One must never forget in reading Gogol that he was a man of the South--"homme du Midi." In all countries of the world, there is a marked difference between the Northern and the Southern temperament. The southern sun seems to make human nature more mellow. Southerners are more warm-hearted, more emotional, more hospitable, and much more free in the expression of their feelings. In the United States, every one knows the contrast between the New Englander and the man from the Gulf; in Europe, the difference between the Norman and the Gascon has always been apparent--how clear it is in the works of Flaubert and of Rostand! Likewise how interesting is the comparison between the Prussian and the Bavarian; we may have a wholesome respect for Berlin, but we love Munich, in some respects the most attractive town on earth. The parallel holds good in Russia, where the Little Russians, the men of the Ukraine, have ever shown characteristics that separate them from the people of the North. The fiery passion, the boundless aspiration of the Cossack, animates the stories of Gogol with a veritable flame. His first book, "Evenings on a Farm near the Dikanka (Veillees de l'Ukraine)," appeared early in the thirties, and, with all its crudity and excrescences, was a literary sunrise. It attracted immediate and wide-spread attention, and the wits of Petersburg knew that Russia had an original novelist. The work is a collection of short stories or sketches, introduced with a rollicking humorous preface, in which the author announces himself as Rudii Panko, raiser of bees. Into this book the exile in the city of the North poured out all his love for the country and the village customs of his own Little Russia. He gives us great pictures of Nature, and little pictures of social life. He describes with the utmost detail a country fair at the place of his birth, Sorotchinetz. His descriptions of the simple folk, the beasts, and the bargainings seem as true as those in "Madame Bovary"--the difference is in the attitude of the author toward his work. Gogol has nothing of the aloofness, nothing of the scorn of Flaubert; he himself loves the revelry and the superstitions he pictures, loves above all the people. Superstition plays a prominent role in these sketches; the unseen world of ghosts and apparitions has an enormous influence on the daily life of the peasants. The love of fun is everywhere in evidence; these people cannot live without practical jokes, violent dances, and horse-play. Shadowy forms of amorous couples move silent in the warm summer night, and the stillness is broken by silver laughter. Far away, in his room at St. Petersburg, shut in by the long winter darkness, the homesick man dreamed of the vast landscape he loved, in the warm embrace of the sky at noon, or asleep in the pale moonlight. The first sentence of the book is a cry of longing. "What ecstasy; what splendour has a summer day in Little Russia!" Pushkin