Rousseau's _Nouvelle Héloïse_, Sterne's _Sentimental Journey_, Poúshkin's _Eugene Onégin_, Schiller's _The Robbers_, Gógol's _Dead Souls_, Tourgénef's _A Sportsman's Sketches_, Drouzhínin's _Pólenka Sax_, Grigoróvitch's _Antón Goremýka_, and the chapter _Tamán_ from Lérmontof's _A Hero of Our Times_. In a third category he mentions some of Gógol's Shorter Stories, and Prescott's _Conquest of Mexico_, as having had 'great' influence. In these works one finds many ideas which have been congenial to Tolstoy throughout his life, and his adhesion to which has only become firmer with age. In illustration of this, take a couple of passages from Dickens which many readers may have passed without much attention, but which to Tolstoy represented the absolute truth of the matters they touch on. David Copperfield says of Parliament: ...I considered myself reasonably entitled to escape from the dreary debates. One joyful night, therefore, I noted down the music of the parliamentary bagpipes for the last time, and I have never heard it since; though I still recognise the old drone in the newspapers without any substantial variation (except, perhaps, that there is more of it) all the livelong session. To most Englishmen with memories of Pym and Hampden, or personal knowledge of the lives of men who have devoted themselves disinterestedly to public affairs, Parliamentary or local, Dickens's sneer at Parliament seems but a paradox or a joke; but to Tolstoy, with his inherited dislike of Government, this testimony from a great English writer (who had served as a Parliamentary reporter) seemed irrefutable evidence of the futility of Parliaments. Take, again, a passage in which Dickens hits a nail adroitly on the head: Mr. Micawber had a relish in this formal piling up of words, which, however ludicrously displayed in his case, was, I must say, not at all peculiar to him. I have observed it, in the course of my life, in numbers of men. It seems to me to be a general rule. In the taking of legal oaths, for instance, deponents seem to enjoy themselves mightily when they come to several grand words in succession, for the expression of one idea--as, that they utterly detest, abominate, and abjure, and so forth--and the old anathemas were made relishing on the same principle. We talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too. We are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on State occasions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration, if there be but a great parade of them.