used to say that the Northern summer was a caricature of the Southern winter. The "Evenings on a Farm" indicates the possession of great power rather than consummate skill in the use of it. Full of charm as it is, it cannot by any stretch of language be called a masterpiece. Two years later, however, Gogol produced one of the great prose romances of the world, "Taras Bulba." He had intended to write a history of Little Russia and a history of the Middle Ages, in eight or nine volumes. In order to gather material, he read annals diligently, and collected folk-lore, national songs, and local traditions. Fortunately out of this welter of matter emerged not a big history, but a short novel. Short as it is, it has been called an epical poem in the manner of Homer, and a dramatisation of history in the manner of Shakespeare. Both remarks are just, though the influence of Homer is the more evident; in the descriptive passages, the style is deliberately Homeric, as it is in the romances of Sienkiewicz, which owe so much to this little book by Gogol. It is astonishing that so small a work can show such colossal force. Force is its prime quality--physical, mental, religious. In this story the old Cossacks, centuries dead, have a genuine resurrection of the body. They appear before us in all their amazing vitality, their love of fighting, of eating and drinking, their intense patriotism, and their blazing devotion to their religious faith. Never was a book more plainly inspired by passion for race and native land. It is one tremendous shout of joy. These Cossacks are the veritable children of the steppes, and their vast passions, their Homeric laughter, their absolute recklessness in battle, are simply an expression of the boundless range of the mighty landscape.