This work is not to be regarded as an authority on political, military or social questions connected with that vast empire, which, to most Englishmen, is a sealed book, for it has been chiefly compiled from rough, and hitherto unpublished notes, casually jotted down during my travels throughout European and Asiatic Russia. These wanderings amount in the aggregate to over miles, and I may therefore, perhaps, claim to Speak with some authority on the conditions of life in a country where I have passed, with intervals, nearly four years of my life.