harm's way at the first sign of danger, we might just as well
have no navy at all."

Besides the journals above named, the Moscow _Son of the Fatherland_ and
two others published in the capital (the _Birjeviya Vedomosti_, or
_Bourse Gazette_, and the _Peterburgskiya Vedomosti_, or _St. Petersburg
Gazette_), though now eclipsed by their younger rivals, formerly held a
high place among Russian dailies. The Russian magazines cannot be dealt
with in the limited space of the present article: it must suffice to
mention the two most important--namely: the _Russki Vestnik_ (_Russian
Courier_) and the _Vestnik Yevropi_ (_Courier of Europe_). Several of
M. Tourgueneff's later stories have made their first appearance in the
pages of the latter, which, numbering among its contributors some of the
foremost writers in Russia, and combining, like the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_, the functions of a review with those of a magazine, is in every
way the worthy successor of its now defunct forerunner, the
_Sovremennik_ (_Contemporary_), formerly owned and edited by the poet
Nekrassoff.[B]

The comic element of Russian journalism is represented by the _Iskra_
(_Spark_) and _Budilnik_ (_Alarm-Bell_), the latter having the
superiority in pictorial illustrations, though the savage and personal
cast of its satire, together with its imprudent fondness for political
allusions, has more than once all but occasioned its suppression. Both
journals are published weekly, and both have a considerable circulation,
though it must be owned that their title of "comic" is for the most part
a sad misnomer. That the Russians are naturally devoid of humor no
reader of Gogol or Griboiedoff, Pushkin, Kriloff or Tourgueneff, can
believe; but the comic journals themselves have fallen far too much into
the hands of the Imperial University, whose literary style is a
combination of the humor of the cider-cellars with the verbal fluency of
Billingsgate. Under such auspices the ill-starred periodicals naturally
oscillate between insipid propriety and labored coarseness. For a month
or two the talented contributors go smoothly on in their career of
untranslatable pleasantry, till some special atrocity calls forth the
fatherly admonition of the police. Immediately a reaction ensues,
filling the objectionable columns with harmless sneers at the weather
and other safe objects of attack, until the effect of the warning has
died away, and all goes on as before.

Those of our