novelist. Like the greatest of our lyric writers, Lermontov, towards whom he felt such an organic attraction, Garshin gives in his works a vast amount of crystallised feeling and emotion with comparatively little of the plastic elements of poetry—those which appeal to all times and all nations. He felt too strongly the woes and sorrows of his own epoch to be able to give to his creations that completeness which would make them live of themselves. But for his contemporaries this is rather an additional charm than a drawback. Most of his sketches are but lyric poems, whose artistic merit and interest lies in their opening the very heart of the author himself. For his heart was that of the Russian humanity of his epoch, intoxicated with bright social ideals of the future, burning
