the Czar by the beard? The enormity of this extravagance showed from
what mint it came. Ever since we have harboured the Czar's rebels in
England, there has been a craze possessing our newspaper press, that
Russia was, or might be, brewing evil against India. We can all see the
absurdity of such reveries when exemplified by our quicksilver neighbour
France, bouncing for ever in her dreams about insults meditated from the
perfidious England; but we are blind to the image which this French
mirror reflects of our own attitude towards Russia. One hundred and
fifty years ago, the _incubus_ which lay heavy on the slumbers of
England was the Pope; of whom Swift remarked, that constantly his
holiness was seen _incog_. under one disguise or other, drinking at
gin-shops in Wapping, and clearly proved to be spying out the nakedness
of the land. In our days the Pope has vanished to the rear of the
English phantasmagoria, and now lies amongst the [Greek: neknon amenena
kasena]. But not, therefore, is England without her pet nightmare; and
that nightmare is now the Czar, who doubtless had his own reasons lately
for examining the ground about Windsor and Ascot Heath--fine ground for
the Preobasinsky dragoons. How often in this journal have we been
obliged to draw upon these blockheads, and disperse them sword in hand!
How, gentlemen, (we have said to them in substance,) if you must play
the fool as alarmists, can you find no likelier towers for menacing
Calcutta with thunder storms than those of arctic St Petersburg; between
which cities lies an interspace equal to both tropics? We remember, as
applicable to this case, a striking taunt reported by Dampier, that when
one bucanier, on the west coast of Peru, was sailing away from the
oppression of another to some East Indian port, with a weak crew in a
crazy vessel, the ruffian from whom he fled told him at parting, that,
by the time he saw green fields again, the boys in his vessel would be
greyheaded. And we suspect that the Russian drummer-boys, by the time
they reach the Khyber pass, will all have become field-marshals, seeing
that, after three years' marching, they have not yet reached Khiva. But
were the distance, the snows, the famine, and thirst nothing, is the
bloodshed nothing? Russia is a colossus, and Bokhara, Khiva, Kokan, &c.,
are dwarfs. But the finger of a colossus may be no match for the horny
heels of a dwarf. The Emperor Tiberius could fracture a boy's skull with
a _t