M. Poulot has related an amusing instance of the way a young lady of the middle class and her mother turned away from him with a kind of horror when they learnt that he actually _worked_ in a factory, and helped to make the steam engines. But I have met with an instance quite as startling on the other side. Meeting at the house of a mutual friend, an orator, who, a few days before, I had heard deliver a strong philippic against the government, at a meeting mainly composed of workmen, and on a question of interest to them, I asked him to introduce me to one of his friends. He assured me that he only knew them in the meetings, but that he did not know the address of any. Nothing could give a stronger impression of the immense chasm between the working class and those not actually members of it, than to find one of their prominent advocates—a man who, I believe, has been devoted for years to their cause—without a single private friend among working-men.—_Good Words._ A RUSSIAN NOVELIST. By GABRIEL MONOD. France has just lost an author who, though he never wrote in French, had made France his adopted country, and had been adopted by her as one of her most illustrious novelists—Ivan Tourgénief. From the time when the petty persecution of the Russian government obliged him to leave his native land, he settled in France with his friends the Viardots, paying only short occasional visits to Russia. It was at Bougival, near Paris, that he died on the third of September, of a painful disease from which he had been suffering for more than two years. His works were often translated into French from the manuscript itself, and appeared simultaneously in French and in Russian; and though he depicted Russian types and manners exclusively, his reputation was as great in Paris as at St. Petersburg, and he passed with the general public for a great French writer. He has contributed, more than any one else, to make Russia understood in France, and to create a sympathy between the two nations. Contemporary Russia lives complete in his works. In his “Memoirs of a Russian Nobleman,” or “Recollections of a Sportsman,” he has given expression to the sufferings, the melancholy, the poetry, of the Russian country-folk, and prepared the way for the emancipation of the peasants; in “A Nest of Nobles” he has depicted the monotonous life of the lesser gentry, living on their small fortunes in the heart of Russia; in “Dimitri Roudine,” in “Smoke,” and in “The Vernal Waters,” we find those Russian types which are met with all over Europe—those nomads whose incoherent brains are seething with all sorts of ideas, social, political, and philosophical; those spirits in search of an ideal and a career, whom the narrow and suffocating social life of Russia has turned into idlers and weaklings; those worldlings, with their eccentric or vulgar frivolity; those women, amongst whom we may find all that is most cruel in coquetry and most sublime in self-devotion. Last of all, in