perstitious
faith, but that a degraded art blinds the eye to the beauty of
nature. It is one of the high services of true art to lead the mind
to the contemplation, to the love and the better understanding,
of the works of creation. But, on the contrary, it is the penalty
of this Byzantine art to close the appointed access between nature
and nature's God. An art which ignores and violates truth and beauty
cannot do otherwise than lead the mind away from nature. This seemed
one of the several lessons taught by Kief, the city of pilgrimage.

Sketchers of character and costume will find excellent studies
among the pilgrims of Kief. The upper and educated classes, who
in Russia are assimilating with their equals in other nations, and
are therefore not tempting to the pencil or the brush, do not, as
we have already seen, come in any numbers to these sacred shrines.
It is the lower orders, who still preserve the manners and customs
of their ancestors, that make these church festivals so attractive
to the artist. The variety of races brought together from afar--a
diversity only possibly within an empire, like Russia, made up of
heterogeneous materials--might serve not only to fill a portfolio,
but to illustrate a volume; the ethnologist equally with the painter
would find at the time of great festivities curious specimens of
humanity. I remember some years ago to have met with the French
artist, M. Theodore Valerio, when he had brought home the _Album
Ethnographique_ from Hungary, Croatia, and the more distant borders
of the Danube. It was quite refreshing, after the infinite number
of costume-studies I had seen from Italian peasantry, to find that
art had the possibility of an entirely new sphere among the Sclavonic
races. A like field for any painter of enterprise is now open in
Russia. The large and famous composition, _The Butter Week (Carnival)
in St. Petersburg_, by C. Makowski, may serve to indicate the hitherto
undeveloped pictorial resources of the empire. When the conditions
are new there is a possibility that the art may be new also. The
ethnology, the physical geography, the climate, the religion, the
products of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, so far as they are
peculiar to Russia, will some day become reflected into the national
art. It is true that the painter may occasionally feel a want of
colour, the costumes of the peasant are apt to be dull and heavy, yet
not unfrequently rags and tatters bring compensa