therefore untrue to life. It is seldom that Turgenev reminds us of Dickens; but Sipyagin and his wife might belong to the great Dickens gallery, though drawn with a restraint unknown to the Englishman. Sipyagin himself is a miniature Pecksniff, unctuous, polished, and hollow. The dinner-table scenes at his house are pictured with a subdued but implacable irony. How the natural-born aristocrat Turgenev hated the Russian aristocracy! When Solomin appears in this household, he seems like a giant among manikins, so truly do the simple human virtues tower above the arrogance of affectation. The woman Marianna is a sister of Elena, whom we learned to know in "On the Eve;" she has the purity, not of an angel, but of a noble woman. She has that quiet, steadfast resolution so characteristic of Russian heroines. As for Mariusha, she is a specimen of Turgenev's extraordinary power of characterisation. She appears only two or three times in the entire novel, and remains one of its most vivid personages This is ever the final mystery of Turgenev's art--the power of absolutely complete representation in a few hundred words. In economy of material there has never been his equal. The whole novel is worth reading, apart from its revolutionary interest, apart from the proclamation of the Gospel according to Solomin, for the picture of that anachronistic pair of old lovers, Fomushka and Finushka.* "There are ponds in the steppes which never get putrid, though there's no stream through them, because they are fed by springs from the bottom. And my old dears have such springs too in the bottom of their hearts, and pure as can be." Only one short chapter is devoted to this aged couple, at whom we smile but never laugh At first sight they may seem to be an unimportant episode in the story, and a blemish on its constructive lines but a little reflection reveals not only the humorous tenderness that inspired the novelist's pen in their creation, but contrasts them in their absurd indifference to time, with the turbulent and meaningless whirlpool where the modern revolutionists revolve. For just as tranquillity may not signify stagnation, so revolution is not necessarily progression. This old-fashioned pair have learned nothing from nineteenth century thought, least of all its unrest. They have, however, in their own lives attained the positive end of all progress--happiness. They are indeed a symbol of eternal peace, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. Turgenev, most cultivated of novelists, never fails to rank simplicity of heart above the accomplishments of the mind. * I cannot doubt that Turgenev got the hint for this chapter from Gogol's tale, "Old-fashioned Farmers."