As for us, while we recognize its high qualities, the work does not wholly please us. Perhaps we are too old or morose to appreciate and enjoy these rustic jokes, and the comic scenes are perhaps a little coarse for our liking. It may be, too, that the enthusiastic readers of 1832 looked upon life with different eyes from ours; and that it is only the difference in time that biases our opinion. To them this book was wonderfully in advance of its time; to us it seems perhaps somewhat behind. Nothing is more difficult than to estimate what effect a work which is already old (especially if it be written in a foreign language) will produce our readers of to-day. Are we amused by the legend of "La Dame Blanche"? Certainly we are, for everybody enjoys it. Then perhaps the "Ladies of the Lake" of Gogol's book will be amusing.
In 1834 Gogol published his "Evenings near Mirgorod," including a veritable ghost story, terror-inspiring enough to make the flesh creep.
The principal work of this period of the author's career, however, and the one which established his fame, was "Taras Bulba," a prose epic, a poetical description of Cossack life as it was in his grandfather's time. Not every writer of modern epics has been so fortunate as Gogol; to live at a time when he could apply Homer's method to a subject made to his hand; only repeating, as he himself said, the narratives of his grandfather, an
