The gardens are full of bowling-greens and restaurants, and while smoking a cigar before one of these restaurants we may enjoy the pleasure of seeing half the magnificoes of the empire move slowly past in their carriages-and-four ; the senators, the star-covered generals, the reverend bishops and metropolitans, the bearded merchants, and the "foreign guests ;" a spectacle of which, often as it is repeated, a St. Petersburger is never weary. The carriages move after a certain prescribed plan the whole day long, like horses in a mill. It is enough to make one giddy to think that all the gay world throughout Russia aie moving about their many thousand towns, at the same pace on the same day. The emperor, whose presence crowns the festival, is generally on horseback, with the princes and a brilliant staff. The St. Petersburgers, who are accustomed to keep all holidays in common with their adored emperor
III the old pajKirs of a merchant of Reval, I read Genuan commercial letters dated from Nyenschanz on the Neva ; and I saw in St. Petersburg an old oaken clothes-press that came from Nyenschanz — the only antiquities, j^erhaps, that St. Petersburg i)osscsscs.
and his court, c annot at all relish ours, where this luminary Is wanting, in whose magnificent presence all appears so much brighter, and whom to admire is the habit of their lives. The arrival of the emperor is looked for as if he were the representative of the spring, and when he has passed by, the throng di-op off one after the other, and go home again, as if the sun liimself had disappeared.
From Catherinenhoff, a series of country-houses stretch along the coast of the gulf to Peterhof and Oranienbaum. In the neighbourhood of the city the coast is low and flat, a part of the inundated Delta of the Neva ; farther on towards the southern shores of the gulf, the coast rises into chalky cliffs, and to an abrupt height of from two to three hundred feet. This part of the coast is called the Klint. West of this Klint lies the cathedral of Reval, further to the east the cascade of the Narova falls from the Klint at nine English miles from the sea, — there is probably nowhere else iu Europe so considerable a waterfall so near the sea ; Peterhof and Oranienbaum lie on the side of the Klint, and a number of garden terraces belonging to private villas descend from it to the sea.
The road to Zarskoye Selo excepted, the Peterhof coast-road is decidedly the liveliest and best inhabited of any in the precincts of St. Petersburg. It is broad, finely paved, with excellent bridges, and granite verst stones. It is a proof of the general monotony that reigns in all things here, that the verst stones are the only landmarks in this desert. People will say, for instance, " We are living this year in the Peterhof road, at the seventh verst ;" or " The Orlof Datsha stands at the eleventh verst ;" " We will breakfast at the Traiteur's at the fourteenth verst ;" as if these milestones were pyramids. But so it is, there are neither valleys, brooks, nor smihng villages wherewith to distinguish places; and people can find their way only by reckoning the milestones.
The centre of Peterhof is the old castle, built by Peter the Great. Although every emperor and empress has made additions and alterations, the character of the whole is the same as that of all the houses built by Peter the Great, the old summer palace, the Menzikoff palace, &c. ; even the yellow colour of the castle is always renewed. Like all the other buildings, its architecture is very insignificant in character, and deserves as little to be mentioned with Versailles, and the other French chateaux which may have served as models, as the Kasan church deserves to be compared with St. Peter's at Rome. Animating as the view is from the lofty coast over the sea, covered with ships of war and merchantmen, it is strange enough that the main front of the castle should be turned landwards. Downwards to the seashore, the garden descends in terraces, adorned with fountains and waterfalls. The basins, the Neptunes, storks, swans, and nymphs, the tritons, dolphins, painted rocks and grottoes, are copied from the engravings in Hushfeld's Art of Gardening ; but we cannot pass the oaks and limetrees planted by Peter himself without reverence. The smaller buildings of Marly and Monplaisir, which lie under these trees, as wings to the larger edifice, remind the beholder, as many a house in the city has done, of the modest domestic arrangements of the carpenter of Saardam, the great reformer of eastern Europe.