The Snubbo-Celestial form of the Sclavonic Nose stamps its character irretrievably, and accords remarkably with the description of the Sclavonic mind given by Kohl and other recent writers:—“Inconsistent and unstable—wanting in the creative faculty; but we cannot deny them a marvellous aptitude for all kinds of work, and an extreme facility of imitation.”[47] This is just the description a farmer might give of his horse, or a fine lady of her monkey. “The hope of Europe,” says the same author, “from Russian power consists in its total want of vigorous characters, mighty minds, and moral energy.” The pictures which the lively writer Kohl gives of the Russians—their ‘small shrewdness and fox-like common sense,’ their impudent acknowledgment of their shameless cheating and pedlaring dishonesty—accord literally with the indications which we have ascribed to the Celestial Nose; but we must refer the reader to his work on Russia for endless confirmations of our assertion.
Russia may rise above its present animal degradation, but it will never take a high place in the history of civilization. It may be doubted whether it will ever take any station there at all, except when in some future and long distant age, it is recorded, that, like Asia and Africa, Europe fell from its palmy state, and became a heap of ruins before the furious desolation of barbarous swarms from the north.
Napoleon said, with the prophetic vision of old experience, for
“Old experience doth attain To somewhat of prophetic strain,”
that in fifty years Europe would be Republican or Cossack. He only erred in using the disjunctive; for it does not require much penetration to foresee that, at no very distant period, Europe will be both—first Republican, and then, when thus prostrated at the foot of the first powerful despot—Cossack.
For this purpose, it is probable the Sclavonian nations, with hordes of Mongolian Calmucks, and Tartars—the σιμοὶ, or flat-nosed nations of Herodotus—are gathering force and increasing in their vast plains and desolate forests. The scourge of Europe—once the scourge of Asia—is being prepared slowly but surely; and when civilization shall have taken a firm hold of America and the new continents gradually being built up in the Pacific, Europe, having fulfilled its part in the world’s history, will be swept away, and become a byword and a scorn among the nations—‘Ichabod’ will be written on its temples, and the bittern and the owl shall inhabit it; the wild beast of the desert shall lie there, and the dragons in its pleasant palaces.