who have been married into the Imperial family, they seem to have left everything behind them when they came to make their homes in Muscovy. There was never a more thorough Russian than Catherine II. When she came to the Imperial court at the age of fifteen she immediately went to work to learn the language, and in after-life she used to say that if she knew of a drop of blood in her veins that had not become Russian she would have it drawn out.
"Before becoming the wives of the men of the Imperial family, all foreign princesses must be baptized and taken into the Russian Church. The ceremony is a very elaborate one, and is made a state affair. The members of the Imperial family are present, together with many high officials, who appear as witnesses, and there can be no exceptions to the rule that requires the Emperor's bride to be of his religion. Family, home, religion, everything must be given up by the woman who is to become an Empress of Russia.
"Well, we will leave Romanoff House and the Kitai Gorod, and go to see something else. Our guide suggests the Church of the Saviour, which has only recently been completed. It was built to commemorate the retreat of the French from Moscow. Our guide, whose arithmetic is a good deal at fault, says they have been working at it for more than a hundred years.
"Though not so quaint as the churches we have seen, it is certainly the finest in the city. It is in the form of a Greek cross, and the central cupola, eighty-four feet in diameter, rises three hundred and forty-three feet above the ground. In front of the church there are statues of the Russian generals of the early part of the century; the outside is adorned with bronze reliefs, which are strangely divided between Scriptural subjects and the war of 1812. The interior of the building is finished with highly polished porphyry, lapis-lazuli, and other costly stones, and there is a profusion of paintings ornamenting the walls. We spent half an hour or more at the church, and were loath to leave it.
"In addition to its many churches of the Greek faith, Moscow is like St. Petersburg in containing churches representing all the religions of a Christian city, together with synagogues for the Jews and mosques for the Tartars. Some Chinese who once lived in Moscow had a pagoda, where they worshipped idols as in their own country, but our guide says there are no Chinese here at present. Of course we had not sufficient time for visiting all the churches of Moscow, and told the guide to take us only to those which were really remarkable. We saw perhaps a dozen in addition to those I have named. They were interesting to us who saw them, but I omit a description lest it might prove tedious.
"We went to the Museum, which has a library of one hundred and fifty thousand volumes, a collection of minerals, and a great number of paintings, engravings, and similar things. It did not impress us as much as did the Museum of St. Petersburg, but perhaps this is due to the fact that we were a good deal wearied after our long hours of sight-seeing, and were more desirous of a rest than anything else.