to be called an idealist is no laughing matter! The main point in which our latter-day young people are out in their reckoning is this. They fancy that the time for the old, obscure, underground work is over, that it was all very well for their old-fashioned fathers to burrow like moles, but that’s too humiliating a part for us, we will take action in the light of day, we will take action.... Poor darlings! why your children even won’t take action; and don’t you care to go back to burrowing, burrowing underground again in the old tracks?’ A brief silence followed. ‘I am of opinion, my dear sir,’ began Potugin again, ‘that we are not only indebted to civilisation for science, art, and law, but that even the very feeling for beauty and poetry is developed and strengthened under the influence of the same civilisation, and that the so-called popular, simple, unconscious creation is twaddling and rubbishy. Even in Homer there are traces of a refined and varied civilisation; love itself is enriched by it. The Slavophils would cheerfully hang me for such a heresy, if they were not such chicken-hearted creatures; but I will stick up for my own ideas all the same; and however much they press Madame Kohanovsky and “The swarm of bees at rest” upon me,--I can’t stand the odour of that _triple extrait de mougik Russe_, as I don’t belong to the highest society, which finds it absolutely necessary to assure itself from time to time that it has not turned quite French, and for whose exclusive benefit this literature _en cuir de Russie_ is manufactured. Try reading the raciest, most “popular” passages from the “Bees” to a common peasant--a real one; he’ll think you’re repeating him a new spell against fever or drunkenness. I repeat, without civilisation there’s not even poetry. If you want to get a clear idea of the poetic ideal of the uncivilised Russian, you should turn up our ballads, our legends. To say nothing of the fact that love is always presented as the result of witchcraft, of sorcery, and produced by some philtre, to say nothing of our so-called epic literature being the only one among all the European and Asiatic literatures--the only one, observe, which does not present any typical pair of lovers--unless you reckon Vanka-Tanka as such; and of the Holy Russian knight always beginning his acquaintance with his destined bride by beating her “most pitilessly” on her white body, because “the race of women is puffed up”! all that I pass over; but I should like to call your attention to the artistic form of the young hero, the _jeune premier_, as he was depicted by the imagination of the primitive, uncivilised Slav. Just fancy him a minute; the _jeune premier_ enters; a cloak he has worked himself of sable, back-stitched along every seam, a sash of seven-fold silk girt close about his armpits, his fingers hidden away under his hanging sleevelets, the collar of his coat raised high above his head, from before, his rosy