The Russians of that day appeared to him to be essentially in the imitative stage, both as regards art and letters; and he supports this position by well-chosen examples of pictorial design and by the statistics of the book-trade, contrasting the enormous number of volumes imported with the few original works produced in the country. He was particularly struck by the absence of a middle class. 'In no country,' he says, 'except, perhaps, in Ireland, is the transition from the palace to the cabin more {29} abrupt, or the difference between the peer and the peasant more wide. This is mainly owing to the want of a middle class--that cement of the social state ... which is so indispensable to the wellbeing of a commonwealth. The serf in his sheepskin may walk into the palace of his lord, or may watch by his master's gate; but no feeling in his breast tells him that he is born of the same race or formed for the same purposes. And the great lord, knowing his superiority of birth, education, and descent, looks forth on his horde of slaves with all benignity and kind attention. But it is the affection of a good heart for a noble and faithful beast, whose involuntary service may sometimes command the solicitude of the master, but never the least participation in a single right of fellowship or friendship.'[3] [Footnote 3: Vol. i, pp. 154-155.] And here are the results: 'We see perfectly devised plans of Government placed among a tangled web of complicated and clumsy political institutions. We see one race of men enjoying all the benefits and exhibiting all the graces of enlightened education, while the other and inferior class are sunk in deep ignorance, rudeness, and slavery. We see the palace towering by the cabin, the rod of bondage lying beside the sceptre of righteousness. The rivers flow at one moment among stately fanes and Grecian porticos; at another, wander through the savage forest and uncultivated morass. All is incongruous; the {30} social edifice is yet unbuilt, and the materials for its erection lie in splendid confusion on desert ground.'[4] [Footnote 4: Vol. i, pp. 273-274. It should be remembered that these remarks apply to Russia in 1845.]