one we may draw the safe conclusion, that the Russians have ever
been a _singing_ race. We allude to their custom of attaching verses
full of allusions and sacred meaning to every festival, nay, to every
extraordinary event of human life, and thus of fettering the flying
hours with the garland chains of poetry and song. They have to this
very day their wedding songs, Pentecost and Christmas carols, and
various other songs, named after the different occasions on which they
are chanted, or the game which they accompany. Although these songs,
also, have been modernized in language and form, they seem always to
have been regarded with a kind of pious reverence, and appear to have
been altered as little as possible. Most of their allusions are, for
that reason, unintelligible at the present day. That their groundwork
is derived from the age of paganism, is evident from the frequent
invocations of heathen deities, and from various allusions to heathen
customs.

Nearly related to these songs are the various ditties of a social
kind, which peasant girls and lads are in the habit of singing on
certain, stated occasions; for instance, walking songs, dancing songs,
and the like. They consist mostly of endless repetition, often of
words or single syllables, apparently without meaning; and the tune,
in which these fragmentary poems are sung, is after all the best part
of it. Yet not seldom a spark of real poetry shines through that
melodious tissue of unmeaning words. What is most remarkable in these
songs, which have now been more than a century the exclusive property
of the common people, is the utter absence of coarseness and
vulgarity, even in the wedding songs.

The Russian songs, like the Russian language, have a peculiar
tenderness, and are full of caressing epithets. These are even
frequently applied to inanimate objects. A Russian postilion, in a
simple and charming song, calls the tavern, which he never can make up
his mind to pass without stopping, "his dear little mother." The words
_Matushka, Batushka, Starinka_, which we may venture to give in
English by _motherling, fatherling, oldling_, are in Russian favourite
terms of endearment. The post-boy's song may stand here as eminently
characteristic of the cheerful, childlike, caressing disposition of
the nation. It is translated in the measure of the original, as nearly
as it could be imitated in English.

THE POSTILION.

Tzarish Tavern, thou
Our good motherling