impression of pettiness, like many English novels. No, it is something
that exhales from the pages, whether they be few or many. As
illustrations of this quality of vastness, one has only to recall two
Russian novels--one the longest, and the other very nearly the
shortest, in the whole range of Slavonic fiction. I refer to "War and
Peace," by Tolstoi, and to "Taras Bulba," by Gogol. Both of these
extraordinary works give us chiefly an impression of Immensity--we
feel the boundless steppes, the illimitable wastes of snow, and the
long winter night. It is particularly interesting to compare Taras
Bulba with the trilogy of the Polish genius, Sienkiewicz. The former
is tiny in size, the latter a leviathan; but the effect produced is
the same. It is what we feel in reading Homer, whose influence, by the
way, is as powerful in "Taras Bulba" as it is in "With Fire and
Sword."


The Cosmopolitanism of the Russian character is a striking feature.
Indeed, the educated Russian is perhaps the most complete Cosmopolitan
in the world. This is partly owing to the uncanny facility with which
he acquires foreign languages, and to the admirable custom in Russia
of giving children in more or less wealthy families, French, German,
and English governesses. John Stuart Mill studied Greek at the age of
three, which is the proper time to begin the study of any language
that one intends to master. Russian children think and dream in
foreign words, but it is seldom that a Russian shows any pride in his
linguistic accomplishments, or that he takes it otherwise than as a
matter of course. Stevenson, writing from Mentone to his mother, 7
January 1874, said: "We have two little Russian girls, with the
youngest of whom, a little polyglot button of a three-year-old, I had
the most laughable little scene at lunch to-day. . . . She said