And we shall know more of him, far more, than we shall ever know of Tamerlane and Genghiz Khan: as much very likely as we know of Napoleon. He has no physical attributes and no material accoutrements which might lend him adventitious aid as the centre of a pageant of power, struggle, or woe: a short, bowed man in a black coat, vivacious, hedged by no formalities of ceremonial. Yet to the imagination--and it must surely be so when he is seen backward--this little fanatic, who for twenty years was hunted from exile to exile, and returned to overthrow a government and enthrone himself on the ruins of a great Empire, is the centre of Russia, seated in the middle of that enormous web of conflict and suffering like an impassive and implacable spider. We hear this and that of him. He is genial in conversation. He is not personally cruel. He is willing to slaughter thousands at a blow to realise his ideas, for he looks at human affairs historically, if with but one eye. He is a poor speaker, but his words whip audiences into enthusiasm. He thought he would be overturned in three weeks, but adapted himself with instant decision when a longer lease was offered. This man and that is jealous of him and has tried to upset him; he has said this or that about his success and his failure; he will fly; or he knows he will be executed. The reports contradict each other, but the picture remains and strengthens, the picture of a man in the grip of an idea, with one of the strongest wills in the world, indifferent to the pains and pleasures of ordinary people. That ugly little face, with its swollen bald forehead, its slanting lids closing on straight penetrating eyes, its squat nose, its fleshy mouth between moustache and goatee, its smile mechanical as a mask's, will be more familiar to our descendants than to us. They will see in reverie the revolution, with vast ancient Russia as its background, and this doctrinaire tyrant as its centre, with his ragged armies, his spies and Chinamen, his motley gang of clever Jews, brigands, and mild, bearded, spectacled professors around him. They will feel his magnetism, and, whether as "hero of legend" or devil of legend, they will celebrate him. Of these things perhaps men will write two hundred or two thousand years hence. But the duration of human life on our planet is measured, as we suppose, in tens of thousands of years.