letters too well!” Or with a touch of humour: “If ever I go to the lower regions, I shall beyond a doubt be sentenced to write for my sins some ten letters a day”--and I think this is the one flicker of humour you can discern throughout the whole gloomy book. So only direst compulsion will drive him to write a letter. His correspondence (save during the last ten years of his life, when the tone is altered--and of this period I shall speak apart) is one prolonged cry of distress: he is penniless, desperate, and he seeks help. A cry, did I say? It is one unending, monotonous lament. He is a beggar, and does not know how to beg: he is all awkwardness, without pride, and innocent of irony. He reminds me of the angel of whom we read in the _Little Flowers of St. Francis_. This angel, in the form of a traveller who had lost his way, came to the Val de Spolete and knocked at the door of the infant settlement. His knocking was so loud, long, and precipitate that the brethren grew indignant, and Brother Masseo (M. de Vogüé, I presume!) at last opened the door, asking, “Whence comest thou to knock in so unseemly wise?” And the angel inquired, “How then must I knock?” Brother Masseo replied, “Knock thrice with deliberation, then pause. Leave the porter time to say a pater-noster. Then if he comes not, knock again.” “But I am sore pressed,” continued the angel. “I am in such poverty that I am fit to hang myself,” writes Dostoevsky, “I can neither pay my debts nor leave, lacking funds for the journey, and I am in black despair.”--“What is to become of me between now and the close of the year? Dear knows. My head is bursting. I have not a soul left from whom I can borrow.”--(“Do you realize what it means, to have nowhere to go?” says one of his characters.) “I’ve written to a relative to ask him for six hundred roubles. If he doesn’t send them, then all is lost.” His correspondence is so full of such laments and others in like strain that I make my selection at random. Sometimes there is, every six months or so, a note of greater insistence: “It is only once in a lifetime that money can possibly be so cruelly needed.” Towards the end--drunk with the humility he used to intoxicate the heroes of his novels, that uncanny humility of the Russian, which may be Christ-like, but, according to Mme. Hoffmann, is still found in the depths of the Russian soul even when Christian faith is lacking, and which the Western mind will never fully understand since it reckons self-respect a virtue--towards the end, he asks, “Why should they deny me? I make no demands. I am but a humble petitioner!”