We next halted before a picture representing the horrible execution of the Strelitzes. I said that "such pictures prove that the world does, after all, progress slowly, in spite of what pessimists say, and that in order to refute pessimists one has only to refer to the improvements in criminal law." To this he agreed cordially, and declared the abolition of torture in procedure and penalty to be one great gain, at any rate. We spoke of the present condition of things in Europe, and I told him that at St. Petersburg the opinion very general among the more thoughtful members of the diplomatic corps was that war was not imminent; that the Czar, having himself seen the cruelties of war during the late struggle in the Balkans, had acquired an invincible repugnance to it. He acquiesced in this, but said that it seemed monstrous to him that the peace of the empire and of Europe should depend upon so slender a thread as the will of any one man. Our next walk was taken across the river Moskwa, on the ice, to and through the Kremlin, and as we walked the conversation fell upon literature. As to French literature, he thought Maupassant the man of greatest talent, by far, in recent days, but that he was depraved and centered all his fiction in women. For Balzac, Tolstoi evidently preserved admiration, but he cared little, apparently, for Daudet, Zola, and their compeers. As to American literature, he said that Tourgueneff had once told him that there was nothing in it worth reading; nothing new or original; that it was simply a copy of English literature. To this I replied that such criticism seemed to me very shallow; that American literature was, of course, largely a growth out of the parent stock of English literature, and must mainly be judged as such; that to ask in the highest American literature something absolutely different from English literature in general was like looking for oranges upon an apple-tree; that there had come new varieties in this growth, many of them original, and some beautiful; but that there was the same sap, the same life-current running through it all; and I compared the treatment of woman in all Anglo-Saxon literature, whether on one side of the Atlantic or the other, from Chaucer to Mark Twain, with the treatment of the same subject by French writers from Rabelais to Zola. To this he answered that in his opinion the strength of American literature arises from the inherent Anglo-Saxon religious sentiment. He expressed a liking for Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whittier, but he seemed to have read at random, not knowing at all some of the best things. He spoke with admiration of Theodore Parker's writings, and seemed interested in my reminiscences of Parker and of his acquaintance with Russian affairs. He also revered and admired the character and work of William Lloyd Garrison. He had read Longfellow somewhat, but was evidently uncertain regarding Lowell,--confusing him, apparently, with some other author.