94 BY ORDER OF THE CZAR.
tale of sorrow, and the more so if he could suggest it with his brush. He was like a musician who dramatizes events and emotions in musical rhapsodies, only that he tried to put them on canvas, and he confessed to Chetwynd that the incidents of so-called Irish rebellion did not inspire him with a single subject worth painting. On the other hand, the struggle of Liberty with Tyranny in Russia ennobled the cause of Freedom; it made men heroes, it made women divine.
How far these feelings and opinions were the outcome of serious reflection or the evanescence of an artistic habit of thought, influenced by a poetic temperament and fostered by the conversations of Dick Chetwynd, must be left to the judgment of the reader and the elucidation of events. Not only had Philip heard his father speak of the shameless dishonesty of Russian officials, the barbarism of the Russian law in the matter of political offences, in regard to which the English law is so especially lenient, but he imbibed from some of his mother's foreign visitors a desperate hatred of Russia. He knew by heart the story of Poland, the disabilities of Russian serfdom freed only to have to endure worse hardships than slavery; he had heard from their own lips some of the horrors endured by political prisoners, though it was a perpetual wonder to him how any of the refugees he had met could ever have escaped Russian vigilance, without the talismanic assistance of gold.
When he thought of the struggles of brave men for constitutional rights in Russia, of their desperate plots, and their fiendish punishments, he found no word of defence against Chetwynd's impeachment of more than one of his mother's Irish friends, who were enjoying all the freedom of the crowned Republic of England, living luxuriously in her great metropolis, and still prating of her tyranny and oppression, and who, the time being opportune, would be
