ate of
semi-barbarity, agriculture in its infancy, the soil parched like a
desert, the animals stunted, the people, although of good stature, in
a state of extreme poverty, the towns built of wood, the houses filled
with vermin, and the food revolting. This picture will not escape
the suspicion of being overdrawn. But J.G. Seume, who was by no means
over-squeamish, and whom experience had taught the meaning of "to rough
it," asserts, in speaking of Poland in 1805, that, Warsaw and a few
other places excepted, the dunghill was in most houses literally and
without exaggeration the cleanest spot, and the only one where one could
stand without loathing. But if the general aspect of things left much
to be desired from a utilitarian point of view, its strangeness and
picturesqueness would not fail to compensate an imaginative youth
for the want of order and comfort. The strong contrast of wealth and
poverty, of luxury and distress, that gave to the whole country so
melancholy an appearance, was, as it were, focussed in its capital.
Mr. Coxe, who visited Warsaw not long before Nicholas Chopin's arrival
there, says:--

The streets are spacious, but ill-paved; the churches and
public buildings large and magnificent, the palaces of the
nobility are numerous and splendid; but the greatest part of
the houses, especially the suburbs, are mean and ill-
constructed wooden hovels.

What, however, struck a stranger most, was the throngs of humanity that
enlivened the streets and squares of Warsaw, the capital of a nation
composed of a medley of Poles, Lithuanians, Red and White Russians,
Germans, Muscovites, Jews, and Wallachians, and the residence of a
numerous temporary and permanent foreign population. How our friend from
quiet Nancy--which long ago had been deserted by royalty and its train,
and where literary luminaries, such as Voltaire, Madame du Chatelet,
Saint Lambert, &c., had ceased to make their fitful appearances--must
have opened his eyes when this varied spectacle unfolded itself before
him.

The streets of stately breadth, formed of palaces in the
finest Italian taste and wooden huts which at every moment
threatened to tumble down on the heads of the inmates; in
these buildings Asiatic pomp and Greenland dirtin strange
union, an ever-bustling population, forming, like a
masked procession, the most striking contrasts. Long-bearded
Jews, and monks in all kinds of habits; nuns o