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Of this too they had only one portion, yet the supply seemed to be ample; and it was the same with the sweet, a sort of highly-seasoned rice-pudding. The whole party had as much as they could eat, they said, and they waxed quite enthusiastic in their praise of every dish. The cost of the dinner, including a large pot of tea and an unlimited supply of bread, was about a shilling. "I could not have made the dinner at home for the money," the woman declared. Yet this restaurant is practically self-supporting, a notable proof of what may be done in the catering line by careful organization and good management, even when intoxicants are banished.

In the Concert Hall, which is a most popular resort, military bands play from time to time, and in the intervals entertainments of various kinds from acrobat shows upwards are given-negroes sing their ditties there, clowns make their jokes and Chinamen swallow swords. What is aimed at here is amusement pure and simple, for the members of the Committee, being wise in their generation, boldly face the fact that among their clients are some with tastes the reverse of refined, and with a rooted objection to everything that smacks even remotely of edification. It is for the benefit of such people as these that the variety show is provided, and they certainly appreciate the attention. Russians are not as a race prone to laughter, still I heard more laughter in that hall than anywhere else in the country.

This Nicholas II. variety show is undoubtedly a useful institution; quite a fair percentage of the men who pass their holiday there would, were they not there, be drinking vodka. Still it is not an institution of which the Committee is proud, whereas of the Nicholas II. theatre it is honestly proud and with good reason. The theatre is huge, there are seats there for some 2,000

spectators and standing room besides for a legion; and although some few of the seats, those intended for casual visitors, cost 4s. 4d. each, there are many others in all respects as good that cost 6d.; others again that cost only 21⁄2d.; while standing room costs nothing at all. In judging of these prices it must be remembered that tickets for the ordinary theatres cost more than twice as much in St. Petersburg as in London.

The Nicholas II. Theatre was crowded the last time I was there,-it was during the Carnival, and there were 20,000 persons in the Dom. Every seat was secured in advance, and there was not an inch of standing room long before the curtain went up. The play was Peter the Great, and the acting was remarkably good even to the smallest rôle; for the Committee has a company of its own-or rather two companies, for it gives operas alternately with plays-every member of which is carefully chosen and trained. These artistes are most of them quite young-"Stars" are of course for financial reasons out of the question-but they all have talent for their calling. Their dresses were tasteful, and some of them exceedingly beautiful; while the scenery, although simple, was in every respect appropriate. Evidently the play appealed in a quite special degree to the audience, for even the roughest among them followed it with close attention. Some of them indeed were quite transformed as they listened; there was real distress in their faces when the hero's plans seemed going a-gley; and their eyes glowed with excitement when he finally put his foes to rout. They sat as if spellbound so long as each scene lasted, and then shook the very building with their applause. Never have I seen a more appreciative audience, or one more enthusiastic. When the play was over they turned to one another eagerly

comparing notes and discussing its bearing. Evidently the theatre serves its purpose admirably, if that purpose be to put new ideas into the heads of those who frequent it, and give them something to think about.

The Nicholas II. is not the only theatre the St. Petersburg Committee owns; it has another in a poor district on the opposite side of the city, but this it opens only three times a week. It has also theatres in the Tauride Gardens and the Petrowsky Park which it opens in summer; while during the winter it gives dramas and even operas in the Michel Manège. On every holiday, it organizes in the different suburbs popular fêtes with music, and, when possible, with outdoor sports; and caters with much care and judgment for those who go there, providing them with all sorts of drinks excepting vodka. Then it is trying an interesting experiment in the great workingclass district that lies just behind the Alexander Nevsky Lavra Monastery. It has organized there a great hotel, a sort of Rowton House, with a restaurant attached, where men are decently lodged for 14d. a night, and both boarded and lodged for 6d. a day. It has organized tea-rooms, too, in different parts of the city, and has even bought two ships to serve as people's kitchens. These are floated about to wherever food may be most required. On one of these ships I found, on a Sunday afternoon, the very poorest crowd I ever saw in St. Petersburg. They were real Mujiks, every one of them, men who had just drifted in from the country. None of them could afford to buy anything but tea and bread; nor could they have afforded to buy even that had they had to pay ordinary restaurant prices.

Although the special characteristic of the St. Petersburg Committee is the vigor with which it throws itself into the task of providing amusement and

cheap food, this is by no means the be-all and end-all of its work. It has opened twelve reading-rooms, as well as two libraries, and it intends before long to open many more; and during the winter months it organizes classes and arranges for lectures to be given. It has devised a method of its own of teaching history by means of tableaux vivants; and of teaching temperance by pictures and pamphlets in which the evils that result from excessive drinking are depicted in quite Zolaesque colors. It is doing much good work too among children, especially among the street urchin class, its pet protégés. It makes its influence felt indeed in all directions, and always for good. And what this Committee and that in Moscow are doing other Committees are doing, in a lesser degree, in every town in the Empire, and throughout the country. In most villages now there is a comfortable tea-room where the peasants may resort whenever they choose and find newspapers and books awaiting them. There is someone or other in the district, too, whose special business it is to bring within their reach pleasures better worth having than vodka drinking.

