Tolstoy was well aware of the advantages a play possesses over a novel as a means of propaganda, and but for the existence of the Censorship he would have written more for the stage. When asked, in 1892, whether he would write any more plays, he replied: "I would do so with great pleasure, and I even feel a special need to express myself in that way; but I feel certain the Censor would not pass my plays. You would not believe how, from the very commencement of my activity, that horrible Censor question has tormented me! I wanted to write what I felt; but at the same time I felt that what I wrote would not be permitted; and involuntarily I abandoned the work. I abandoned, and went on abandoning, and meanwhile the years passed away." * * * * * There is one other matter of some importance on which I must here say a word. No accepted standard of transliteration for Russian names into English has hitherto existed. Each writer has been a law unto himself. Now, at last, the Liverpool School of Russian Studies has prepared and privately circulated a scheme, which deserves to be, and is likely to be, generally adopted. It differs in some particulars from the plan I have followed heretofore; but the advantage to Anglo-Russian literature of the general adoption of a uniform and authoritative rule will be so great that I hasten to put myself in accord with the Liverpool scheme, without even waiting for it to be publicly promulgated. The result of so doing however is that in the three earlier plays now reprinted from stereotype plates the transliteration does not quite coincide with the plan adopted in the three freshly translated plays. For this discrepancy I must ask the readers' kind indulgence. AYLMER MAUDE. Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the University Press, Edinburgh