This journalistic turn of mind, combined in nearly equal measures with the literary talent, produced several singular effects. It rendered his periodical 'Diary of a Writer' the most enormously popular publication of the day, and a success when previous ventures had failed, though it consisted entirely of his own views on current topics of interest, literary questions, and whatever came into his head. On his novels it had a rather disintegrating effect. Most of them are of great length, are full of digressions from the point, and there is often a lack of finish about them which extends not only to the minor characters but to the style in general. In fact, his style is neither jewel-like in its brilliancy, as is Turgénieff's, nor has it the elegance, broken by carelessness, of Tolstoy's. But it was popular, remarkably well adapted to the class of society which it was his province to depict, and though diffuse, it is not possible to omit any of the long psychological analyses, or dreams, or series of ratiocinations, without injuring the web of the story and the moral, as chain armor is spoiled by the rupture of a link. This indeed is one of the great difficulties which the foreigner encounters in an attempt to study Dostoévsky: the translators have been daunted by his prolixity, and have often cut his works down to a mere skeleton of the original. Moreover, he deals with a sort of Russian society which it is hard for non-Russians to grasp, and he has no skill whatever in presenting aristocratic people or society, to which foreigners have become accustomed in the works of his great contemporaries Turgénieff and Tolstoy; while he never, despite all his genuine admiration for the peasants and keen sympathy with them, attempts any purely peasant tales like Turgénieff's 'Notes of a Sportsman' or Tolstoy's 'Tales for the People.' Naturally, this is but one reason the more why he should be studied. His types of hero, and of feminine character, are peculiar to himself. Perhaps the best way to arrive at his ideal--and at his own character, _plus_ a certain irritability and tendency to suspicion of which his friends speak--is to scrutinize the pictures of Prince Myshkin ('The Idiot'), Ivan ('Humbled and Insulted'), and Alyosha ('The Karamazoff Brothers'). Pure, delicate both physically and morally, as Dostoévsky himself is described by those who knew him best; devout, gentle, intensely sympathetic, strongly masculine yet with a large admixture of the feminine element--such are these three; such is also, in his way, Raskolnikoff ('Crime and Punishment'). His feminine characters are the precise counterparts of these in many respects, but are often also quixotic even to boldness and wrong-headedness, like Aglaya ('The Idiot'), or to shame, like Sonia ('Crime and Punishment'), and the heroine of 'Humbled and Insulted.' But Dostoévsky could not sympathize with and consequently could not draw an aristocrat; his frequently recurring type of the dissolute