succeeded in changing his
physical and intellectual exterior; but all those deeper and more
delicate parts of human nature which are formed by the accumulated
experience of past generations could not be so easily and rapidly
changed. The French gentilhomme of the eighteenth century was the direct
descendant of the feudal baron, with the fundamental conceptions of his
ancestors deeply embedded in his nature. He had not, indeed, the old
haughty bearing towards the Sovereign, and his language was tinged with
the fashionable democratic philosophy of the time; but he possessed
a large intellectual and moral inheritance that had come down to him
directly from the palmy days of feudalism--an inheritance which even the
Great Revolution, which was then preparing, could not annihilate. The
Russian noble, on the contrary, had received from his ancestors entirely
different traditions. His father and grandfather had been conscious
of the burdens rather than the privileges of the class to which they
belonged. They had considered it no disgrace to receive corporal
punishment, and had been jealous of their honour, not as gentlemen or
descendants of Boyars, but as Brigadiers, College Assessors, or Privy
Counsellors. Their dignity had rested not on the grace of God, but
on the will of the Tsar. Under these circumstances even the proudest
magnate of Catherine's Court, though he might speak French as fluently
as his mother tongue, could not be very deeply penetrated with the
conception of noble blood, the sacred character of nobility, and the
numerous feudal ideas interwoven with these conceptions. And in adopting
the outward forms of a foreign culture the nobles did not, it seems,
gain much in true dignity. "The old pride of the nobles has fallen!"
exclaims one who had more genuine aristocratic feeling than his
fellows.* "There are no longer any honourable families; but merely
official rank and personal merits. All seek official rank, and as all
cannot render direct services, distinctions are sought by every possible
means--by flattering the Monarch and toadying the important personages."
There was considerable truth in this complaint, but the voice of this
solitary aristocrat was as of one crying in the wilderness. The whole of
the educated classes--men of old family and parvenus alike--were, with
few exceptions, too much engrossed with place-hunting to attend to such
sentimental wailing.

* Prince Shtcherbatof.

If the Russian No