digestion? Your digestive faculties are of iron; your entrails
fathomless!

Pooh--I had many other things to say to you, but I am in a hurry to be
off. You are an ugly brother-in-law--go! I hear you are calculating on
living to see a general collation, where great and small, globes and
lexicons, philosophies and knick-knacks, will fly into your jaws--a good
appetite to you, should it come to that.--Yet, ravenous wolf that you
are! take care that you don't overeat yourself, and have to disgorge to a
hair all that you have swallowed, as a certain Athenian (no particular
friend of yours, by-the-by) has prophesied.

PREFACE.

TOBOLSKO, 2d February.

Tum primum radiis gelidi incaluere Triones.

Flowers in Siberia? Behind this lies a piece of knavery, or the sun must
make face against midnight. And yet--if ye were to exert yourselves!
'Tis really so; we have been hunting sables long enough; let us for once
in a way try our luck with flowers. Have not enough Europeans come to us
stepsons of the sun, and waded through our hundred years' snow, to pluck
a modest flower? Shame upon our ancestors--we'll gather them ourselves,
and frank a whole basketful to Europe. Do not crush them, ye children of
a milder heaven!

But to be serious; to remove the iron weight of prejudice that broods
heavily over the north, requires a stronger lever than the enthusiasm of
a few individuals, and a firmer Hypomochlion than the shoulders of two or
three patriots. Yet if this anthology reconciles you squeamish Europeans
to us snow-men as little as--let's suppose the case--our "Muses'
Almanac," [61] which we--let's again suppose the case--might have
written, it will at least have the merit of helping its companions
through the whole of Germany to give the last neck-stab to expiring
taste, as we people of Tobolsko like to word it.

If your Homers talk in their sleep, and your Herculeses kill flies with
their clubs--if every one who knows how to give vent to his portion of
sorrow in dreary Alexandrines, interprets that as a call to Helicon,
shall we northerns be blamed for tinkling the Muses' lyre?--Your matadors
claim to have coined silver when they have stamped their effigy on
wretched pewter; and at Tobolsko coiners are hanged. 'Tis true that you
may often find paper-money amongst us instead of Russian roubles, but war
and hard times are an excuse for anything.

Go forth then, Siberian anthology! Go! Thou wilt make many a coxcomb
h