NOVOGOROD. 
27 
themselves Saints, and were worshipped by CI ^ P - 
their followers. The pictures they had brought 
were then suspended in the churches, and 
regarded as the most precious relics. Many 
of them, preserved now in Russia, are con- 
sidered as having the power of working mi- 
racles. It would then necessarily follow, that, 
with new preachers, new pictures must be 
required. The Russians, characterized at this Manner of 
1 . imitating 
day by a talent of imitation, although without them in 
a spark of inventive genius, strictly observed 
not only the style of the original painting, but 
the manner of laying it on, and the substance 
on which it was placed. Thus we find, at 
the end of the eighteenth century, a Russian 
peasant placing before his Bogh a picture, 
purchased in the markets of Moscow and 
Petersburg, exactly similar to those brought 
from Greece during the tenth; the same stiff 
representation of figures which the Greeks 
themselves seem to have originally copied from 
works in Mosaic, the same mode of mixing 
and laying on the colours on a plain gold 
surface, the same custom of painting upon 
wood, and the same expensive covering of a 
silver coat of mail ; when, from the multitude 
and cheapness of such pictures, the precaution 
at first used to preserve them is no longer 
necessary. In other instances of their religion. 
