Page:Notes upon Russia (volume 1, 1851).djvu/29



the following “Notes upon Russia” are presented to the reader as the earliest description of that country, the statement, though substantially and for all essential purposes correct, must not be allowed to pass without a word of modification. As we shall presently take occasion to show, the Baron Sigismund von Herberstein was preceded by numerous travellers to Russia, the record of whose peregrinations could scarcely have been handed down to us without some slight allusion to the character of the country they visited; yet from none of them have we received anything that could with reason be referred to as an authentic description of the country and its people, derived, as all such descriptions should be, from lengthened personal observation and industrious inquiry. The present work, however, which embodies the experience and observations of a sagacious and pains-taking man, during two periods of residence, in all about sixteen months, in Moscow, as ambassador from the Emperor of Germany to the Tzar, has won for its author so high a reputation for correctness and minuteness of detail, that he has been thought