independence--of choice, volition, action--with man, had not begun to be. That of itself would suffice to make _Clarissa_ memorable; and that is the least of its merits. Consider it from which point you will, the book remains a masterpiece, unique of its kind. It has been imitated but it has never been equalled. It is Richardson's only title to fame; but it is enough. Not the Great Pyramid itself is more solidly built nor more incapable of ruin. TOLSTOI The Man and the Artist. There are two men in Tolstoi. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of character and emotion. These antitheses are both represented in his novels. He has thought out the scheme of things for himself; his interpretation, while deeply tinctured with religion, is also largely and liberally human; he is one to the just and the unjust alike, and he is no more angry with the wicked than he is partial to the good. He asks but one thing of his men and women--that they shall be natural; yet he handles his humbugs and impostors with as cold a kindness and a magnanimity as equable as he displays in his treatment of their opposites. Indeed his interest in humanity is inexhaustible, and his understanding of it is well nigh formidable in its union of breadth with delicacy. Himself an aristocrat and an official, he is able to sympathise with the Russian peasant as completely and to express his sentiments as perfectly as he is able to present the characters and give utterance to the ambitions and the idiosyncrasies of the class to which he belongs and might be assumed to have studied best. It is to be noted, moreover, that he looks for his material at one or other pole of society. He is equally at home with officers and privates, with diplomats and carpenters, with princes and ploughmen; but with the intermediary strata he is out of touch, and he is careful to leave the task of presenting them to others. It is arguable that only in the highest and lowest expressions of society is unsophisticated nature to be found; and that Tolstoi, interested less in manners than in men and studious above all of the elemental qualities of character, has done right to avoid the middle- class and attach himself to the consideration and the representation of the highest and the lowest. Certain it is that here have been his successes. The Prince Andrew of _War and Peace_--cultured, intelligent, earnest, true lover and true gentleman--is as noble a hero as modern fiction has achieved; but he is no more interesting as a human being and no more successful as art than the Marianna of _les Cosaques_, who is a savage pure and simple, or the Efim of _les Deux Vieillards_, who would seem to the haughty Radical no better than a common idiot. It is to be