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

280SOUVENIRS OF I VAX IV.

presiding over carnage and pestilence, couched among the ruins of the city; and the bloody corpses of his subjects seemed to issue out of the river that was choked with their bodies, to prove to me the horrors of intestine wars. It is worthy of remark, that the correspondence of the Archbishop Pinen, and of other principal citizens of Novgorod, with the Poles, was the cause which brought the evil on the city, where thirty thousand innocent persons perished in the combat, and in the executions and massacres invented and presided over by the czar. There were days on which six hundred were at once executed before his eyes; and all these horrors were enacted to punish a crime unpardonable from that epoch — the crime of clandestine communication with the Poles. This took place nearly three hundred years ago, in 1570. Great Novgorod lias never recovered the stroke : she could have replaced her dead, but she could not survive the abolition of her democratic institutions : her whitewashed houses are no longer stained with blood; they appear as if they had been built only yesterday; but her streets are deserted, and three parts of her ruins are spread over the plain, beyond the narrow bounds of the actual city, which is but a shadow and a name. This is all that remains of the famous republic of the middle ages. Where are the fruits of the revolutions which never ceased to saturate the now almost desert soil with blood ? Here, all is as silent as it was before the history. God has only too often had to teach us, that objects which men, blinded with pride, viewed as a worthy end of their efforts, were really only a means of employing their superfluous powers in the