“He was a typical representative of the men of the ’fifties--a radical in the best sense of the word. His struggle against serfdom is remarkable, and also his love for what he describes; for instance, the way he describes the old man in _Old Portraits_. And then there is his sensitiveness to the beauties of nature.” Speaking of the province of criticism, Tolstoi said: “The value of criticism consists in pointing out all the good that there is in this or that work of art, and in thus directing the opinion of the public, whose tastes are mostly crude and the majority of whom have no feeling for beauty. Just as it is difficult to be a really good critic, so it is easy for the most stupid and limited man to become a critic; and as good critics are needed, so bad critics are merely harmful. It is a particularly absurd and cheap habit of critics to express, in talking of other people’s work, all sorts of personal ideas which have nothing to do with the book they are criticizing. This is the most useless gossip.” _July 7th._ Tolstoi said that all human vices can be reduced to three classes: (1) anger, malevolence; (2) vanity; and (3) lust--in the widest sense of the word. The last is the most powerful. In the morning, at coffee, Tolstoi sighed and said: “Yes, it is hard, it is hard.... It is hard because falsehood and arrogance prevail in the higher ranks of society, and because there is much darkness among the people. The other day two sectarians of the priestless sect came to me from Tula: one a young one, evidently of little understanding, and the other an old man, who, while we talked, kept putting on his spectacles. The old man turned out to be understanding, wise, and said many things to the point, as though he agreed with my religious views; and yet when I offered them tea they refused because they had not brought their tea things with them.” On the occasion of the Boxer rising Tolstoi said: “It is terrible that it should happen in such an awful way. But, although it is difficult to foresee, yet it is to be expected that after the war a greater understanding will take place between Europeans and the Chinese; and I think that the Chinese are bound to have a most beneficial influence on us, if only because of their extraordinary capacity for work and of their ability to grow more on a small plot of land and obtain better results than we do on a space a dozen times larger.” Tolstoi compares the present state of Europe with the end of the Roman Empire. The Chinese, in his opinion, play the part of the “barbarians.” Tolstoi said to-day: