A tender, gentle sentimentality prevails from cover to cover; a quality which was always afterwards antipathetic to Tolstoy, and one which he sedulously excluded from his other romances. We recognise it; these tears, this sentimentality came from Dickens, who was one of Tolstoy's favourite authors between his fourteenth and his twenty-first year. Tolstoy notes in his _Journal_: "Dickens: _David Copperfield_. Influence considerable." He read the book again in the Caucasus. Two other influences, to which he himself confesses, were Sterne and Töppfer. "I was then," he says, "under their inspiration."[5] Who would have thought that the _Nouvelles Genevoises_ would be the first model of the author of _War and Peace?_ Yet knowing this to be a fact, we discern in Tolstoy's _Childhood_ the same bantering, affected geniality, transplanted to the soil of a more aristocratic nature. So we see that the readers of his earliest efforts found the writer's countenance familiar. It was not long, however, before his own personality found self-expression. His _Boyhood_ (_Adolescence_), though less pure and less perfect than _Childhood_, exhibits a more original power of psychology, a keen feeling for nature, and a mind full of distress and conflict, which Dickens or Töppfer would have been at a loss to express. In the _Russian Proprietor_ (October, 1852[6]) Tolstoy's character appeared sharply defined, marked by his fearless sincerity and his faith in love. Among the remarkable portraits of peasants which he has painted in this novel, we find an early sketch of one of the finest conceptions of his _Popular Tales:_ the old man with the beehives; a the little old man under the birch-tree, his hands outstretched, his eyes raised, his bald head shining in the sun, and all around him the bees, touched with gold, never stinging him, forming a halo.... But the truly typical works of this period are those which directly register his present emotions: namely, the novels of the Caucasus. The first, _The Invasion_ (finished in December, 1852), impresses the reader deeply by the magnificence of its landscapes: a sunrise amidst the mountains, on the bank of a river; a wonderful night-piece, with sounds and shadows noted with a striking intensity; and the return in the evening, while the distant snowy peaks disappear in the violet haze, and the clear voices of the regimental singers rise and fall in the transparent air. Many of the types of _War and Peace_ are here drawn to the life: Captain Khlopoff, the true hero, who by no means fights because he likes fighting, but because it is his duty; a man with "one of those truly Russian faces, placid and simple, and eyes into which it is easy and agreeable to gaze." Heavy, awkward, a trifle ridiculous, indifferent to his surroundings, he alone is unchanged in battle, where all the rest are changed; "he is exactly as we have seen him always: with the same quiet movements, the same level voice, the