the children are to be taught, the teacher, Tolstóy said, must learn from the children themselves what to teach them, and must adapt his teaching to the individual tastes and capacities of each child. Tolstóy carried this out with his pupils, and obtained excellent results. His methods, however, have as yet received but little attention; and only one great writer--another poet, William Morris,--has advocated (in _News from Nowhere_) the same freedom in education. But we may be sure that some day Tolstóy’s Yásnaya Polyána papers, studied by some gifted teacher, as Rousseau’s _Emile_ was studied by Froebel, will become the starting point of an educational reform much deeper than the reforms of Pestalozzi and Froebel. It is now known that a violent end to this educational experiment was put by the Russian Government. During Tolstóy’s absence from his estate a searching was made by the gendarmes, who not only frightened to death Tolstóy’s old aunt (she fell ill after that) but visited every corner of the house and read aloud, with cynical comments, the most intimate diary which the great writer had kept since his youth. More searchings were promised, so that Tolstóy intended to emigrate for ever to London, and warned Alexander II., through the Countess A. A. Tolstáya that he kept a loaded revolver by his side and would shoot down the first police officer who would dare to enter his house. The school had evidently to be closed. WAR AND PEACE In the year 1862 Tolstóy married the young daughter of a Moscow doctor, Bers; and, staying nearly without interruption on his Túla estate, he gave his time, for the next fifteen or sixteen years, to his great work, _War and Peace_, and next to _Anna Karénina_. His first intention was to write (probably utilising some family traditions and documents) a great historical novel, _The Decembrists_ (see Chapter I.), and he finished in 1863 the first chapters of this novel (Vol. III. of his _Works_, in Russian; Moscow, 10th edition). But in trying to create the types of the Decembrists he must have been taken back in his thoughts to the great war of 1812. He had heard so much about it in the family traditions of the Tolstóys and Volkhónskys, and that war had so much in common with the Crimean war through which he himself had lived that he came to write this great epopee, _War and Peace_, which has no parallel in any literature.