expression of emotion being one of his weak points. Kalashnikov's scene, in which he confers with his brothers, completes Act II. The curtain rises in Act III. upon a Square in Moscow where the people are assembling to meet the Tsar. Their chorus of welcome, "Praise to God in Heaven," is not to be compared for impressiveness with similar massive choruses in the operas of Moussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. There are some episodes of popular life, such as the scene between a Tatar and the jester Nikitka, that are not lacking in humour; and the latter has another tale about King David which is in the style of the so-called "spiritual songs" of the sixteenth century. The accusations brought by Kiribeievich are spirited. In a dramatic scene the Tsar listens to Alena's prayer for mercy, and pardons the bold Kalashnikov who has dared to defy his Pretorian guards, the Oprichniki. The opera winds up with a final chorus of the people who escort the Merchant from prison. _The Merchant Kalashnikov_, although somewhat of a hybrid as regards style, with its Russian airs handled _à la Tedesca_, and its occasional lapses into vulgarity, has at the same time more vitality and human interest than most of Rubinstein's operas, so that it is to be regretted that it has remained so long unknown alike to the public of Russia and of Western Europe. Rubinstein's Biblical operas have now practically fallen into oblivion. Seeing their length, the cost involved in mounting them, and their lack of strong, clear-cut characterisation, this is not surprising. The _Acts of Artaxerxes_ and the _Chaste Joseph_, presented to the Court of Alexis Mikhaïlovich, could hardly have been more wearisome than _The Tower of Babel_ and _The Shulamite_. These stage oratorios are like a series of vast, pale, pseudo-classical frescoes, and scarcely more moving than the official odes and eclogues of eighteenth-century Russian literature. Each work, it is true, contains some saving moments, such as the Song of Victory, with chorus, "Beat the drums," sung by Leah, the heroic mother of the Maccabees, in the opera bearing that title, in which the Hebrew colouring is admirably carried out; the chorus "Baal has worked wonders," from _The Tower of Babel_; and a few pages from the closing scene of _Paradise Lost_; but these rare flashes of inspiration do not suffice to atone for the long, flaccid Handelian recitatives, the tame Mendelssohnian orchestration, the frequent lapses into a pomposity which only the most naïve can mistake for sublimity of utterance, and the fluent dulness of the operas as a whole.