literature. Each masterpiece has its political tendencies, is written with a purpose. Already, sixty years ago, the "Revizor" of Gogol was a blow dealt at bureaucracy. His "Dead Souls," as well as Turgenev's "A Sportsman's Sketches," are an attack on serfdom. Turgenev's novel, "Fathers and Sons," is an analysis of nihilism. Dostoevsky's "The House of the Dead" is a revelation of the horrors of Siberian convict life. And to take the work of the two men, who in both countries have had the most magnetic influence—would it be possible to imagine a writer more like Rousseau than Tolstoy? No doubt Tolstoy is by far the more consistent thinker, the stronger personality, the nobler character, and the more creative and more original artist, indeed the most original artist the world has seen since Shakespeare; but apart from these personal characteristics, the work of the two men presents the most extraordinary similarity, and the influence of the one on the other is obvious and openly admitted by Tolstoy himself. In both we find the same extreme doctrines preached with the same earnestness and passionateness, the same subjective individualism, the same unexpected interpretation of Christianity, the
