Leaving this brilliant scene, I joined the throng on the steps, and by the side of a splendid hussar, stooping his manly figure to whisper in the ears of a lovely young girl, I ascended to the palace and presented my ticket of admission to the bal masqué, so called from their being no masks there. I had not been presented at court, and, consequently, had only admission to the outer apartments with the people. I had, however, the range of a succession of splendid rooms, richly decorated with vases and tazzas of precious stones, candelabra, couches, ottomans, superb mirrors, and inlaid floors; and the centre room, extending several hundred feet in length, had its lofty walls covered to the very ceilings with portraits of all the female beauties in Russia about eighty years ago. I was about being tired of gazing at these pictures of long-sleeping beauties, when the great doors at one end were thrown open, and the emperor and empress, attended by the whole court, passed through on their way to the banqueting-hall. Although I had been in company with the emperor before in the garden, and though I had taken off my hat to the empress, both passed without recognising me. The court at St. Petersburgh is admitted to be the most brilliant in Europe; the dresses of the members of the diplomatic corps and the uniforms of the general and staff-officers being really magnificent, while those of the ladies sparkled with jewels. Besides the emperor and empress, the only acquaintance I recognised in that constellation of brilliantly-dressed people were Mr. Wilkins and Mr. Clay, who, for republicans, made a very fair blaze. I saw them enter the banqueting-hall, painted in oriental style to represent a tent, and might have had the pleasure of seeing the emperor and empress and all that brilliant collection eat; but, turning away from a noise that destroyed much of the illusion, viz., the clatter of knives and forks, and a little piqued at the cavalier treatment I had received from the court circles, I went out on the balcony and soliloquized, "Fine feathers make fine birds; but look back a little, ye dashing cavaliers and supercilious ladies. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, a French traveller in Russia wrote that 'most men treat their wives as a necessary evil, regarding them with a proud and stern eye, and even beating them after.' Dr. Collins, physician to the Czar in 1670, as an evidence of the progress of civilization in Russia, says that the custom of tying up wives by the hair of the head and flogging them 'begins to be left off;' accounting for it, however, by the prudence of parents, who made a stipulative provision in the marriage contract that their daughters were not to be whipped, struck, kicked, &c. But, even in this improved state of society, one man 'put upon his wife a shirt dipped in ardent spirits, and burned her to death,' and was not punished, there being, according to the doctor, 'no punishment in Russia for killing a wife or a slave.' When no provision was made in the marriage contract, he says they were accustomed to discipline their wives very severely. At the marriage the bridegroom had a whip in one boot and a jewel in the other, and this poor girl tried her fortune by choosing. 'If she happens upon the jewel,' says another traveller, 'she is lucky; but if on the whip, she gets it.' The bridegroom rarely saw his companion's face till after the marriage, when, it is said, 'If she be ugly she pays for it soundly, maybe the first time he sees her.' Ugliness being punished with the whip, the women painted to great excess; and a traveller in sixteen hundred and thirty-six saw the grand duchess and her ladies on horseback astride, 'most wickedly bepainted.' The day after a lady had been at an entertainment, the hostess was accustomed to ask how she got home; and the polite answer was, 'Your ladyship's hospitality made me so tipsy that I don't know how I got home;' and for the climax of their barbarity it can scarcely be believed, but it is recorded as a fact, that the women did not begin to wear stays till the beginning of the present century!"