Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

the very sense of one's own assumption is an inconsistency in the actings of self-love which is not un-frequently to be seen in Russia, where the character of the parvenu may be studied under all its grades and phases.

As a general rule applicable to the different classes of the nation, beauty is less common among the women than the men; though among the latter also may be found great numbers whose faces are flat and void of all expression. The Finns have high cheek bones, small, dull, sunken eyes, and visages so flattened that it might be fancied they had all, at their birth, fallen on their noses. Their month is also deformed, and their whole appearance bears the impress of the slave. This portrait does not apply to the Slavonians.

I have met many people marked with the smallpox, a sight rarely now seen in other parts of Europe, and which betrays the negligence of the Russian administration on an important point.

In Petersburg the different races are so mingled, that it is impossible to form a correct idea of the real population of Russia. Germans, Swedes, Livonians, Finns (who are a species of Laplanders), Calmucs and other Tartar races, have so mixed their blood with that of the Slavonians, that the primitive beauty of the latter has, in the capital, gradually degenerated ; which leads me often to think of the observation of the emperor, "Petersburg is Russian, but it is not Russia."

I have been witnessing at the opera what is called a gala representation. The building was magni-ficiently lighted: it is large, and well proportioned.