handled, highly finished, and perfectly adjusted to a point of view that is not the point of view for the rest of the book. And it is to be remarked that the lines of cleavage--which, as I suggested, can be traced with precision--by no means invariably divide the peaceful scenes of romance from the battles and intrigues of the historic struggle, leaving these on one side, those on the other. Sometimes the great public events are used as the earlier theme demands that they should be used--as the material in which the story of youth is embodied. Consider, for instance, one of the earlier battle-pieces in the book, where Nicholas, very youthful indeed, is for the first time under fire; he comes and goes bewildered, laments like a lost child, is inspired with heroism and flees like a hare for his life. As Tolstoy presents it, this battle, or a large part of it, is the affair of Nicholas; it belongs to him, it is a piece of experience that enters his life and enriches our sense of it. Many of the wonderful chapters, again, which deal with the abandonment and the conflagration of Moscow, are seen through the lives of the irrepressible Rostov household, or of Peter in his squalid imprisonment; the scene is framed in their consciousness. Prince Andrew, too--nobody can forget how much of the battle in which he is mortally wounded is transformed into an emotion of _his_; those pages are filched from Tolstoy's theory of the war and given to his fiction. In all these episodes, and in others of the same kind, the history of the time is in the background; in front of it, closely watched for their own sake, are the lives which that history so deeply affects.