Though no such impression could well be sustained in the streets of a great modern city, the first view of the Swedish capital suggests nothing so much as an enchanted town, the capital of fairyland in the middle of a wood that one dreamed about as a little child. [Illustration] CHAPTER X ST. PETERSBURG What must the man have been who, born and bred in this atmosphere, conceived and by one tremendous wrench, almost by his own manual labour and his own sole gigantic strength, executed the prodigious idea of dragging the nation, against its will, into the light of Europe, and erecting a new capital and a new empire among the cities and kingdoms of the world. St. Petersburg is indeed his most enduring monument. A spot up to that time without a single association, selected instead of the Holy City to which even now every Russian turns as to his mother; a site which but a few years before had belonged to his most inveterate enemies, won from morass and forest, with difficulty defended, and perhaps even yet doomed to fall before the inundations of its own river.--DEAN STANLEY. Russia, or Garthrealm, was not outside the circuit of saga lands. The _Heimskringla_ indeed has much to tell us concerning it in days when the country formed a most hospitable refuge for those in trouble at home. And at one time or other most prominent men of the viking age were in that uncomfortable position. Of the Slavs themselves, indeed, we do not learn a great deal. The saga writers were not much interested in foreign countries except as they affected the Norse, but the regard for law in Russia evidently made an impression, as did also the respect entertained for woman there, at any rate as she was represented by the queen. The chief town of Russia in those days was called by the Norsemen Holmgarth, because it stood on an island, to the Slavs it was known as Novgorod, or new town, although about the oldest we wot of in the land. It became in rather later days the eastern outpost of Hansa trade (p. 155). Russia herself, like Normandy, was originally a Scandinavian state, and there seems to be little doubt that the name Russ was originally applied to the Norse. Even to-day the Finns know the Swedes as Ruotsi.[132] Thus Ruric and his viking followers[133] gave a name to the Slavs of the North, even as Bulgars from Asia named a portion of the Slavs of the South and the German Franks gave a new designation to Gaul. In all three cases the conquerors who gave a new name to the conquered received from them language and nearly everything else. It is quite possible, however, that Scandinavian vigour was potent in giving to northern Slavland that political unity which neither Mongol domination, nor the long lapse of centuries nor a series of drunken and incapable monarchs ever succeeded in breaking up. While the disastrous failure of the southern Slavs to unite is patent to the whole earth.