"SAINT, OR SINNER P"
[To THE EDITOR OF THE" SPECTATOR,"]
SIR,—YOU are not "Notes," and I am not " Queries," but some of your readers may solve me a question, upon some authority which I can accept. What is the name of the chief city of Russia ? The question sounds elementary, but in conversation, at all events, nobody seems to know. Or rather, as usual in conversation, everybody knows ; but no two people knot in the same way. All the Britons (telegrams included) call the place St. Petersburg ; all the French, 1 believe, Petersburg. It was
certainly built by, and canal after, Czar Peter, whom I imagine to have been as little like St. Peter as anybody can well be. Some very remarkable letters in the Times a year or two ago, by some outsider (" ant Freeman, ant Diabolus," I thought), ridiculed the English fashion, as against the French (a nation much more exact of true scholarship than ours is), of calling Czar Peter's city St. Petersburg. Which authority I adopted, and stated that only Englishmen so called the place. Whereupon I was at once confronted by an Ind,ependance Beige, which called it" St. Petersbourg," without variation. I consulted a friend, who said that " Petersburg " was a mere traveller's familiarity, and "St. Petersburg" the proper name, the city baying been christened after St. Peter and St. Paul. Why not "St. Peter and Paul's-burg," then, after the usual precedent of the sweet Zanipolo (Giovanni e Paolo) of Venetian Italy ?
On the other hand, a young lady of the modern-educational school, whom I at once consulted, as more likely to know than anybody, assured me that all her professors taught her to speak of "Petersburg," and to laugh at the conventional ignorance of the British newspaper. Which, then, on genuine authority, is right ? One must be very wrong.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Eastbourne, Tune 4th. HERMAN HERIVALE.
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