ide were elegant fashions, magnificent dresses, sumptuous repasts,
splendid feasts, theatres like those which gave grace and animation to
the select circles of London or Paris: on the other side, shopkeepers in
Asiatic dress, coachmen, servants, and peasants clad in sheepskins,
wearing long beards, fur caps, and long fingerless gloves of skin, with
short axes hanging from their leathern girdles. The thick woollen bands
round their feet and legs resembled a rude cothurnus, and the sight of
these uncouth figures reminded one who had seen the bas-reliefs on
Trajan's column at Rome, of the Scythians, the Dacians, the Goths, the
Roxolani, who had been the terror of the Empire.[71] Literary
cultivation was confined to almost the smallest possible area. Oriental
as Russia was in many respects, it was the opposite of oriental in one:
women were then, as they are still sometimes said to be in Russia, more
cultivated and advanced than men. Many of them could speak half a dozen
languages, could play on several instruments, and were familiar with
the works of the famous poets of France, Italy, and England. Among the
men, on the contrary, outside of a few exceptional families about the
court, the vast majority were strangers to all that was passing beyond
the limits of their own country. The few who had travelled and were on
an intellectual level with their century, were as far removed from the
rest of their countrymen as Englishmen are removed from Iroquois.

[71] Segur's _Mem._, ii. 230.

To paint the court of Catherine in its true colours it has been said
that one ought to have the pen of Procopius. It was a hot-bed of
corruption, intrigue, jealousy, violence, hatred. One day, surrounded by
twenty-seven of her courtiers, Catherine said: "If I were to believe
what you all say about one another, there is not one of you who does not
richly deserve to have his head cut off." A certain princess was
notorious for her inhuman barbarity. One day she discovered that one of
her attendants was with child; in a frenzy she pursued the hapless
Callisto from chamber to chamber, came up with her, dashed in her skull
with a heavy weapon, and finally in a delirium of passion ripped up her
body. When two nobles had a quarrel, they fell upon one another then and
there like drunken navvies, and Potemkin had an eye gouged out in a
court brawl. Such horrors give us a measure of the superior humanity of
Versailles, and enable us also in passing to s