1884 he showed no intelligent comprehension whatever of the new elements in literature. He was absolutely indifferent to Stevenson, to Ibsen, to Dostoieffsky, each of whom was pressed upon his notice, and his hostility to Zola was grotesque. In 1877 L'Assommoir was published periodically in a Paris review called, I think, La Republique des Lettres, a journal which had languished from the first, and now expired in its third volume. Swinburne attributed, of course jocosely, the fact of its failure to the effect of a most dignified protest against Zola which he had printed somewhere. I remember his ecstasy, and his expression of a belief (which proved quite unfounded) that Zola would never dare to publish another page. This attitude to the French Naturalists was unusual. Swinburne's native temper was generous and kind, and the idea of attacking a genuine talent of any species would have been dreadful to him. But he did not think that Stevenson--to take a particularly distressing instance-had any talent, and he was therefore silent about what he wrote. It was curious, however, to note that Swinburne was always capable of being affected along straight lines of reminiscence. At the very moment when he was hewing at the French realists, root and branch, he spoke to me with generous approval of one of the least gifted and most extreme of them all, Léon Cladel. I was greatly astonished, but the mystery was soon explained. Cladel had attacked Napoléon III. with peculiar virulence, and he was an open worshipper of Victor Hugo. No matter how Zolaesque his stories might be, he had these two unquestionable claims on Swinburne's approbation.

The Fortnightly Review.

There is no doubt that a wonderful aura of charm hung about the person of this astonishing man of genius. Swinburne might be absurd; he could not fail to be distinguished. He might be quixotic; he was never mean or timid or dull. He represented, in its most flamboyant shape, revolt against the concessions and the hypocrisies of the mid-Victorian era, "this ghastly, thin-faced time of ours." An extraordinary exhilaration accompanied his presence, something uplited, extravagant, and yet unselfish. No one has ever lived who loved poetry more passionately, found in it more inexhaustible sources of pleasure, cultivated it more thoroughly for itself, more sincerely for nothing which it might be persuaded to offer as a side-issue. Half Swinburne's literary influence depended upon little, unregarded matters, such as his unflinching attitude of worship towards the great masters, his devotion to unpopular causes, his uncompromising arrogance in the face of conventionality. It is becoming difficult to recapture even the thrill he caused by his magic use of "unpoetic" monosyllables, such as "bloat," "pinch," "rind," "fang," "wince," embedded in the very heart of his ornate melody. But his meteoric flight across the literary heavens, followed by the slow and dignified descent of the glimmering shower of sparks, will long excite curiosity, even when the sensation it caused has ceased to be quite intelligible. Yet those who stood under the apparition, and stared in amazement at its magnificent audacity, must not be over-much surprised if a generation is arising that fails to comprehend what the phenomenon meant to the original spectators.

Edmund Gosse.

One needs to have lived in Russia and watched her changing politics on the spot for most of the last five years to see how deep is her vitality. Allowing that hers is a young people whose bruises mend sooner than the broken bones of the grown-up world, her recovery is yet surprising in its extent and in its early advent. Most of all are notable the first steps that Russia is taking now in her will to remain one empire and to outlive her enemies. When the two Dumas of revolution had gone their way; when the melodrama of terrorism gradually subsided through failure to attract-the governing temper among Russians having decided that it would rather try to cure its own ills than be ruled from the gut ters-the easiest thing to say was that the "old gang" had again got the nation by the throat. It has not proved to be the case. The first Duma, the "constituent assembly," which went to Viborg and passed its resolution calling on the nation to refuse taxes to the Treasury and conscripts to desert the Army, had its influence on the change. It helped to teach the Russian peasant to distinguish between brave words and the facts of life. "I can call spirits from the vasty deep!" quoth the Duma. "So can I," reflected the sceptic. "But they won't come!"

Duma was the most revolutionary Parliament elected anywhere in the past hundred years. It was the first fruit of Count Witte's amazing experiment in choosing an elective council, intended to co-operate harmoniously with the Tsar, by universal suffrage of all the nationalities who had lived under his absolute rule. The worst of the coming storm was bound to burst on the Minister of the Interior, whoever he might be. He had to be the target for everybody with a grievance. It was a sound instinct of the few Conservatives who then kept their heads to put M. Durnovo, then Count Witte's Minister of the Interior, and for long the embodiment of the principles of government by administrative order, out of office altogether and to find a new man to face the Duma.

