1851.] Pictures from St Petersburg. 171
medley of facts, anecdotes, and traditions. After visiting three palaces, and dismissing them with brief notice, he enters an unpretending little house which Russian veneration for a great sovereign has covered with a wooden casket, to protect it from decay. There dwelt Peter the Great, when superintending the building of his capital. His chamber is scrupulously preserved in the same state as during his life. There are his bedstead, some of his tools, his iron ruler, his writing materials, and some fragments of his clothing. Everything that belonged to him is held sacred by his descendants, in grateful memory of the benefits he conferred on his country. His room has been converted into a chapel. At an altar, whose plainness accords with the simplicity of the apartment, two masses are daily said. An old inn is shown in the neighbourhood, built upon the same spot where formerly stood the little tavern in which Peter and Meuaikoff drank the Dutch ambassador under the table. Hard by stands a monument of Peter's energy and skill; the citadel, built of granite, after a plan of his drawing. In the church pertaining to it are preserved the banners and keys of conquered towns; those of Warsaw, Oczakoff, Ismael, and Derbent, taking the first places; and there are also kept the bread and salt which the chief magistrate of Warsaw presented, with the city keys, to Suwarrow, in token of the entire subjection of Poland. In a casemate of the fortress, converted into a state prison, prince Alexis, son of Peter I., ended his days, after his condemnation as a rebel. And there, in 1771, perished the princess Tarakauoff, and all the other state prisoners there confined, in consequence of an overflow of the Neva. "Since those days the state of morals in Russia has greatly improved, even amongst the very lowest classes, and manners and habits have become milder and more humane. In the year 1776, out of 4369 deaths in St Petersburg, 113 persons were found dead—murdered, there could be no doubt. What a difference between then and now. Modern writers certainly warn us of the insecurity of the streets in the long winter evenings; even Kohl, who wrote only eleven years ago about St Petersburg, sees a candidate for the cemetery in every sledge that crosses the Neva after nightfall; but such expressions are the mere results of preconceived notions or exaggerated apprehensions. It has happened to me to return home from Waasilije-Ostrow at every hour of the night, and in every season of the year, and I never found cause for the least uneasiness." St Petersburg, Mr Jerrmann thinks, is nearly or quite as safe of nights as Berlin itself. Of the corpses occasionally found in the streets of the former capital, many are erroneously supposed to be the result of violence, when in reality drunkenness was the cause of the deaths. A nap in the streets on a December night is inevitably fatal, in a climate where sentries, enveloped in thick furs, and relieved every hour, sometimes die upon their posts, as happens nearly every winter at Kronstadt. Occasionally, too, a loiterer may be attacked by wolves, although Mr Jerrmann protests against those highly-coloured descriptions of Mr Kohl's, "according to which one might be led to suppose that in every summer-house round St Petersburg, the bears and wolves run about as plentifully as puppies and poodles in German country places. All this belongs to the class of exceptions—nay, so great is the scarcity of wolves at St Petersburg, that when the court on one occasion, to pleasure a foreign prince, got up a wolf-hunt, the witty prince, when the chase was ended, expressed great surprise at the singular breed of the slain savage, round whose neck the hair was rubbed off, exactly as if he had worn a collar." If, in Russia, the poor are more exposed than the rich to death from frost, this is only an indirect consequence of the cold—a more direct one of their love of brandy—for even the very poorest has at least a sheepskin. The better classes wear furs that resist a cold of twenty or more degrees in the open country. They are costly—Mr Jerrmann paid nearly fifty pounds for one—but they last a long time; and when he left St Petersburg, the farrier willingly took his back, after three years' wear, at a very trifling reduction of price.
