From this time, I am embarrassed in choosing from such a rich supply of material, but I shall confine myself to a few individual types. This method is, besides, even more legitimate in Russia than in more recently settled countries. If you go through one hundred different villages between St. Petersburg and Moscow, you will see that, in feature, bearing, and costume the people seem to be remarkably similar; so that a few portraits, chosen at random, will describe the whole race, both as to physical and moral traits. This series of studies is principally devoted to the four distinguished contemporary writers, already well known in Europe by their translated works. I have tried to show the man as well as his work; and both, as illustrating the Russian national character. Without paying much attention to the rules of literary composition, I have been glad to make use of everything which would help me to carry out my design: of biographical details, personal recollections, digressions upon points of historical and political interest, without which the moral evolutions of a country so little known would be quite unintelligible. There is but one rule to be followed; to use every means of illuminating the object you wish to exhibit, that it may be thoroughly understood in all its phases. To this end, I have used the method of comparison between the Russian authors and those of other countries more familiar to us, as the surest and most rapid one. Some persons may express surprise that it is of her novelists that I demand the secret of Russia. It is because poetry and romance, the modes of expression most natural to this people, are alone compatible with the exigencies of a press-censure which was formerly most severe, and is even now very suspicious. There is no medium for ideas save through the supple meshes of fiction; so that the fiction which shields yet conveys these ideas assumes the importance of a doctrinal treatise. Of these two leading forms of literature, the first, poetry, absorbed the early part of the present century; the other, the novel, has superseded poetry, and monopolized the attention of the whole nation for the last forty years. With the great name of Pushkin at the head of the list, the Russians consider the romantic period as the crowning point of their intellectual glory. I once agreed with them, but have had two motives for changing my opinion. In the first place, it would be quite useless to discuss works which we could not quote from; for the Russian poets have never been and never will be translated. The life and beauty of a lyric poem is in its arrangement of words and its rhythm; this beauty cannot be transferred into a foreign form. I once read a very admirable and exact Russian translation of Alfred de Musset’s “_Nights_”; it produced the same sensation as when we look upon a beautiful corpse; the soul had fled, like the divine essence which was the life of those charming verses.