But the most essential quality of Dostoevsky's creative art is the psychical analysis, which occupies the foreground in the majority of his romances, and constitutes their chief power and value. A well-known alienist doctor, who has examined these romances from a scientific point of view, declares himself amazed by the scientific accuracy wherewith Dostoevsky has depicted the mentally afflicted. In his opinion, about one-fourth of this author's characters are more or less afflicted in this manner, some romances containing as many as three who are not normal, in one way or another. This doctor demonstrates that Dostoevsky was a great psychopathologist, and that, with his artistic insight, he anticipated even exact science. And much that he has written will certainly be incorporated in psychological text-books. It is superfluous, after such competent testimony, to insist upon the life-likeness and the truth to nature of his portraits. The effect of his books on a reader is overwhelming, even stunning and nerve-shattering. One further point is to be noted: that notwithstanding the immense number of characters presented to the reader by Dostoevsky, they all belong to a very limited number of types, which are repeated, with slight variations, in all his romances. Thus, in conformity with the doctrine of the "native-soilers," he places at the foundation of the majority of his works one of the two following types: (1) The gentle type of the man overflowing with tender affection of utter self-sacrifice, ready to forgive everything, to justify everything, to bear himself compassionately towards the treachery of the girl he loves, and to go on loving her, even to the point of removing the obstacles to her marriage with another man, and so forth. Such is the hero of "Crime and Punishment"; such is Prince Myshkinh in "The Idiot," and so on; (2) The rapacious type, the type of the egoist, brimming over with passion, knowing no bounds to his desires, and restrained by no laws, either human or divine. Such are: Stavrogin in "Devils," Dmitry Karamazoff ("The Karamazoff Brothers"), and so forth. His women also can be divided into two similar, contrasting types; on the one hand, the gentle--the type of the woman who possesses a heart which is tender and loving to self-abnegation, like Nelly and Natasha, in "Humiliated and Insulted"; Raskolnikoff's mother and Sonya, in "Crime and Punishment"; Netotchka Nezvanoff, in "The Stripling." On the other hand, there are the rapacious types of capricious, charming women who are tyrannical to the point of cruelty, like Polina, in "The Gambler," Nastasya Filippovna in "The Idiot," Grushenka and Katerina Ivanovna in "The Karamazoff Brothers," and Varvara Petrovna, in "Devils."