At the same time it must be remembered that to an enormous majority of their countrymen Moscow is so intimately bound up with the great crises of their fatherland, such as the occupation by the Poles and their expulsion, and the episode of 1812, and so venerated as the high altar of their faith, that Kief as a capital, in spite of all its sanctity and its remote antiquity, can never in their opinion be more than an academic problem. I have given here a very brief _précis_ of M. Gerebzoff’s talk. But I could wish that some of our statesmen who seem to advocate a return to the Heptarchy could have heard his eloquent advocacy of a united empire. As to that when I was in Russia there were no two schools, no two opinions. Of all the strangely quaint buildings in Moscow—perhaps of the world—the most arresting is the Church of Vassili Blagennii, standing at the entrance to the Kremlin; it was erected by Ivan the Terrible in honour of Basil, the crazy monk of Moscow—the only man who ever dared to rebuke him—and of the victory which wrested Kazan from the Tartars in 1554. Designed by one madman at the command of a second and to the glory of a third, it looks as if it had been planned in an ecstatic mood by the capricious fantasy of King Oberon’s court architect. One can picture to oneself his craftsmen, gnomes, trolls and Nibelungen, busily at work sawing, planing, hammering; shaping stones, beating out iron and gold and silver and copper; fashioning pinnacles and cupolas and towers into weird forms and grotesque combinations; making up a structure unlike anything in Heaven or upon earth, baffling description—something to make a man rub his eyes in wonder and ask himself whether it can be reality or a dream of ghost-land. Clearly the work of a man gay, happy, unrestrained, laughing at all prescribed rule and convention. Strange to say, this weird Saracenic conception was born in an Italian brain in the days of the Rinascimento! When it was finished, and men lifted their hands in wonder, the artist in his folly bragged that this was not to be taken as the measure of his powers, or as having dried up the wellspring of his imagination; he could do better yet. An unwise boast which cost him dear; for lest the eccentricities and beauties that he had fathered should ever, as he threatened, be beaten, the Terrible Tsar promptly caused the poor Italian’s eyes to be put out. Who can account for the wild whims of fancy? Why should the thought of the savage beauty and fateful sadness of this sacred building bring back to my mind without rhyme or reason the memory of a beautiful mad girl who used to wander singing and dancing in the craziest gyrations through the streets of a little country town in France which I knew as a youngster? The thing would be impossible in these days. She was very lovely, but in her loveliness, which had been so cruel to her, there was something weird, something remote and mystic and tragic, that seemed to belong to another sphere.