Chateaubriand pays a similar compliment to the German people:--“I love Germany; I admire its domestic virtues and its hospitable manners; its poetic and religious sentiments, and its love for science. Amongst the Germans we feel that invincible power that conceals the _positiveness_ of the world and the _prosaism_ of life.” In Russia duels very rarely took place, a circumstance which in a great measure may be attributed to the ferocity of their princes, who not only saw the penal laws executed, but not unfrequently acted themselves as executioners: a fact illustrated by Peter I, who gave the signal for the judicial massacre of the revolted Strelitz, his Pretorian guards, by seizing an axe and striking off the heads of a hundred of his victims. The gross and brutal conduct of the Russian autocrat towards women was imitated by his court and the people; and it can scarcely be expected that a nice sense of honour can prevail in the minds of men who only punished infidelity by a bastinade inflicted on both the offending parties, and who usually testified their affection by submitting the object of their love to the _knout_,--indeed, the fair sex of Muscovy considered this infliction as a gallantry on the part of their husbands; nor could their sense of delicacy be very acute, when we find their Empress kneeling at the shrine of the Virgin and St. Nicholas, to ask from what company of her guards she was to select her favourite paramour. The Russian laws against duelling were most severe. In the military penal code of Peter I. it was ordered, that whoever provoked another to fight a duel should be hanged, whether the duel took place or not; that the seconds should suffer the same punishment, unless they exerted themselves to prevent the meeting. That in the case of any dispute, or blow being given, the aggressor was to ask pardon of the offended party in presence of the military tribunal; and that whoever should slap another’s face was to submit to a public retaliation. In the code of Catherine we find, in the 234th article, the following view of the subject:--“As to duelling, the best mode of preventing it is to punish the aggressor, and to declare the innocence of the man who, without any fault of his own, has found himself under the necessity of avenging his honour.” We also find in an ukase of Catherine the following enactment:-- “Whoever insults or strikes a citizen with an _unarmed hand_, shall forfeit the amount of whatever yearly tax the citizen pays to the state. Whoever insults or injures the wife or the daughter of a citizen, shall pay double the amount for the wife, and four times the amount for the daughter, of the annual tax the father or husband pays to the state.”