The only kind of bergere that the Messrs. Gamb have excluded from their magazine is that in which man enjoys the softest and most undisturbed of all slumbers — his coffin. Many other magazines furnish them in abundance. These melancholy commodities are piled up by hundreds for all religions, ranks, and ages ; black with golden crosses for the protestants; brown and lig-ht colours for the Russians of the Greek church ; small rose-coloured ones, with white lace, for young girls ; azure blue for boys. As the dead are always laid out immediately in Russia, coffins must be kept ready made, and in considerable numbers, to aiford a choice. There are about 250 wine and beer cellars in St. Petersburg. Those only frequented by the lower classes have any thing interesting or characteristic about them. Here are sold beer, mead, spirituous liquors, and bad wine, and here also people say what they think of themselves and of the pictures that adorn the walls. These pictures offer the stranger many facilities for studying the national character of the Russians. In the most glaring colours are represented the ideas of the lower-classes on the most important subjects of human thought; the Deity, heaven, hell, the soul, and the creation of the world, without some reference to which, steeped as they are in fanaticism and ascetic practices, they would not venture even to swallow a mouthful of beer. These kind of tap-rooms are usually papered with such pictures like a show-box. The study of them is the more interesting because they are in general very old, and witli many of them not the slightest deviation fi'om old established types is ever permitted. They are generally the production of the church painters of Moscow and Kieif, in which cities, under the shadow of the most ancient and most sacred temples of Russia, this kindred branch of industry is stUl in high preservation, and the fancy they display is exceedingly lively and orientally grotesque. You may see, for example, the day of creation depicted on an enormous scale. On the upper part Chaos is represented by dark, vigorous strokes ; morass, water, and unformed masses of rock in fearful confusion ; over it lowers a thick dark cloud, made palpable by a single stroke of the brush ; in the midst hovers the Creator under the physiognomy of a Russian priest, from whose mouth proceeds the creative, " Be thou," scrawled in the old Slavonian character ; and beneath it the sun and the stars glide out of Chaos, the sun closely resembUng a Medusa's head, attended by the moon and the seven greater planets. By every star its name is written in the Slavonian character. All the other stars are running after a solid blue beam, which represents the firmament. They revolve, sun and all, about the earth, of which a portion, the Garden of Eden, is indicated on the lower part of the canvass, and on it smiles the sun, his rays indicated by a multitude of yellow stripes crossing one another. On either side over Paradise, clouds are heaped ; from one half fall thick spots as hlaclc as Ink, near which is written, " rain," and out of the other an equally generous allowance of white dabs, with " snow," written in great letters on the other side ; for a Russian can hardly picture to himself Paradise without snow. Round about Paradise runs a garland of mountains, some of whose summits reach the stars. The less a Russian knows of mountains, the more liberally his fancy paints them. The edges of the mountains are abundantly sprinkled with flowers, of every colour of the rainbow, and almost as big as the mountains themselves. Betw^een every two flowers stands regularly a tree, the tree sometimes overshadowing the flowers, and sometimes the flowers overshadowing the tree, and near them several times inscribed the words, "the blooming flowers, the blooming flowers." In the middle of the garden, Adam and Eve are kneeling, a Russian and his wife ; close to them, a fountain, breathed on by two swollen -cheeked cherub-heads, signifying the air, and dancing over It, a gigantic will-o'-the-wIsp Indicating fire. All around, in the tumultuous excitement of creation's dawn, all the creatures of nature and fancy seem to be bellowing ; all the birds, real and unreal, the elephant, the lion, the unicorn, the seducing serpent, the leviathan, the hare, the carp, the fish of Jonas, the four beasts of the Apocalypse, rats and mice. The whole picture Is in a frame of arabesques of wreaths and heads of saints and angels.
In this style all the pictures are done. Mount Athos, so renowned in the Russian Greek church. Is never represented with less than a himdred and fifty churches and convents on it, and every church has at least a dozen cupolas. When Mount Sinai is represented, it Is like Pellon on Ossa, and Ossa on Olympus ; a column of mountains with an exceedingly pointed summit reaching to Sirlus with Moses on the top.