But although justly popular in their own country, the Russian humorists are hardly known abroad. This is certainly due not to want of opportunity of knowing them. Gogol’s masterpieces, “Dead Souls” and “The Inspector,” were translated years ago into English. But he is not half so well known in this country as any of the three great Russian novelists. Humour is so eminently national, it is so closely bound to the soil where it is born, that it can rarely be transplanted to other climes and skies. It certainly loses more in translation than ordinary fiction, and it requires a peculiar gift on the part of the translator that its distinctive characteristics should not be lost altogether. However, translators have had the courage to try their skill upon Gogol, who is not only the greatest but the most comprehensible of Russian humorists. With him the comical effect results neither from the peculiar manner of description nor from the contrasts presented, but from his unique gift of bringing to the surface the comical traits of men’s characters. His is the deepest and the most artistic form of humour, which on this account becomes sometimes international. Gogol’s heroes—some of them at least—are as comprehensible to the English as Charles Dickens’s Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby are comprehensible to the Russians. The present volume contains two beautiful examples of Gogol’s art, which has not been yet translated into English—“A Madman’s Diary” and “Marriage.” The “Diary” is a fanciful sketch, presenting perhaps the most typical sample of “Humour,” as distinguished from other forms of the comical, which can be found in any literature. It is an intensely pathetic, and at the same time irresistibly droll, bit of autobiography of a poor wretch of an official whose life has been one of insufferable humiliation, and whose mind, upset by a fatal passion for a fashionable girl, seeks refuge in the dream of greatness ending in total madness. “Laughter through tears,” that was Gogol’s own definition of the character of his muse, and in no other work has he shown so palpably what he meant by that expression as in “A Madman’s Diary.”