Leisure Hours in Russia. By Wickham Hoffman. (Bell and Sons.)
—This is a volume of miscellanies of varying merit and interest. The best of them is, or, perhaps we should say, might have been, "Nadeschda," a translation from the Swedish of Raneberg. It might have been, but for the strange vehicle of a verse which halts more than ever verso did before which Mr. Hoffman has chosen to employ. The heroine is a serf-girl ; the time is the reign of Catharine, daughter of Peter the Great. Prince Woldmar loves and marries her ; but she is the object of a wild passion on the part of Dmitri, Woldmar's brother. Dmitri tells his mother, a haqghty lady of the old school, of the marriage. Woldmar is to be banished to Siberia ; the peasant wife, with her two children, is driven out from her home. But Catharine comes on a visit to the old Princess ; discovers that she has been grossly deceived by a painted village, which she sees from the castle windows, and which conceals a set of squalid hovels and a starving population. Hence she is just in the mood to listen to the wife's petition. Altogether, we have a very vigorously-drawn picture of Russian life as it was in the old days of serfdom ; and Catharine acts, at least for once, the graceful part of the benevolent despot. "Russian Superstitions" is, we are thankful to say, a paper written in plain prose. This is full of curious matter. The" Lyeshy," or Russian satyr, a being who drinks, smokes, and plays cards (field-mice and squirrels being his stakes), but will not use clubs, because they are too like the cross, is a very quaint imagination indeed. Among the other papers, we may mention descriptions of St. Peters- burg and Finland, and an account of the great Finnish epic, the " Kalwala."
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