Youth is certainly the age when higher moral ideals find their way into the mind of the future man or woman; the years when one strives to get rid of the imperfections of boyhood or girlhood; but this aim is never attained in the ways recommended at monasteries and Jesuit schools. The only proper way is to open before the young mind new, broad horizons; to free it from superstitions and fears; to grasp man’s position amidst Nature and Mankind; and especially to feel at one with some great cause and to nurture one’s forces with the view of being able some day to struggle for that cause. Idealism--that is, the capacity of conceiving a poetical love towards something great, and to prepare for it--is the only sure preservation from all that destroys the vital forces of man: vice, dissipation, and so on. This inspiration, this love of an ideal, the Russian youth used to find in the student circles, of which Turguéneff has left us such spirited descriptions. Instead of that, Irténeff and Neklúdoff, remaining during their university years in their splendid aristocratic isolation, are unable to conceive a higher ideal worth living for, and spent their forces in vain endeavours of semi-religious moral improvement, on a plan that may perhaps succeed in the isolation of a monastery, but usually ends in failure amidst the attractions lying round a young man of the world. These failures Tolstóy relates, as usual, with absolute earnestness and sincerity. _The Morning of a Landed Proprietor_ produced again a strange impression. The story deals with the unsuccessful philanthropic endeavours of a serf-owner who tries to make his serfs happy and wealthy--without ever thinking of beginning where he ought to begin: namely, of setting his slaves free. In those years of liberation of the serfs and enthusiastic hopes, such a story sounded as an anachronism--the more so as it was not known at the time of its appearance that it was a page from Tolstóy’s earlier autobiography relating to the year 1847, when he settled in Yásnaya Polyána, immediately after having left the University, and when extremely few thought of liberating the serfs. It was one of those sketches of which Brandes has so truly said that in them Tolstóy “thinks aloud” about some page of his own life. It thus produced a certain mixed, undefined feeling. And yet one could not but admire in it the same great objective talent that was so striking in _Childhood_ and the Sebastopol sketches. In speaking of peasants who received with distrust the measures with which their lord was going to benefit them, it would have been so easy, so humanly natural, for an educated man to throw upon their ignorance their unwillingness to accept the threshing machine (which, by the way, did not work), or the refusal of a peasant to accept the free gift of a stone house (which was far from the village).... But not a shade of that sort of pleading in favour of the landlord is to be found in the story, and the thinking reader