Such names as Turgeniev, whom I once met, Dostoieffski, and the two Tolstoys, have still a magic charm for me. Besides, all the world can prate of them. Of the host of lesser novelists, mostly translated by ladies, in my judgment the less said the better. The work of obviously coarse, uninstructed men, they often, both in their narration and in their imagery, deal with subjects which are unwholesome and which common consent rejects as unsuitable. Literature does not scramble about in midden heaps. And the great ones—what is their place in the history of the world’s achievements? I very much doubt whether there be any among the most patriotic enthusiasts who would claim even for his beloved Pushkin a seat on Parnassus beside Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Voltaire. That Karamzin’s prose was of the very first order is proved by Pushkin’s appreciation of him. Unfortunately it can only appeal to a very small public. Twelve volumes of chronicles, essential to the Russian student of his own country’s story, will hardly be faced by the average foreigner. Pushkin’s activities were phenomenal. That in the thirty-seven years of his tragically short life he should have wrought what he did, and that he should have been so uniformly good, invests him with a glamour which is all his own. He was a meteor, and, like a meteor, he appeared as it were for a moment in the sky, and then vanished into space. And yet half a century ago, among the men who were the leaders of thought in Petersburg, there was far less talk of Pushkin than there was of Dante, Shakespeare, or Voltaire—not to speak of many other foreign authors. It has taken many years to create the revival of the interest of Russians in Russian work. It has come at last, and now the only danger is lest, under much flattery and patting on the back from abroad, the true advance of public taste should not be rather hindered than furthered. Pushkin, be it remembered, was highly cultivated, a man of wide reading. He recognized the fact that in order to write well a man must read well, and study the best models. Some of his criticisms of Shakespeare and of Byron, under whose influence he was until Shakespeare dethroned his idol, are masterpieces.