recent times has not fostered among us the development of a respect for equity, has not created any solid guarantees for personal rights, and has left a wide field to arbitrary tyranny and caprice." This criticism of Dobroliubov's was written in 1860, the date of the play; but we have only to look back at the internal history of Russia for the last thirty years to see that it too "has not created any solid guarantees for personal rights, and has left a wide field to arbitrary tyranny and caprice." And here is Ostrovsky's peculiar merit, that he has in his various dramas penetrated deeper than any other of the great Russian authors into one of the most fundamental qualities of the Russian nature--its innate tendency to arbitrary power, oppression, despotism. Nobody has drawn so powerfully, so truly, so incisively as he, the type of the 'samodour' or 'bully,' a type that plays a leading part in every strata of Russian life. From Turgenev we learn more of the reverse side of the Russian character, its lack of will, tendency to weakness, dreaminess and passivity: and it is this aspect that the English find it so hard to understand, when they compare the characters in the great Russian novels with their own idea of Russia's formidable power. The people and the nation do not seem to correspond. But the riddle may be read in the coexistence of Russia's internal weakness and misery along with her huge force, and the immense role she fills as a civilising power. In "The Storm" we have all the contradictory elements: a life strongly organised, yet weak within; strength and passivity, despotism and fatalism side by side. The author of "The Storm," Alexander Ostrovsky (born in Moscow 1823, died 1886), is acknowledged to be the greatest of the Russian dramatists. He has been called "a specialist in the natural history of the Russian merchant," and his birth, upbringing, family connections and vocations gave him exceptional facilities for penetrating into the life of that class which he was the first to put into Russian literature. His best period was from 1850 to 1860, but all his work received prompt and universal recognition from his countrymen. In 1859 Dobroliubov's famous article, "The Realm of Darkness," appeared, analysing the contents of all Ostrovsky's dramas, and on the publication of "The Storm" in 1860, it was followed by another article from the same critic, "A Ray of Light in the Realm of Darkness." These articles were practically a brief for the case of the Liberals, or party of Progress, against the official and Slavophil party. Ostrovsky's dramas in general are marked by intense sombreness, biting humour and merciless realism. "The Storm" is the most poetical of his works, but all his leading plays still hold the stage.