, _i.e._, revealed images, and their number is considerable, though
all of them do not enjoy an equal reputation for miraculous powers. The
number of images of various descriptions is, I think, much greater in
Russia than in any other country, and they are called by the common
people, not images, _icony_, but gods, _boghi_; and many of their
worshippers are so ignorant, that they take every kind of picture or
engraving for the _boghi_, and devoutly cross themselves before them. A
German officer of engineers, in the Russian service, related to the author
that he had a Russian servant, a young lad of a very devout disposition,
who pasted every engraving which he could lay hold on, upon the wall over
his bed, in order to address his prayers to them. This officer once missed
some plates, containing mathematical figures, which had dropt from a book
of geometry, and he found afterwards that his pious servant, having picked
them up, gave them a place in his pantheon. If this strange divinity had
been found amongst the objects worshipped by that poor lad by some very
profound foreign traveller, unacquainted with the Russian people, it is
more than probable that he would have taken it for a mystical object of
adoration, and written a learned dissertation to explain its emblematic
sense.

Every household in Russia has its own little sanctuary, consisting of one
or more images, ornamented according to the means of the owner, and placed
in a corner opposite to the principal door. Every one who enters the room
makes a sign of the cross, bowing to these _penates_, the place under
whose shrine is considered as the seat of honour, reserved at meals for
the father of the family, or the most respected guest.

The Russians are great _exclusives_ in respect to their images, and every
believer has at least one of them stuck on the wall near his sleeping
place, for his especial use and comfort; whilst people who are continually
moving about, as carriers, pedlars, soldiers, &c., have their pocket
divinities with them; and the description of the devotional exercises of a
Russian soldier, given on p. 171, is by no means a caricature. This
exclusiveness was much greater before the reforms introduced by the
Patriarch Nicon in the seventeenth century than it is at present.(114)
Contemporary travellers relate that people brought into the churches their
own images, trying to get for them on the walls of the church the place
which they considered the