of starers; drunken
ragamuffin lacqueys on their way from the cook's shop, bearing piles of
plates with their masters' dinners, which grow cold whilst they gape at
the pictures; great-coated Russian soldiers with penknives for sale;
Okhta pedlar-women with boxes of shoes. Each spectator expresses his
admiration in his own peculiar way: peasants point with their fingers;
soldiers gaze with stolid gravity; dirty foot-boys and blackguard
apprentices laugh and apply the caricatures to each other; old serving
men in frieze cloaks stand listless and agape, indulging their
propensity to utter idleness.

A number of persons answering to the above description were assembled
before the picture-shop, when they were joined by a young man in a
threadbare cloak and shabby garments. He was a painter, named
Tchartkoff, as enthusiastic in his art as he was needy in his
circumstances and careless of his dress. Pausing before the booth, he
smiled as he glanced at the wretched pictures there displayed. The next
moment the expression of mirthful contempt faded from his thin, ardent
features, and he fell a-thinking. The question had occurred to him,
amongst what class of people could those tawdry, worthless productions
find purchasers? That Russian _mujiks_ should gaze delightedly upon the
_Yeruslan Lazarevitches_, on pictures of _Phoma_ and _Yerema_, of the
heroes of their tales and legends, was quite natural; the objects
represented were adapted to popular taste and comprehension; but who
would buy those tawdry oil-paintings, those Flemish boors, those crimson
and azure landscapes, which, whilst pretending to a higher grade of art,
served but to prove its deep degradation? Not one redeeming touch could
be traced in the senseless caricatures, to whose authors' clumsy hands
the mason's trowel would assuredly have been better adapted than the
painter's pencil. It was the very dotage of incapacity. The colouring,
the treatment, the coarse obtrusive mechanical touch, seemed those of a
clumsily constructed automaton, rather than of a human painter. Thus
musing, our artist stood for some time before the vile daubs that
excited his disgust, gazing at them long after the train of his
reflections had led him far from them; whilst the master of the shop, a
little, gray, ill-shaven fellow in a frieze cloak, chattered and
chaffered and bargained as indefatigably as if the young man had
announced himself a purchaser.

"Well now," said he, "for these