“Fathers and Sons,” he has revealed, with a prophetic touch, the first symptoms of that moral malady of Nihilism which is eating at the heart of modern Russia, and in “Virgin Soil” he has given us a faithful and impartial description of the society created by the Nihilistic spirit. Tourgénief is a realist; his personages are real, his pictures are drawn from life, his works are full of true facts; but he is at the same time a true artist, not only in virtue of the power with which he reproduces what he has seen, but because he has the faculty of raising his personages to the dignity of human types of lasting truth and universal significance, and because he describes, not all he sees, but only what strikes the imagination and moves the heart. He is wholesomely objective; he does not describe his heroes, he makes them act and speak; the reader sees and hears and knows them as if they were living people—loves them and is sorry for them—hates and despises them. Tourgénief is one of those novelists who have created the greatest number of living types; he is one of those in whom we find the largest, the most sensitive, the most human heart. He has shown, like Dickens, all that warmth of heart can add to genius.—_The Contemporary Review._ A LAY OF A CRACKED FIDDLE. By FREDERICK LANGBRIDGE. When I was quite a tiny mite, And life a joyful ditty, I used to know a poor old wight Who fiddled through the city. Alas! it’s thirty years ago— Time _is_ so quaint and flighty! And now I’ve mites myself, you know, And not so very mighty. And he’s unvexed by flat and sharp; He’s guessed the awful riddle, And, haply, got a golden harp In place of that old fiddle. And yet, methinks, I see him now— So clear the memory lingers— His long grey hair, his puckered brow, His trembling, grimy fingers, The comforter that dangled down Beyond his waist a long way, The beaver hat with battered crown, He’d pause to brush—the wrong way, The brown surtout that still could brag Its buttons down the middle, And, crowning all, the greenish bag That held the sacred fiddle. Two tunes he played, and only two, One over, one beginning; “God Save the Queen’s” collapse we knew Was “Kitty Clover’s” inning. How startlingly the bow behaved— Curveted, jerked, and bounded— The while our gracious queen was saved, And knavish tricks confounded! And oh! the helpless, hopeless woe, Brimful and running over, In (_very_ slow) the o—o—oh Of bothering Kitty Clover!