ho is insufficient in it. But when we pass from
the idea of the barbaric to the idea of the oriental, the case is even
more curious. There is nothing particularly Tartar in Russian affairs,
except the fact that Russia expelled the Tartars. The eastern invader
occupied and crushed the country for many years; but that is equally true
of Greece, of Spain, and even of Austria. If Russia has suffered from the
East she has suffered in order to resist it: and it is rather hard that
the very miracle of her escape should make a mystery about her origin.
Jonah may or may not have been three days inside a fish, but that does
not make him a merman. And in all the other cases of European nations who
escaped the monstrous captivity, we do admit the purity and continuity
of the European type. We consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but
not as a stain. Copper-coloured men out of Africa overruled for centuries
the religion and patriotism of Spaniards. Yet I have never heard that
Don Quixote was an African fable on the lines of Uncle Remus. I have
never heard that the heavy black in the pictures of Velasquez was due
to a negro ancestry. In the case of Spain, which is close to us, we can
recognise the resurrection of a Christian and cultured nation after its
age of bondage. But Russia is rather remote; and those to whom nations are
but names in newspapers can really fancy, like Mr. Baring's friend, that
all Russian churches are "mosques." Yet the land of Turgeniev is not a
wilderness of fakirs; and even the fanatical Russian is as proud of being
different from the Mongol, as the fanatical Spaniard was proud of being
different from the Moor.

The town of Reading, as it exists, offers few opportunities for piracy
on the high seas: yet it was the camp of the pirates in Alfred's day. I
should think it hard to call the people of Berkshire half-Danish, merely
because they drove out the Danes. In short, some temporary submergence
under the savage flood was the fate of many of the most civilised states
of Christendom; and it is quite ridiculous to argue that Russia, which
wrestled hardest, must have recovered least. Everywhere, doubtless, the
East spread a sort of enamel over the conquered countries, but everywhere
the enamel cracked. Actual history, in fact, is exactly opposite to
the cheap proverb invented against the Muscovite. It is not true to
say "Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar." In the darkest hour of
the barbaric dominion it