They paid M. Stolypin the compliment of offering him the post of danger. He had none of the accustomed claims to Imperial favor, not even long service as a tchinovnik. He was under forty-five years old; he had not graduated as a militant Crown Prosecutor in the way that M. de Plehve had won the confidence of the Imperial household in the campaign against Nihilism that followed the assassination of Alexander II.; he had not any of Count Witte's international reputation for resourcefulness in money-raising; nor had he, like General Trepoff, a soldier's record as body-guard to his Sovereign. But he was a self-reliant man, the younger son of a country squire, and he had made his way without asking favors. In the large southern province of Saratoff he was liked in a respectful, trusting way; for he kept a vigilant eye and a firm hand on his subordinates. He settled questions on the spot without referring to headquarters at St. Petersburg. The ouly

trouble now remembered of those days sprang from an impulsive gesture such as occasionally dominates his fullblooded temperament. A crowd of small traders came to the Governor's house to tell him that a "pogrom" was being hatched against them. They wished to get out of the town with their families, and they could not trust the police escort. M. Stolypin told them to come with him. He mounted a horse and headed the procession from the town. His intervention was not so effective as he wished, for while he and the leaders were hit only with casual missiles the rear of the exodus was unmercifully belabored.

His first appearances in the Duma promised little of the great talent and tenacity that he developed in his Premiership. He showed temper. M. Goremykin, a wealthy good-natured old gentleman, who tried to forget the Duma by never going near it, was his titular chief. Ministers were expected to treat the ragings of Russia's first Parliament with supercilious nonchalance. This did not suit the young Minister of the Interior at all. The only memory that remains now of those turbulent scenes, apart from the vehement clamor of the Group of Toil, the Social Revolutionaries, and the Social Democrats for a Communist Republic, is a mental picture of M. Stolypin's big, muscular frame, erect in the orator's tribune shouting back to his tormentors. Like other Russian officers of State he had never before had occasion to address an Assembly which had the right to interrupt him. Public speaking of any kind was the last ordeal that any Administrator was expected to go through. His headstrong temperament impelled him to let the graces of Ministerial decorum look after themselves; he preferred to exhort the elect of all the people so faithfully that they shouted back at him "Enough!" The hectoring tones of his strong voice were

probably due to nervousness, for in those days, at any rate, he showed himself a highly strung man. Under his wide, prominent brow, his deep-set, dark eyes had always an intense glow of life. His sanguine, red and white complexion did not help him to play the sphinx; he flushed and clenched his fist at the revolutionaries' attacks. His full Slavonic lips and jet black hair and beard completed the picture of the big mana natural, passionate man.

All the while he was keeping his own counsel. Although he was not then Prime Minister he was trusted by the Tsar's private advisers to decide the proper time to ring down the curtain on the first Duma. He came to the conclusion after a six weeks' trial of its oratory that the effects were wholly evil; in particular he made sure by reports from the provinces that its claim to have the peasantry and the army ready to fight on its side was completely false. He let it ordain the compulsory expropriation of all landed property, the amnesty of all prisoners, and the autonomy for all non-Russian nationalities in the empire. After that token of its intentions he closed its doors. The same day he was appointed Prime Minister, while remaining Minister of the Interior. He set to work forthwith on the prosecution of the policy which in three years has brought his country to good order and a fair prospect of prosperity.

M. Stolypin has acted on the conviction, shared by many foreigners who have lived much among Russians and like them cordially, that of the two charges commonly brought against all Russian administration of cruelty and corruption, the latter is the greater danger. There are about a hundred and fifty million Russians who are neither gaolers nor in gaol. Their general sentiment regarding the administration of the law is that a criminal trial usually proceeds with considerable

fairness, but that any litigant who finds himself trying to get redress in the civil courts will find an empty purse a terrible handicap. Venality is the worse curse to the country from the fact that so little business of any kind can be transacted except through the intermediary of Government departments. The pessimism of the average man, his shoulder-shrugging doubts whether anything in Russia would ever get better, rested usually on the common belief that the all-pervading bureaucracy would continue to defeat him. He could prosper only by paying a tribute to it.

The whole commercial community was at the mercy of the State Railway Department. The chiefs of sections in Russia's nationalized ways and communications needed no lessons from America in the art of receiving valuable consideration for the granting of secret rebates to their customers. No business man in Russia had any chance until he "saw" the right person. It is recorded that an agent of a foreign house who had been forbidden by his principals to make any personal payments in advance was able to sell a mechanical appliance to the Railway Department. It had to be bought, as his firm owned the sole patent rights. But he left a bad impression in Government railway circles. When he called on the chief of the Department, and, holding out his hand, exclaimed: "How can I thank you for giving us the contract?" the other looked in his empty palm and answered coldly: "Since the invention of paper currency I find your question wholly out of place."

