he was hiding the remains of something which had known life, with its torments, its betrayals, and its sorrow." "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord."[9] Around this tragedy of a soul consumed by love and crushed by the law of God--a painting in a single shade, and of terrible gloom--Tolstoy has woven, as in _War and Peace,_ the romances of other lives. Unfortunately these parallel stories alternate in a somewhat stiff and artificial manner, without achieving the organic unity of the symphony of _War and Peace_. It may also be said that the perfect realism of certain of the pictures--the aristocratic circles of St. Petersburg and their idle discourse--is now and again superfluous and unnecessary. Finally, and more openly than in _War and Peace_, Tolstoy has presented his own moral character and his philosophic ideas side by side with the spectacle of life. None the less, the work is of a marvellous richness. There is the same profusion of types as in _War and Peace,_ and all are of a striking justness. The portraits of the men seem to me even superior. Tolstoy has depicted with evident delight the amiable egoist, Stepan Arcadievitch, whom no one can look at without responding to his affectionate smile, and Karenin, the perfect type of the high official, the distinguished and commonplace states-man, with his mania for concealing his real opinions and feelings under a mask of perpetual irony: a mixture of dignity and cowardice, of Phariseeism and Christian feeling: a strange product of an artificial world, from which he can never completely free himself in spite of his intelligence and his true generosity; a man afraid to listen to his I own heart, and rightly so afraid, since when he does surrender to it, he ends by falling into a state of nonsensical mysticism.