The story of a saint or a deity spearing a dragon, was known all over the east; among the Mahometans, a person called Gergis or George, under a similar figure, was much revered as a prophet; and similar emblems have been discovered among many barbarous nations of the east. Whether these nations took it from the Greeks, or the latter from them, cannot be ascertained; for of the real existence of such a person as St. George, no positive proofs have ever been advanced.
But whether the Russians derived St. George from the Greeks or the Tartars, it is certain that his figure was adopted as the arms of the grand dukes, and that the emblem of the saint and the dragon, has been uniformly represented on the reverse of the Russian coins.
With respect to the arms, Herberstein, in his account of his embassy to Moscow in 1518, under Vassili Ivanovitch, has given a wooden print of that prince, at the bottom of which are engraved his arms, representing thus—
a naked man on horseback, piercing a serpent with his lance. The equestrian figure in this device has a Tartar-like appearance, and is so coarse and rude, that it seems to have been derived from a people in a far more uncivilized state of society than the Greeks: add to this, that the Greeks always represented St. George clad in armour.
NATURALISTS’ CALENDAR.
Mean Temperature 48·27.
[131] Fosbroke’s Dict. of Antiquities.