For many superficial English and American readers Gorki furnished what Professor Phelps has aptly compared to a slumming party--they were pleased to be nauseated. Naturally, they soon dropped the new toy. But others have continued to read him, some because they are in sympathy with the reform movement, some from sheer enjoyment of the terrible, others for the flashes of genius which are frequent enough to remind us that he has not lived up to the anticipations his earlier writings evoked. In this country, he has lost general sympathy, especially since his comparatively recent visit culminated in the disclosure of his illicit relations with his travelling companion, and much consequent newspaper gossip; so that on the whole we wait for another to wear the mantle of Tolstoi, which so many, six years ago, were ready to cast upon the shoulders of Maxim Gorki. Gorki has had a wild and varied life,--but he may tell the story in his own words: “I was born March 14th, either in 1868 or 1869, in Nijni Novgorod, in the family of Vassili Vassilezewitsch Kaschirin, dyer, to his daughter Warwara, and Maxim Sawwatjev Pjeschkow, who, according to his sign, was an upholsterer. Thenceforth I have borne honorably and without a stain the title of a member of the guild of artists. I was baptized by the name of Alexei, but in choosing a pseudonym I preferred my father’s name, Maxim. “My real name is therefore Alexei Maximowitsch Pjeschkow. My father died in Astrakhan when I was five years old. After the death of my mother my grandfather placed me in a shoe-store. I was then nine years old, and my grandfather had taught me to read in the Psalter and Prayer Book. I ran away from my studies and became a draughtsman’s apprentice; ran away from him and entered the workshop of a painter of saints’ images; then I served on a steamer as a cook’s boy; then I became a gardener’s assistant. “Here I remained till my fifteenth year, spending all my time in zealously reading the productions of known authors, such as ‘Guak; or, Unshakable Fidelity,’ ‘Andreas Fearnaught,’ ‘Jacschka, the Cut-throat,’ etc. “While I was serving as cook’s boy on the steamboat, the cook, Smury, gained a powerful influence over my development. He persuaded me to read the ‘Legends of the Saints,’ Eckartshausen, Gogol, Gljeb Uspenski, Dumas _père_, and various books on Freemasonry. “Up to that time I had been a sworn enemy of all books and of all printed paper, even including my passport. After my fifteenth year I felt a passionate wish to learn, in pursuance of which I betook myself to Kasan, under the impression that knowledge would be imparted free to all who desired it. It turned out, however, that this was not the case; so I went to work in a pretzel bakery, at a salary of three rubles a month.