pply all possible modern improvements, to adapt them to present
ideas, and to present events. Though he would have no objection to his
mailed knight traveling per first-class railway, he would abolish
luggage-trains to encourage intestine trade and the breed of that noble
animal the pack-horse. He has, indeed, done something in this monastic
line; but his efforts for the dissemination of superstition, and his
denunciations of a certain sort of witchcraft, have signally failed. In
truth, the task he has set himself--that of re-constructing society anew
out of old materials--though highly archaeological, historical, and
poetic, has the fatal disadvantage of being simply impossible. It is
telling the people of the nineteenth century to carry their minds,
habits, and sentiments back, so as to become people of the thirteenth
century; it is trying to make new muslin out of mummy cloth, or razors
out of rusty nails.

"Young Russia" is an equal absurdity, but from a precisely opposite
cause; for, indeed, this sort of youth out of age is a series of
paradoxes. The Russian of the present day _is_ the Russian of past ages.
He exists by rule--the rule of despotism--which is as old as the Medes
and Persians; and which forces him into an iron mould that shapes his
appearance, his mind, and his actions to one pattern, from one
generation to another Hence every thing that lives and breathes in
Russia being antique, there is no appreciable antiquity. The new school,
therefore--even if amateur politics were allowable in Russia, which they
are not, as a large population of exiles in Siberia can testify--has no
materials to work upon. Stagnation is the political law, and "Young
Russia" dies in its babyhood for want of sustenance. What goes by the
name of civilization, is no advance in wealth, morals, or social
happiness. It is merely a tinsel coating over the rottenness and rust
with which Russian life is "sicklied o'er." It has nothing to do with a
single soul below the rank of a noble; and with him it means Champagne,
bad pictures, Parisian tailors, operas, gaming, and other expenses and
elegancies imported from the West. Hundreds of provincial noblemen are
ruined every year in St. Petersburg, in undergoing this process of
civilization. The fortunes thus wasted are enormous; yet there is only
one railroad now in operation throughout the whole empire, and that
belongs to the Emperor, and leads to one of his palaces a few miles from
the ca