was endless; but when he was away all our noses hung down dismally enough.” The couplets he composed on the occasion of the battle of August 4th were sung by the whole army; but his hopes of obtaining a field-adjutancy were dashed in consequence of some bitterly sarcastic verses on his official chiefs which he could not resist writing, and which when once written circulated in MS. from hand to hand. It was now, too, that he drafted the first sketch of his famous “Sevastopolskie Razskazui” (“Sebastopol Tales”), which, even in its rough form, drew tears from the Empress Alexandra, and induced Tsar Nicholas himself to remark that “the life of this young author must be looked after,” and to order that he should be transferred to a less dangerous position.
At the end of 1855, on his return to St. Petersburg, the young and titled “hero of Sebastopol” found all the best houses open to him, while “The Sebastopol Tales” gave him the entrée to the leading literary circles. His earlier works, “Dyetsvo” (“Childhood”), first published in 1852 in the Sovremennik, where it was speedily followed by “Utro Pomyeshchika” and “Otrochestvo” (“Boyhood”), though highly spoken of by Nekrasov and other connoisseurs, do not seem to have attracted general attention. Now, however, he was regarded as one of the leading spirits of that new era of emancipation and enlightenment which coincided with the accession of the Tsar-Liberator, Alexander II. But Tolstoi was never able to thrive in literary circles. This was due not so much to his super-sensitiveness and natural reserve as to an intimate conviction, which he invariably
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