wards, than for the rich designs and
adornments of the handles. All these apparently
trifling specimens are worthy of study by our
workers in metal.

In woodwork, too, the productions of two
or three centuries ago were full of ingenuity
and skill. We never now see made such cabinets,
coffers, and tables as were then produced.
Our workmen could manufacture them,
perhaps, so far as cutting and joining and
polishing are concerned, but the artistic
meaning of the whole is less studied, and
there are few furniture-makers who treat
the carver as a man of genius and high art.
If the encouragement were to strengthen,
the carvers would strengthen also; and it is
in this way that the study of old furniture is
now and then useful. The honesty of the
old works is another merit worthy of attention:
no veneering, no sham; if walnut-
wood it be called, walnut-wood it is, solid
and strong. There are many striking
examples of this nature in the Soulages
collection, some grotesque in adornment, some
graceful, but all exhibiting a definite design
or purpose in the adaptation of ornament to
the primary uses of the articles themselves.
The various modes of inlaying or combining
different kinds of wood, again, were much
more practised in the past days than the
present. The parquetrie, marquetrie, mosaic,
and other varieties of this work, are often
full of beauty in the designs, and always
wrought with conscientious minuteness and
accuracy.

The glass specimens in the Soulages collection
are in many instances exceedingly
curious: rich, both in the twisted and ornate
forms adopted, and in the combination of
coloured with colourless materials. They are
of Venetian origin. Venice, receiving her
early instruction in this art from the
Constantinopolitan or Eastern empire, astonished
all Europe in the sixteenth and. seventeenth
centuries, by her glass bowls, salvers, bottles,
and vessels of various kinds: some with arms
and devices in enamel, some presenting a
jasper-like appearance, some with threads
of colour fused on the exterior of the glass,
some with imbedded mosaics of enamel, some
with coloured glass reeds and threads
imbedded in the body of the crystal, some
with a frosted texture, some with embossed
subjects blown hollow from within, some
with exquisitely minute particles of gold
inserted in regular patterns in the crystal.
Nearly all these varieties are illustrated by
specimens in the Soulages collection. As to
mirrors or looking-glasses, sheets of smooth
glass coated on the hinder surface with an
amalgam of mercury and tinfoil, here we
fairly beat the medievalists hollow; they had
nothing to compare with the productions of
the nineteenth century. They did their best
with metallic mirrors, plates of metal
polished and kept as free as could be from
tarnish. One such, said to have belonged to
Lucrezia Borgia, adorns the collection now
under notice. The mirror is now very dull,
and its elaborately carved frame is full of little
satyrs, griffins, vultures, skeletons, wolves,
and other unpleasant personages, which almost
typify the terrible Lucrezia.

A JOURNEY DUE NORTH.

I BEGIN TO SEE LIFE.

THEY do, certainly certainly, see a great
deal of Life at Heyde's. There is a convivial
phrase, called, "keeping it up," which the
Heydians seem perfectly well acquainted
with, and act upon to a tremendous extent.
If I come home from a ball very late, or
rather very early— say four o'clock in the
morning, I find the jovial men who dwell
at Heyde's just sitting down to supper,
and ordering tankards of strong beer
(they have the genuine Baerisch here, and
it costs thirty copecks— a shilling a pint*),
as a preparative for subsequent sound and
steady drinking. If I emerge from the family
vault, to dine, to smoke, to " coffeecate " myself
or to read the newspapers, still find I the
Heydians keeping it up with unabated and
unwearied joviality. All night long too, at
least whenever I wake during that season
when deep sleep should fall upon men, but
falleth not, alas, upon me!— I hear the
clicking of the balls in the billiard-room, the
shouts of the conquerors, the " Gleich, gleich!"
or " Sitchasse! sitchasse!" (Coming! coming!)
of the waiters. In the morning, going into
the café to breakfast I find the brothers
Barnabay with pale faces and encrimsoned
eyelids, telling dreadful tales of long keeping
it up; and as for Zacharai, he has kept it up,
I imagine, so long that he is now kept down
—in bed— and does not appear at all. finding
this widely spread determination to keep
things up; and being rather tired of loneliness
and keeping my room— or vault— it
occurs to me to keep it up too; so I go into
the public world of Heyde's, and see what it
is made of.

In that rapid, scurrying journey I took
when the two Ischvostchiks brought me here,
I spoke of the spacious apartments I had
traversed. In these the Heydians keep it
up, by night and by day, and in this wise.

There is the Buffet or cafe, call it what

* There is a very excellent beer (Piva) brewed at
Moscow, which is (being Russian) of course abandoned to
the moujiks. Nous autres are very fond of Dublin bottled
stout. At Dominique's café, on the Nevskoï, feeling one
night athirst for beer, I asked for and obtained a pint
bottle of the brown and frothy beverage that has made
the name of Guinness famous all over the world. For
this same pint bottle of beer I was charged the small sum
of one rouble— three and twopence. An English gentleman,
long resident in Russia, and intimately conversant
with things Muscovite, has since told me that I had been
swindled, and that I ought not to have been mulcted
in more than half a rouble. However, I know that I
paid it; and the consciousness of having been cheated
out of fifty copecks did not give me much more
satisfaction than, I imagine, the worthy justice Shallow
experienced when Sir John Falstaff was good enough to
inform him that he owed him a thousand pounds.