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

newly copied from the English, like our cercles of Paris.

In the state which the frequency and facility of communication has produced in modern Europe, one is at a loss where to до to find original manners, and habits which may be taken as the true expression of characters. The customs recently adopted by each people are the results of a crowd of borrowed notions. There arises from this digest of all characters in the crucible of universal civilisation, a monotony that is any thing but conducive to the enjoyment of the traveller, although at no other epoch has the taste for travelling been so universal; owing to the great number of people who travel through ennui instead of for instruction. I am not one of those travellers: curious and indefatigable, I discover each day, to my cost, that differences are the rarest things in the world ; and that resemblances are the great annoyances of the traveller, whom they oblige to play the part of dupe, a part the most unpleasant to accept, precisely because it is the most easy to perform.

We travel to escape the world in which we have passed our lives, and we find it is impossible to leave it behind. The civilised world has no longer any limits; it is the whole earth. The human race is reuniting, languages are being lost, nations arc disappearing, philosophy is reducing creeds to a matter of private belief—last product of a defaced Catholicism, so ordained until it shall shine forth again with renewed brightness, and serve as the future basis of society. Who shall assign limits to this re-assorting of the human race ? It is impossible to avoid seeing in it a design of Providence. The malediction of Babel