Considering the work they are doing these Committees are not expensive luxuries. In theory they each receive from the Government at least 50,000 roubles; but one Committee solemnly assured me, a few months ago, that it had never received a penny and was supporting its tea-room out of its own pocket; while several were emphatic in their declarations that M. de Witte is the veriest Pharaoh-he expects them to make bricks without straw. The truth of the matter seems to be that whereas to large towns money is given freely, to small towns and villages it is given but grudgingly. The St. Petersburg Committee has certainly been treated with exceptional generosity, for it received for the erection and

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organization of the Dom Nicholas II. alone more than a million roubles, and has besides an annual allowance of nearly 300,000 roubles. The Moscow Committee too has good reason to be content with its lot, for its annual allowance is 300,000 roubles, while that of Warsaw is 100,000. In 1900 M. de Witte handed over to the Committees collectively nearly 4,000,000 roubles, and last year he gave them considerably more, how much more is not yet known. And this he could well afford to do, seeing that the yield of the vodka monopoly brought into his coffers already in 1897, 20,375,000 roubles, and is expected to bring into them this year nearly five times that amount.

Russian Temperance Committees are not ideal institutions; they have their faults, of course; still they are undoubtedly doing much useful work, work which will make its influence felt more and more from year to year. For they are not only fighting against intemperance but they are fighting for civilization, for a higher standard of The Contemporary Review.

life among the workers, for their social and intellectual development. They are striving too, so far as in them lies, to introduce purple patches into dull, grey existences, and thus render this world of ours a pleasanter place than it is. And this in itself is a work of real charity. It is a great thing for a nation to have, as Russia has, thousands of men and women bonded together for the express purpose of giving a helping hand to the poor, of removing stones from the path of the weak, and rendering life all round better worth living. As I went about among the Moscow workers and saw them in their great dining-halls, with their well-cooked dinners before them, I often wished that English workers were as well catered for as these Russians are. I often wished, too, when in St. Petersburg, that London had, as that city has, its pleasure resorts for the poor, its people's theatres, nay even its variety shows with performing Chinamen and ditty-singing negroes. Edith Sellers.

RUSKIN'S BIBLES.

Ruskin et la Bible-who would have expected it?-is the title of a French book, written by a science professor, and published in Paris.

We all know that his works, from "Modern Painters" to "Præterita," are full of the Bible. Sometimes his allusions and quotations are merely ornamental, and sometimes his remarks are sharp enough to pain the reader; for Ruskin went through many phases of faith, or, rather, through a long period of doubt, from which he came, in his later years, into a new and very simple acceptance of the Christian hope. But at all times he took the

Bible seriously, and in many a passage he has made its thoughts and stories live for us with marvellous reality. Hear him tell the Death of Moses or the Call of Peter in those well-known pages of his masterpiece, or follow him in "Fors" through unpalatable deductions from neglected commands, and you cannot but feel that he was a great preacher, "a man of one book," and that book was the Bible.

How he was brought up upon it he tells us in his autobiography. In Coniston Museum not the least interesting of the Ruskin relics is the Bible from which, as he noted on the fly-leaf, his

mother taught him the paraphrases. Turning it over, one sees how the parts he has named as especially studied, Psalm cxix. above all, have been soiled; for even little John Ruskin, model of home-bred boys, was like Tommy Grimes the scamp-he couldn't always be good-and continual thumbing embrowns the page.

It was his mother to whom he owed this early training in a close knowledge of the text, "without note or comment." This was her Bible in the earlier days. Later in life she laid the somewhat worn volume aside for a new one, given her, as her husband notes in it, "at Dover, 13 May, 1858"; and a bearded thistle-head is fastened for a memento on the fly-leaf. To the end of her life she read in it every day, and every day learned two verses by heart; she has pencilled on the margins the dates in her last two years, 1870 and 1871; and after the daily reading she always put the volume away in its yellow silk bag with purple strings. This curious habit of dating came out also in her son's old age; perhaps the modern psychologist will diagnose in it some form of degeneracy, but in old times dates were important from a lingering respect for astrology, which is betrayed-most likely unintended-in the precision with which John Ruskin's father noted the exact hour of his birth. It is in a Baskett Bible of 1741, with engraved title-page, and a pencil drawing, probably by John in his boyhood, stuck in as a sort of frontispiece, a copy from a picture of Jesus Mocked, and opposite to it is written: "John Ruskin, son of John James Ruskin and Margaret Ruskin, Born 8 February 1819 at 1⁄2 past 7 o'clock Morning. Babtized (sic) 20 Feby 1819 by the Revd Mr. Boyd" -the father, I understand, of "A.K.H. B." To emphasize the Scottish character of the family one may note that this volume has bound up with it at

the end "The Psalms of David in Meeter," printed at Edinburgh, 1738. It is most curious that Mr. J. J. Ruskin, a distinctly well-educated man, should have made the mistake in spelling, and carried on the old tradition of providing material for the horoscope.

