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Calrnucks with flat features are still brought up in the houses of the Russian nobility, as if to preserve a specimen of those Tartars who were conquered by the Sclavonians. In the palace of Narischkin there were two or three of these half-savage Calmucks running about.
The jugglers, tumblers, and Calmucks still occupied their old place under the gallery, but their performances were of a highly decorous character. At the least-sign of a relapse into certain old tricks, more grotesque than refined, the brows of Prince Alexis would grow dark, and a sharp glance at Sasha was sufficient to correct the indiscretion.
At the northern and eastern end of the same line there live the most brachycephalic, orthognathous, straight-haired, yellow-skinned of men the Tartars and Calmucks. The two ends of this imaginary line are indeed, so to speak, ethnological antipodes.
They are the ear-mark of a roving, careless, selfish population, which thinks only of mill-privileges, and never of pleasant meadows, which has built the ugliest dwellings and the biggest hotels of any nation, save the Calmucks, over whom reigns the Czar.
They are easily put into disorder and hard to recover out of it. They frequently kill their officers in their fear and murder one another in their confusion." "Nothing, I think, can hurt their discipline it is at its worst. They shall drink and swear, plunder and murder, with any troops in Europe, the Cossacks and Calmucks themselves not excepted."
The reign of independent Barbarism is now contracted to a narrow span; and the remnant of Calmucks or Uzbecks, whose forces may be almost numbered, cannot seriously excite the apprehensions of the great republic of Europe.
They are, in fact, the slaves of their caprice, often ill-treated by them, and sometimes even put to death. The Calmucks are considered as remarkably lenient in their conduct to the women: but fathers dispose of their daughters without their consent, and even antecedently to their birth. Their chiefs and princes have, besides, large harems or seraglios where domestic rivalship imbitters existence.
Friedrich, by degrees, has considerably changed his opinion, and bent towards the late Keith's, about Russian Soldiery: a Soldiery of most various kinds; from predatory Cossacks and Calmucks to those noble Grenadiers, whom we saw sit down on the Walls of Schweidnitz when their work was done.
After an orgy of Martial Law the Scottish General, Abercromby, Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, wrote: "Every crime, every cruelty that could be committed by Cossacks or Calmucks has been transacted here.... The abuses of all kinds I found can scarcely be believed or enumerated." Lord Holland recalls that many people "were sold at so much a head to the Prussians."
Twelve thousand of them rushed straggling through the Eichsfeld; plundering and harrying, like Cossacks or Calmucks: "Army blown asunder, over a circle of forty miles' radius," writes St.