Russia. By W. R. Morfill, M.A., Reader in Russian and
Slavonic in the University of Oxford. (Fisher 17nwin.)—This book is, as its author claims, something more than a compilation. It is a careful study of the rise and progress of the Russian people and government founded almost wholly upon native authorities, for the most part of an original character, as original at least as the chronicles of Nestor and his successors. Foreign con- temporary sources are also laid under contribution, and, indeed, are almost the only available sources for the history of a great part of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among these, the most valuable are the diary of Sir Jerome Horsey, English Ambassador at the Court of Ivan the Terrible, the life- long repentant slayer of his son ; the travels of Herberstein, German Envoy to Basil ; Giles Fletcher's " Of the Busse Common- wealth," London, 1591 (to be found, together with the accounts of other English travellers in Russia during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, in a volume of the Haklnyt Series, published by Mr. Delmor Morgan) ; " L'Estat de l'Empire de Russie" (1607), by Jean Margaret, who had been employed by Boris Godunov and the Pretender Demetrius ; and the journal of Patrick Gordon, the Scotch friend of Peter the Great. In addition, the bilini, or native quasi-epics or sagas, are largely drawn upon, and illustrated by extracts. Some of the most interesting of these curious productions were collected by an Oxford graduate, Richard James, who was chaplain to the English merchants at Moscow in 1619. Mr. Morfill translates a portion of one of them, whose subject is the hapless lot of Xenia, the daughter of Boris, under the tyranny of the False Demetrius. A good, though of course all too brief, account is given of Russian literature, which, however, is likely for a long time to come, to be known only through the imperfect —in the case of Russian, extremely imperfect—medium of transla- tions, for the language is not one to be mastered without very con- siderable labour. In common with most writers on Russia, Mr. Morfill sees in Peter the Great the wisest ruler that vast Empire has known. But Peter rather consolidated his own power than provided for the true welfare of the State he governed. He riveted the chains of serfdom, first forged during the sixteenth century, and he instituted the chinornik system, which has been the moral and political death of the Russian people, and from which it is difficult to perceive any constitutional or peaceful escape. The volume is amply illustrated, and as well, perhaps, as its cheapness renders possible.
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