The systematized corruption was at its worst during the Manchurian campaign and the subsequent social revolts in the provinces. Everything was subordinated to the strategic employment of the railways. Anything loaded on a train ostensibly for a military commis

sariat would reach its destination carriage free. The opportunity was too tempting to be missed. The market speculators in forage, rations, even horses, made their terms with the traffic managers and their merchandise was franked through to Irkutsk, there to be sold on the open Siberian market, leaving both the Army and the Treasury duped and the honest business community disgusted.

The successive official Ministers of Ways and Communications were powerless. The late Prince Khilkoff was a master of locomotive science and transported an army of a million men across the Trans-Siberian railroad without a hitch; but he never knew or had the means of knowing the bookkeeping of his traffic department. His successor, General Schaufuss, by profession a military engineer, was appointed for the specific purpose of having always in readiness a corps of military locomotive engineers in case of a renewal of a general railway strike. It was left for M. Stolypin to make the really suitable appointment. His new Minister of State Railways, M. Roukhloff, was trained in the penitentiary department of the Ministry of the Interior, and is an ex-chief Inspector of Prisons. He now exercises disciplinary control over his present department, which has been submitted to "Senatorial Revision" by order of the Prime Minister.

This process, akin to a Government Court of Inquiry in England, is being applied drastically to the railways, the commissariat, the admiralty, the police department of Moscow, and the administration of Turkestan. The Senators' Court compels the presence of persons and papers, takes evidence on oath, and makes a judicial report in the nature of an indictment of the guilty persons whom it names for the Government to prosecute. Its proceedings so far have been as fearless, conscientious, and

thorough as that of any State inquiry

in a country governed by public opinion. It is chiefly by such energetic persistence in stamping out corrupt officialdom that M. Stolypin has at last won the goodwill of non-political Russians.

For a year past the fair-minded influences in the reform movement have given him a general support. The rabid communists are still implacable; but it is on the extreme right wing of politics that the Premier's bitterest enemies have gathered. They are described by M. Alexander Gutchkoff, the leader of the centre party, the most numerous in the present Duma, as a three-fold combination. There is the camarilla of private visitors at the Tsar's Court, whose methods have been frustrated by M. Stolypin's open, aboveboard ways. Its members, moreover,

have lost social status since the deaths of the Grand Dukes Alexis and Vladimir, and the withdrawal of the Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaievitch from the Committee of Imperial Defence. But they have sunk their mutual jealousies and worked with a will to undermine the new régime. Their closest allies are "the old gang" of the Russian bureaucracy, adherents of the system that was in full sway so few years ago, many of them ambitious men still in their vigorous age. They include a resolute administrator in M. Durnovo who invented the system of political police which his successor inherited; Count Witte, untiring and resourceful in his schemes for the overthrow of any Ministry in which he is not the ruling spirit; M. Goremykin, the favorite politician of the old country party, of the provincial nobility councils. In the ante-reform days he led the opposition to Count Witte's centralizing devices for raising fresh revenue. Now adversity has prevailed on them to make common cause. The third element in the ultra-Monarchist opposi

tion to M. Stolypin has come from a group of the large landowners who wish to return to the days when they were satraps in their provinces, and the official Governors sent down from St. Petersburg obediently did their behests.

There are more desperate elements in the opposition. Angry, superseded officials, many of them waiting their trial on charges of corruption, are fighting with the bitter knowledge that the continuance of the new order means their final extinction. And yet M. Stolypin is helped by his enemies. It needed some, expression of their heartfelt hatred to convince the generality of his countrymen that at last they had a Government that was reforming the administration in earnest. In the weary, unspectacular process of upholding order, the Premier has in these last three years been brought much in contact with the Tsar. The least courtier-like of men has won the confidence and hearts of the Imperial family. All politics aside the great independent factors in the empire have given their goodwill to his honest energy and loyal character. Best of all his personality and administration are trusted by the army.

The principle on which the new Russian internal policy is founded is the consolidation of the peasantry with the army, the development of each to make both the stronger. "If agriculture goes to ruin, then the empire goes to ruin, without a shot being fired," is a dictum that M. Stolypin holds with von Moltke. When the Government's Land Bill was introduced in the Duma, the Premier announced that he intended to "legislate for the strong." By "the strong," he spoke of the people who were able and willing to work. The Bill proposed to abolish the communal ownership of village property, and to establish the individual freehold of the peasant occupier. Unless that were