Hurrying now towards England, with the anxiety which every one feels to reach home as the end of a long journey seems to be nigh, the traveller passed through Kazan, second in national honour to Moscow, but found it in ashes from a late fire. He then hurried on to Nishney-Novgorod, the place of the greatest fair in the world, where the traffic brings traders from the ends of the earth, and where the trade amounts to nineteen millions sterling a-year. He then traversed the property of General Sheremetieff, an estate of two days' journey, with a hundred thousand serfs—a comfortable race when under a good master, each head of a family having a farm, and paying its rent, part in produce and part in work. The people appear to be a gay race—singing every where; singing on the roads, singing at work, and singing at cutting up their cabbages for the national luxury of saurkraut.
At length was seen looming in the west, with all its steeples and domes, the queen of the wilderness, Moscow the Magnificent—the most frequently-burned of all cities, and, as Sir George observes, the most retaliatory on the burners—it having been burned to embers four times, and each time having seen the incendiary nation ruined. It must be admitted, however, that the revenge, however sure, was slow, for it seldom occurred in less than a couple of centuries!—Napoleon's fate being the only instance of promptitude on this point.
From Moscow to St Petersburg, a macadamised road of seven hundred versts conveyed the traveller to the northern city of the Czar, where, on the 8th of October, he terminated a journey from Ochotsk, of about seven thousand miles. In eight days from St Petersburg he reached Hamburg, and in five days more arrived in London, having rounded the globe in a period of nineteen months and twenty-six days!
We have given an abstract of this work with the more satisfaction, that it not merely supplies a certain knowledge of vast regions of which the European world knows little; but that it gives a favourable view of the condition, the habits, and the temper, of the multitudes of our fellow men, spread over those immense spaces of the globe. Personally, of course, a man of the official rank and individual intelligence of the writer, might expect the hospitality of the Russian employés. But he seems to have been met with general kindness—to have experienced no injury, no obstacle, and no extortion; and, on the whole, having exhibited the good sense which disregards the inevitable annoyances of all journeys in distant countries, to have escaped all the severer ones which an ill-tempered traveller naturally brings upon himself. But the feature of his volumes on which we place the still higher value, is the honesty of his English spirit. He knows the value of his country; he does justice to her principles; he gives the true view of her power; he vindicates her intentions; and without depreciating the merits of foreign nations, he pays a manly tribute to the truth, by doing deserved honour to his own.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Narrative of an Overland Journey Round the World. By Sir George Simpson, Governor-in-Chief of the Hudson's Bay Company's Territories in North America.