therefore give my readers the observations which have been made on the
same subject by another German author, Baron Haxthausen, a great admirer
of Russia, who travelled over that country in 1843, under the patronage of
the Emperor, in order to study the state of its agriculture and industry,
as well as the social condition of the working-classes.

"A foreigner is struck," says the Baron, "by the deep devotion and the
strict observance of the ordinances and customs of the church shown by
Russians of rank and superior education. I had already, at Moscow, an
opportunity of seeing it. Prince T., a young, elegant Muscovite dandy,
conducted me about the churches of the Kremlin, and almost in every one of
them he knelt down before some particularly venerated object,--as the
coffin of a saint, the image of a Madonna,--and touched the ground with his
forehead, and devoutly kissed the object in question. I observed the same
thing at Yaroslaf. Madame Bariatynski (the wife of the governor) and
another lady conducted me about the churches of that city, and as soon as
we entered one of them, both these ladies approached an image of the
Virgin, fell down before it, _without any regard to their __ dresses_,
touched with their foreheads the ground, and kissed the image, making
signs of the cross; and these were ladies belonging to the highest
society, and of the most refined manners. Madame Bariatynski had been a
lady of the court, and the ornament of the first drawing-rooms of St
Petersburg. Her mind is uncommonly cultivated, and she has a thorough
knowledge of French and German literature; and, indeed, when we were
walking to see these churches, along the banks of the Volga, she
discussed, in an animated and ingenious manner, the matchless beauty of
Goethe's songs, and recited from memory his Fisherman. Even in the
strictest Roman Catholic countries, as, for instance, Bavaria, Belgium,
Rome, Munster, such public demonstrations of piety are not to be met,
except in some exceedingly rare cases, with women, but never with men. The
educated classes have in this respect separated from the lower ones. Even
people who are very devout consider such excessive manifestations of piety
as not quite decent, nay, though they dare not confess it, they are in
some measure ashamed of them. In Russia the case is different. There are
perhaps as many freethinkers, and even atheists, as in western Europe, but
even they submit, at least in public, and when