Another Baskett Bible of 1749, nicely re-bound in old red morocco, handsomely tooled, bears the family's earliest register. It is written in a big, unscholarly hand in the blank space of the last page of Maccabees; for this volume contained an Apocrypha, and the page becoming worn, it was stuck down on the cover. "John Ruskin, Baptized April 9th, 1732 O.S." (i.e., 1733 new style), and then follow the children of this John, with dates and hours of birth, among whom is John Thomas, born October 22, 1761, the father of John James, the father of John. Like many other remarkable men who owed their fame to their powers rather than to their circumstances, Ruskin came of a line of decent, respectable, bourgeois folk, who read their Bibles, "feared God, and took their own part when required.”

His earliest literary training, so to say, was closely connected with Bible study: for every Sunday he had to take notes of the sermon and write out a report of the discourse. One of his childish sermon-books is preserved in the Coniston Museum, and as one turns its pages, one notes the care of writing and choice of wording insisted upon. In the stories and verses with which he amused himself, he learned a good deal of freedom and ease: in these he learned dignity of style, a corrective to boyish flippancy. Also he got the habit of thinking with his pen, so that he nearly always scribbled when most people would only meditate. His father's Bible (a small pica 8vo, Oxford edition of 1846, finely re-bound in tawny leather, gilt) was used by him in later times, and sidelined vigorous

ly; all the blank spaces are scribbled

over with the thoughts that came as he read. He did this even in his most valuable ancient manuscripts, to the scandal of bibliophiles; but he thought of his books as things to use, and he used them in his own way.

There is a grand Old Testament in Greek M.S.; the back is lettered "tenth century," but Dr. Caspar René Gregory, who spent some time in examining the books at Brantwood, pointed out that the Greek date for 1463 could be dimly seen, printed off from the lost last leaf. It was bound in vellum in or after 1817, to judge from the watermark in the fly-leaves; and the pages, a little waterstained, are written large and quaint with the reed pen, and adorned with strips of painted pattern and Byzantine portraits of the authors of the books-Solomon as a young king, Isaiah and the prophets in varying phases of grey-bearded dignity and elaborate robes of many colors, rather coarsely but very richly painted. Such a book to most would be quite too sacred for anything but occasional turning with careful finger-tips, or a paperknife delicately inserted at the outer margin of the leaves; not to say, too crabbed in its contractions and old style calligraphy to be read with ease. But Ruskin read it, and annotated as he read. He did the same with the Greek Psalter in the Coniston Museum; he did it still more copiously, and in ink, not merely in erasable pencil, in his most valuable tenth-century Greek Gospels, or rather Book of Lessons, and with a frankness most interesting. I am very far from saying that this is a practice to be imitated; but any one who wishes to follow Ruskin in his more intimate thoughts on the Bible, at the time of crisis in 1875 when he was busy on this book, and when he was beginning to turn from the agnostic attitude of his middle life to the old-fashioned piety of his age

any one who wants to get at his mind would find it here.

Some of the remarks merely comment on the grammatical forms, or the contractions, or the style of writing. Where a page is written with a free hand, evidently to the scribe's enjoyment, he notes the fact; and likewise where the scribe found it dull, and penned perfunctorily. That is quite like him, to ask how the man felt at his work! But there are many curious hints of questioning, and then confessions of his doubts about the doubts, that go to one's heart to read. "I have always profound sympathy with Thomas," he scribbles. "Well questioned, Jude!" "This reads like a piece of truth (John xviii. 16). How little ⚫one thinks of John's being by, in that scene!" "The hour being unknown, as well as unlooked for (Matt. xxiv. 42), the Lord comes, and the servant does not know that He has-(and has his portion, unknowingly?)." To the cry for Barabbas (Matt. xxvii. 20) he adds, "Remember! it was not the mob's fault, except for acting as a mob"; and to verse 24 (Pilate washing his hands) -"How any popular electionist or yielding governor can read these passages of Matthew and not shrivel!" Then, on the parable of the vine, the earlier note to the verse about the withered branch cast into the fire and burned-"How useless! and how weak and vain the whole over-fatigued metaphor!" But then-"I do not remember when I wrote this note, but the 'overfatigued metaphor' comes to me to-day, 8th Nov. 1877, in connection with the καθὼς ἠγάπησε, as the most precious and direct help and life." You remember John xv. 9: "As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you; continue ye in my love." That word was the help and life he found.

He used to read his Latin Bibles too, but most of these were collected rather for their artistic value than otherwise.

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