While the Third Section attacked personal security and liberty, the censorship, more intolerable still, hemmed in the spirit and condemned to a death by inanition a young people hungry for literature and science, for plays, periodicals, and books. Mutilated as it is, the newspaper is bread to the soul of the Russian. The Russian press, like all the obstacles that absolute power finds in its way, was founded by one of their imperial civilizers, Peter the Great, and it maintained a purely literary character until the reign of Alexander II., when it took a political form. Under the iron hand of the censor, the Russian press has learned the manner and artifices of the slave; in allusions, insinuations, retentions, and half-meanings it is an adept, for only so can it convey all that it is forbidden to speak. It must emigrate and recross the frontier as contraband in order to speak freely. The censor lies ever in ambush like a mastiff ready to bite; and sometimes its teeth clinch the most inoffensive words on the page, the most innocent page in the book, the librettos of operas, as for example "The Huguenots" and "William Tell." In 1855 certain literary works were exempted from the previous censure, but this beneficence was not extended to the periodical press. The newspapers of St. Petersburg and Moscow were open to a choice between the new and old systems, between submitting to the rule of the censor and a deluge of denunciations, seizures, suspensions, and suppressions; and they willingly chose the former. So the Russian press exists under an entirely arbitrary sufferance, and according as the political scales rise and fall they are allowed to-day what was prohibited yesterday, and sometimes their very means of sustenance are cut off by an embargo on certain numbers or the proscription of advertisements. If a liberal minister is to the fore, times are prosperous; if there is a reaction, they are crushed to death. This accounts for the popularity of the secret press, which is at work even in buildings belonging to the crown, in seminaries and convents, and in the very laboratory of dynamite bombs. Books are as much harassed as periodicals. The Russians, being very fond of everything foreign, sigh for books from abroad, especially those that deal with political and social questions; but the censor has custom-houses at the frontier, and the officials, with the usual perspicacity of literary monitors, finally let slip that which may prove most dangerous and subversive, and exercise their zeal upon the most ingenuous. They have even cut off the _feuilletines_ of thousands of French papers,--what patience it must have required to do it!--while Madame Gagneur's novel, "The Russian Virgins," passed unmutilated. I wonder what would be the fate of my peaceful essays should they receive the unmerited honor of translation and reach the frontiers of Muscovy!