792 Revietvs of Books his latest work ; it is rather a series of connected sketches, in thirteen chapters, "The Land and the People," "Laying the Foundations," "How Russia Became an Autocracy," etc. This method may have the advantage of enabling him to disregard any lack of proportion be- tween his different topics and of allowing a more rhetorical treatment ; but, as a result, the book is neither one thing nor the other. It has not the structure of a good short history, and there are far too many primary facts for a series of essays. The scholar will find nothing in it particu- larly useful, and no method can excuse some of the inaccuracies. !Mr. Noble seems to have meant to write carefully. He has used ex- cellent authorities and evidently has wished to be studiously moderate, though continually indulging in sweeping statements. His belief that "We are thus entitled to regard the autocratic regime in Russia as main- tained not in the interest of the people but in the interest of a ruling class ' ' does not very often crop up to vitiate his impartiality, especially in the earlier part of his work. As one would expect, like most other western liberals, he is not fair to the national Greek Orthodox Church, or to its source, the Byzantine Empire. His broad style of narration, too, leads him to treat controverted and even very doubtful facts as if they were generally accepted truths, as for instance when he calls the princess Tarakanov (p. 91) the daughter of the man he dubs Alexander Alexei Gregorovich Razumovsky (a piling up of names utterly impossi- ble in Russian), and of the Empress Elizabeth. Again, his love of the picturesque makes him forget in the enthusiasm of his description of the baptism of Vladimir's followers (p. 28) that the ceremony took place in the Dnieper not the Volkhov, /. e., near Kiev not Novgorod, in south- ern not northern Russia. To continue our fault-finding, it is hardly worth while to note an oc- casional misplaced accent or questionable transcription ; what we have to criticize is the inaccuracy of many of Mr. Noble's facts. For in- stance he exaggerates the isolating influence of the language in cutting off Russia from the west. Russian is not harder than Polish, nor is it a non-European language like Hungarian ; and even the use of a different script was not such a serious barrier from the rest of the world. Any one can learn the modern simpler Russian alphabet in half an hour. It is a little astonishing, moreover, to find an author who really knows so much about Russia still believing the absurdity (p. 81) that the Urals were ' ' the boundaries thus apparently marked out for them by nature. ' ' The Urals are less of a natural boundary than are the Alleghanies. If jNIr. Noble had read Cahun's Tn re s et Mongols he would scarcely have repeated the old fable of " the enormous numerical superiority" of the Tartars (p. 47), and his statement that "in 1480, the power of the Asiatics was finally brought to an end by Ivan the Terrible, " is to say the least very confusing. Ivan III., whom this must mean, was given the name of the "Terrible," but he is always known as the " Great " and the term " Terrible ' ' has become indissolubly linked with his grand- son Ivan IV. Utterly unpardonable indeed, are such errors as making
